The Trinity, Part 3: The Trinity Defended

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Special 3-part in-depth study of the Trinity

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Apologetics Session 37- Origins and Evolution - Part 4

Apologetics Session 37- Origins and Evolution - Part 4

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Lord, we have received truth from you in your scripture that you have revealed to us about yourself, that you are eternally self -existent, yet you are the
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Trinity, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. We have learned that and we've seen how it has been understood through the ages and how the church has grappled with it.
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We thank you for this message. Today we see the Trinