The Mystery of the Trinity, Pt. 3

And let's pray and we'll get into the word. Thank you, Lord, for this time of year. We love talking about your first advent and we love thinking about your second advent coming up next on the calendar, maybe pretty soon.

And Lord, thank you so much for coming here and laying aside some of your attributes and dying in our place with our sins in your body on the tree and for then imputing your righteousness to us so that the Father sees us as clean as you.

And Lord, we know that's a miracle that man cannot do and we cannot do. It had to be a gift of grace from you. Thank you for that more than anything. And we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Yeah, I liked Finn's answer in the game.

What's Christmas all about? God, wrong answer, wrong game. Okay, so, but I like what Dave said. No, you got an eternal point for that one, buddy. He's come along a long way this year, Finn has. I'm so proud of him.

One of my grandbabies, in case you don't know. Okay, we've been going verse by verse through the book of Colossians. We've made our way down to Colossians chapter two and particularly verse two. So let's just look at that, especially for our visitors.

So you'll kind of know where we are. It says that there, this is a prayer of Paul for his converts, either his spiritual children or grandchildren, they're not all his spiritual children, but they are at least his spiritual grandchildren.

In other words, converts that one of his converts.

Led to the Lord.

And so he's talking here about Jesus Christ and mainly what he's talking about though, well, you'll see what specifically the entire Trinity, but this is a prayer of Paul for his converts. Now look what he prays for them in verse two.

He prays that their hearts might be comforted. I would just call that peace, wouldn't you? He prays that they would be knit together in love. So there wouldn't be disunity, which is always satanic. You know, Satan brings divisions in church families, in families at home, between parents and kids, spouses, any kind of division is from the enemy.

He hates unity of Christians, but guess what? You know what fixes it in a church and home and in anything is godly communication. You know what Satan can't stand is when two saved people communicate in love, he has to flee.

And then there's unity again. So, well, we've seen that a few times in our church, but not as many as most because we're a smallish church and we don't argue over the color of the carpet. It's a beautiful green and I chose it and I'm colorblind.

So I don't get to argue about it. I guess maybe it's gray, it could be brown.

What is it?

Oh, it's red. All right, that's appropriate. All right, so, you know, he is praying here for unity, for peace first, then unity, and it would be love that brings the unity. And then to all, now look at this, all riches of the full assurance of understanding.

So that has to do with assurance of your salvation, but also assurance that you're understanding the scripture correctly, all right? Now, and then he's praying that they would come to the acknowledgement.

Now this implies that maybe all Christians don't, especially when they're brand new, because they may not understand this topic we're about to talk about when they're brand new, but he's praying that they will come to acknowledge the truth of, now listen, the mystery.

So this truth is a mystery that the Old Testament saints didn't really know a lot about, although they wrote about it, but they wrote a lot of things they didn't understand because God inspired, because God wrote it, they didn't write it, they're just the penman.

They wrote it down and read it and didn't understand it until the apostle Paul came thousands of years later. And Jesus met with him for about three years in the Arabian desert and taught him face to face.

And so Paul was given the duty of explaining certain mysteries that no one ever knew until that time. And then when Jesus ascended into heaven and the Holy Spirit came and helped the apostles remember things they should write and even new things he hadn't taught them yet, he taught them to write and they completed the New Testament.

That's what we call the perfect. When that which is perfect is come, that's this. And God not only wrote it and breathed it, but he promised to preserve it till the last generation so we have it. And thanks God for that.

So here he's praying that they will acknowledge the following, the mystery, it's a mystery of what? Of God, the Father and the Holy Ghost. So the first God must be God, the Spirit, the Spirit of God, and then the Father and Christ.

So he's talking about the Trinity. So understanding the Trinity is part of Paul's prayer for the brand new Christian, that he will come to understand that. Now, do we ever understand it completely in this life or probably not even in the next?

No, because we're finite and God's infinite. We're never gonna fully know everything about God, but we're gonna always and forever be learning more and more. And that's exciting to me. And if it's not to you, it will be in the next life.

My job to get you there in this life though.

Got quiet there.

All right, time for some more jokes. Let me think. Okay, I'm teasing. Y 'all didn't really get quiet. That in itself was my joke.

Okay, all right.

Now, so we're talking about the Trinity now. So let me move down to kind of where we are. I don't wanna review the whole thing because we don't have a whole lot of time. That little passage there, the next few verses talks about why it's important to know about the Trinity because verse three says that all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that can be understood in the triune God.

Now, what does that mean? It's important to know that he's one God, but it's also important to understand the distinctions of the persons of the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Understand the different missions they have, the different things they do, even though they're one God.

And so understanding that brings us to the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that we couldn't possibly know if we don't know God in that way. In other words, an Islamic person cannot know this wisdom and knowledge because they don't have a Trinity.

They just have what they call Allah, who's not named anywhere in the scriptures. So it's a God that Muhammad invented. Now, the next thing in verse four down there in Colossians two, it says all of this is important, this idea of understanding the triune nature of God and the wisdom of God, the knowledge of God is important lest any man should beguile you with enticing words and you'd be led astray.

By false teachers.

So that's why we're spending some time on this. It's not, you don't hear it a lot in churches other than just quickly, briefly say what it is. To go in and to study it is not done a lot because a lot of people just don't think you can understand it.

Well, you can understand more and more about it. And I've told most of you this story about a mentor I had for a short, a brief time, and then God moved him on out of our lives, but his name was Gary Plumlee.

And I met him in Mahea, he was a PhD in psychology, but he had spent some time at Dallas Theological Seminary and was a great Bible teacher. And he had a huge IQ. So I was always trying to act smart in front of Gary.

So one time he said, David, tell me about the Trinity. And I said, brother Gary, it's a mystery. And he stepped back and looked at me and said, don't you ever call it a mystery again, because the minute you call it a mystery, you'll stop studying it.

And he walked away from me. I never forgot that one. So Paul calls it a mystery, but I can't, right? So anyway, but what his point was, don't just say, well, it's beyond understanding, and then you stop trying to understand it.

That's a mistake because you learn more and more. I've learned more in the last month because I'm restudying it as I teach it again. So we can always learn more. So that's kind of what this is all about.

The Trinity as a Mystery in Colossians 2

Now, last time we looked at 1 John 5, 7, I want to look at that again, 1 John 5, 7. So let's go there. And I want to mention, the reason I'm mentioning it again, it's not just to review, I want to point out something very important about it.

I spent two years of my young life, last two years. Nope, you're asleep. Okay, because that was a really funny joke. Three people laughed. Okay, so I spent two years of my young life in my 30s studying manuscript evidence.

Where did our Bible come from? English Bible in particular, but tracing it back through the proper Greek manuscripts and Hebrew manuscripts, where did it come from? I loved it so much, I could have done it my whole life, but the Lord wouldn't let me.

The Holy Spirit said, you got to do other stuff. You got to stop, stop studying this. So I did, but I fortunately had sort of finished the study that I wanted to do at a good stopping place. It's one of the things that I taught John.

I think we did that at seminary class, a little bit about that. A lot of you have heard me talk. You just say what I learned, but you've never seen the study. I told Charlotte on the way here, I think I'm going to preach through that.

She said, no, don't do that. And probably she's right. So come to the men's seminary thing that we're doing the second Saturday of every month. Tell me if there is another verse in the whole Bible that explains the Trinity better than this one.

Okay, 1 John 5, 7. For there are three that bear record in heaven,.

The father, the word.

Now we know who the word is from John 1, 1, which we read last week, right?

Who's the word?

Jesus, all right. So there are three that bear record in heaven.

How many?

You like Meyer.

How many? How many?

Three, all right.

Now I know you're listening. Okay, so three. Three that bear record in heaven. And he names them, the father, the word and the Holy ghost. So there are the three distinct personages of the triune God, right?

But now look what he says in the same sentence. And these three are one. Now you don't really need 15 theology books to read and figure out what the Trinity is, except for this one problem. Anybody in here got a new American standard.

Or an NIV or really?

Yeah, right. So Matt's reading the new American standard. Okay, well, which one is it, an NIV or? All right, let's just see if I could be wrong, but a lot of the modern versions don't have this verse in it.

So see if it's got 1 John 5, 7. And if it does, let's see if it says the same thing. I mean, they don't just leave a blank there and go from six to eight. They have a different seven. Actually eight becomes seven, but we'll just see.

I know that the revised standard version doesn't have it. Nope, nope, nope, that's verse eight. It's seven in that Bible, but not in the King James Bible. So they skipped it. So they made, all right, read it, read it.

They have a seven by this, so read it, Matt. Yeah, yep, okay, you can stop. That's verse seven, right? Now the King James reads that in verse eight. But in verse seven, it says, "'For there are three that bear record in heaven, "'the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, "'and these three are one,' verse eight says, "'and there are three that bear witness on the earth, "'the Spirit, the water, and the blood, "'and these three agree in one.'".

And there's a real problem with leaving it out that the scholars won't tell you is that there's a grammar problem with it. There's many problems with leaving it out because it's God's Word and they left it out.

Now, who do you think would cut out a verse like that? You think maybe a Jehovah's Witness would like to cut it out? Do you think maybe a Mormon would like to cut it out? There were people who believed just like Jehovah's Witnesses in the first century.

And so these particular scribes, when they copy their Bible, they leave it out. Now, what modern scholars at every seminary that I'm aware of in this country don't understand manuscript evidence like I do because they didn't read the authors that wrote in the time that Westcott and Hort lived, these two Roman Catholic men who created all the modern versions, and they didn't read the opposing scholars in England who blew them away, and I have read them.

But your modern Bibles are all based on those two men and they left out this verse because they claim the oldest manuscripts don't have them. Well, the oldest two manuscripts, one of them was found in a waste room in a monastery in Egypt where they threw garbage.

The other one was found in the Vatican library. So it's a Roman Catholic document, but it doesn't mean the Roman Catholics believe it because they believe in the Trinity. Maybe not quite like we do, but they believe in it.

So they didn't cut it out, but they just had that book in their library. And so to say that the two oldest or the most accurate is not good logic because you got over 5 ,000, probably more now when I did my study, over 5 ,000 whole or parts of copies of the New Testament.

And what you do is you take the words that are found in the majority of them and put them in here. Well, this verse should be in here. Now, another problem with it is in the grammar. If you just read verse eight and you don't think there's a verse seven, there are some words that are in the neuter that should be masculine.

And the only way that's grammatically correct is if you have verse seven there that sets that up where it's also, there's some words in neuter that match. So the grammar, so the Holy Spirit made a mistake, a grammatical mistake if verse seven isn't in there.

I mean, if you think the Holy Spirit doesn't know grammar in any language. All right, so these are foolish people. And I hate to say it, but Dr. MacArthur, whom I love, bought into this same stuff. He uses New American Standard, which I don't know, I don't think it has verse seven either.

I can't remember. I have one and read it for many years till I learned not to read it. But I don't think it has it either. But he's, you know, the seminaries that these guys come out of teach Westcott Hort.

And it's a false thing that Satan brought in to get the Bibles where people can't find the true word of God. They find part of it in there, but they don't find the whole word of God. The many examples I could give you over, I don't know.

Well, the two manuscripts that they say are the most ancient that they use to create the New Testament that doesn't have verse seven disagree with each other in 2000 places, 2000 places. So how can they both be the word of God?

One of them at least is not, but probably neither. Because it's not the right line of manuscripts. Anyway, it's fascinating. Can you see how we could study this together for two whole years? Yeah, boy, Charlotte said no, and I think she's right.

But just so, you know, if you don't trust me on it, then, you know, you'll have to do it. You'll have to go through it. So verse seven is in there and it's the most beautiful explanation of the Trinity anywhere in the Bible and they took it out.

It's gone, except from the King James. The King James is the most accurate English version.

Of the Bible.

The Geneva Bible is also accurate, but it's not been blessed as much and as widely as the King James and that's why I stick with it. So the King James rings the bells of a lot of Christians. They've memorized a lot of scripture in it and so forth.

Another good reason to use it. But anyway, it's fascinating that that particular verse is gone. Well, now here's other proof that it should be in there. Would you agree with me that if you could find early church fathers who are ancient, because the reason they like the two fake manuscripts that they use, because they're old, they go back older than most of the other ones in the Textus Receptus.

So they go back maybe two or 300 years older, but they don't, as far as I remember, they don't go back to 150 AD. I don't think we have any copies older than that. And yet there are early church fathers in around 150 AD who quoted 1 John 5, 7, as it is in our Bible.

How could they quote it if it didn't exist? You see my point? Do you know what a lectionary is? Probably if you're not Episcopalian, you don't have a clue. If you go to Episcopalian service, they have a book that they all have in the pews called a lectionary and the priest will read something and then you repeat it.

Have y 'all experienced that before? Yeah, and they ring little bells. It's kind of fun to watch. Holy Spirit's nowhere around there, but it's beautiful. And the lectionaries, there have been ancient lectionaries that go back to 200 AD and way, way back, and they have this verse in there.

Where'd it come from if it wasn't in the Bible? So I could tell you all the church fathers, I can't pronounce them very well, so I'm gonna skip it, but I've got one, two, three, four, five, and five church fathers prior to 200 AD, somewhere in that ballpark that quote 1 John 5, 7, but it's not in there, right?

So there you go. And also the lectionaries that we mentioned. So I just wanted to straighten that out for you, Kate, because you'll have family members or friends that have these other modern English versions.

And when you try to show them the Trinity, they'll say, well, that's not in there. Well, you kind of need to know how to answer that, right? So now you know. And don't have to remember it, just say, well, listen, don't you find it odd that early church fathers that go back to 150 AD quoted that verse, where'd they get it from?

Just say that, that's all you need to remember. And if they challenge you on it, just say, Google it, and they could go find it. All right, so then we went through other verses of scripture. Now, my approach to this is we're going to, the real source of knowledge of the triune nature of God is the scripture, of course.

But there's a lot of philosophical arguments and even attempts to draw it and things that are out there. And you know, God did say, come, let us reason together, but notice that he put the word together.

So like you're reasoning together, it's two people, it's God and you. So how do we talk to him? Thank you. How does he talk to us? Through the word, predominantly on this side of, well, when that which is perfect came, which is this, when we had the whole canon from that point on, he speaks to us through the word and the Holy Spirit interpreting it in our hearts, right?

So if you're going to take logic and reason together with God, then you can't do it without this, because this is him informing you in your reasoning. And when you go, when you put your reasoning here in the Bible here, you get in trouble.

You become a Roman Catholic or a Babto Catholic or a Methodo Catholic or a Pinto Catholic, right? You have to keep it this way. And that's what we will do in this study. So we started out with scripture, and then I'm gonna talk a little bit about some philosophy and then we'll end with scripture.

We've already talked about Isaiah 48, 16 through 18, which was written 2 ,712 years ago. And it mentions all of the Godhead, okay? We went all the way back to the first book in the Bible, Genesis, which was written about 4 ,004 BC.

And so 6 ,000 years ago, at the beginning of time on this planet, in this universe, and it calls God Elohim, which is a uniplural Hebrew word. The Jews have trouble explaining that. And then God says, let us create man in our image.

So you see the Trinity all the way back in the earliest books of the Bible. Then we went into Proverbs, jot this down.

If you weren't here.

Proverbs 8, starting with verse 22. If you read through that long passage there, you'll see one of the most marvelous pieces of scripture you'll find in the whole Bible, because it talks about the eternal son of God.

Now he wasn't named Jesus yet, because he wasn't born into this world yet, but Jesus is the eternal son, the word, the eternal word of God. It speaks of the eternal son of God before time began when he was with the father, when there was nothing but God.

There was just the father, the son, the Holy Spirit, and that was it, nothing. There was no place. There was no time. There was just God, and he is an invisible spirit being, and he existed before anything existed, and then he made everything, right?

He spoke the worlds into existence. The Bible says, as we studied last Sunday in John chapter one, verse one, that Jesus, that all things were made by Jesus, and without him was not anything made that was made.

And that in itself speaks of what we're talking about here, which is, I'll give you a good definition of the Trinity. It's not as good as 1 John 5, 7, but it goes like this. God exists as one God who subsists as three distinct persons, or you could call them personalities.

Sometimes the word person will confuse you a little, because it's not like three different people, but personages. They have, each one has their own personality, though, and each one has all the attributes of a person.

We talked about that last time, so I won't review what a person is. How do you define what a person is? Well, basically, intellect, emotions, and what was the other one? There's three, intellect, emotions, and y 'all weren't listening, so it doesn't matter, because I can't remember, and y 'all won't remember it either.

There's three.

We'll figure it out. Well, I think, didn't I say will? Maybe I left will out.

That's it.

All right, so each of the, Jesus has those three attributes. The Holy Spirit has those three attributes, and we get all this from Scripture, where it talks about them, and the Father has all three, so all three are God, in essence.

They have the same essence, so God is one God who subsists as three distinct personalities. It's a good way to just briefly say what the triune nature of God is. Now, so we went all the way through Proverbs 8 .22 last time, where it shows that Jesus was part of the Godhead.

His name wasn't Jesus yet from our viewpoint, but from God's viewpoint, He knew Him as His Son, His eternal Son, who existed with Him and was the pleasure of the Father always, the Scripture says.

Beautiful passage.

All right, so then we went into John chapter one, verse one through five, where it says in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Just that itself shows both of the sides of it, because when it says that the Word was God, that's one, one God, but then it says He was with God, that's distinction, because you have Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit, so He's with, you can't be with if you're not a distinct personage.

You can't be with something else, so it talks about that in John chapter one. Then we went to Matthew 1 .23, where it calls Him Emmanuel, which means God with us. That's who Jesus was, God with us. And then we went to Isaiah chapter nine, verse six, which was my favorite part last time, because it's the Christmas verse, all right?

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. The government will be upon His shoulder. His name will be called Wonderful Counselor. Listen to this, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace.

So we know that's Jesus, but it calls Him God and the Everlasting Father, and we look those Hebrew words up, and guess what they mean? Mighty God and Everlasting Father. So that was Isaiah 9 .6. So now, if you weren't here, you've got all of that good stuff.

Now, I think last time I actually read Tertullian, who wrote, who lived around 150 AD, an early church father, who is one of the earliest commentaries where he talks about the Trinity. And he talks about the unity of God, but he also talks about the distinction of the three persons.

Now, that is long before Constantine. Constantine, he lived about 306 to 337 AD, and he started the Catholic Church. And many people are saying today, this is becoming very popular, so hear me. They're saying that the Trinity was invented by the Catholics, and it's not really in the Bible.

The problem with that is that Tertullian talked about the Trinity, that God is one God and three distinct persons in 150 AD, which was 200 and something years before the Catholic Church came into existence.

So, you got it wrong. We had a buzzer at the game last night that went, like that, when you got it wrong. I should make that clear, because I normally don't make that noise, whether I'm preaching or whatever I'm doing.

Charlotte says something wrong, sometimes I go, we got that wrong. So, Augustine in 354, now that was a little bit after Constantine, but Augustine really is credited as the person who really started getting some really good verbiage to try to describe the Trinity better than it ever had been.

It kind of grew over time in theologians' ability to talk about it better. And that's how I know you can learn more. We can learn more than they knew back then, and continue to have maybe better ways to talk about it.

I liked Dave Huber Sr., who's gonna get home tonight from a trip, usually sits right there. He came up with the idea, we were discussing how, when you say three persons, it's a problem, because you think of that as three people in the pew here, which you can't be the same essence if you're three people, right, human people.

So that's a bad model. He said, I just wish we had a different word that described it other than person, even though for 2 ,000 years of Christian history, they've said person, so we probably should stick with that.

That's what our brothers and sisters have said and used. But he said, well, how about persona?

I said, that's kind of better,.

Because it frees up my mind. I'm not thinking of three different people now, but it's three distinct personas who have different personalities and all the attributes of a person. I like persona, but I guess we need to let somebody shoot that down if it's not good to use it.

So we shouldn't really use it for about a year, give you guys a chance to shoot that down, and say, no, that's not good, we should use person. But I just think it's hard to talk about that part of it, because it's not like three of our people, but here's a good way to think about it.

Okay, now, would you agree, I mean, Dave almost got it right, because what he did, people use a triangle, it doesn't work. You can try to use it to do three, but it's one triangle, it doesn't work. I'll show you why probably next Sunday.

It doesn't work, the reason it doesn't work, because it's at least four-dimensional. Jesus had to be at least four-dimensional to go through a wall without disturbing it and appear in the room and eat fish and bread with the apostles after he ascended.

So you can't draw it, Dave, but you can try. That was a good effort. But, good effort. But, you know, the whole problem is that it's hard to think about the persons, and if you call it a person, like three persons.

So think of it this way, though. Would you agree with me that we are creating God's image? Okay, we have a what? Body, a soul, and a spirit. So we're three-dimensional in three dimensions. I mean, we're a Trinity, but we're in three dimension, a three-dimensional world.

Our bodies are three-dimensional. If you wanna add time, that's a fourth, but I'm talking about just the geometry of it. So would you agree that if God is higher than we are, how many of you think he is?

All right, he's at least four-dimensional, that it could be possible for the Holy Spirit to exist and have his own personality and personhood, and Jesus, the eternal son, to exist with his, and the Father with his, and that's God.

That God isn't limited to being three-dimensional like us, where you have those three things, but they're three-dimensional. He's not limited like that. So he has these three personas, and that's God.

That's really what this is. And where you have to really get careful is you have a lot of heresies through the last 2 ,000 years where people try to describe it incorrectly, and some of the models that are used out there on Google that look really good actually teach heresy, and not that they're trying to, though, but they do.

These models defy scripture, and that's where you get your philosophy, and you put it up here, and you got your Bible down here, and you got a problem. So I don't care how hard it is for you to draw this, people that can draw, you still can't let your drawing be here, and the Bible here, so you can't draw it the way it says it is because you're human, and he's not.

He's God, all right? You're creating his image, but you're not God, and you can't totally figure out how to think it through, but you can really, it really helps if you just read 1 John 5, 7. These three are one.

They're one in essence. Jesus is fully God. He's not just part of God, and this is called modalism, an early heresy. If you draw it as a triangle, it's gonna be modalism. If you try to use the water, ice, and vapor, that's modalism because vapor can't be ice at the same time it's water, but Jesus is God at the same time the Father's God.

You see the difference? If I try to use three people and say, well, it's like three people, but you're one, the problem is what happens if one of you dies? The other two are just fine, but that's not true of God.

If the Holy Spirit or Jesus or the Father died, you'd have nothing. In fact, you'd have no nothing because God invented the idea of nothingness. There just wouldn't be anything. They all have to exist at the same time, and that's where God is different than the models, so modalism is wrong because modalism, have you ever met somebody who called themselves a Jesus-only person?

They just say, God is just Jesus. Now, he can appear as a spirit, he can appear as the Father, but he's just Jesus. That is heresy because you have all three, and all three are one, and all three exist at the same time, and if you saw any, I understand two of them you can't see, but I'm just gonna use that grammatically.

If you saw any one of the three, you would be looking at all of God. Jesus proved that many times, we'll get to him in the scripture. So I think that's enough for the philosophy part. Well, I don't know, maybe I should just get rid of it and finish it, and then we'll get back into the scriptures that show the correct way that I've said to talk about it, you will see that the scriptures do it that way.

So let me talk about this just for a second. There's a guy named Norman Geisler, he died in 2019, I hope not of COVID, that didn't happen until 2020, so it wasn't COVID, but he is a recent scholar, and he started two seminaries, and he had a PhD in philosophy, and also, he taught many things, he taught Calvinism, he taught Roman Catholicism, in seminary, biblical inerrancy, which I really liked that part of him, he studied manuscript evidence, and all these different things.

He co-authored or authored 90 different books and hundreds of articles, so he's really a true scholar. And so he would talk about the Trinity, I'll give you some thoughts on how he would word it, cause they may help you.

He words it this way, the unity and equality of the persons, which necessarily resulted from holding sameness of essence, and you've heard me say that a lot, Jesus is the same essence as the Father, and Father is the same essence as the Holy Spirit, and vice versa.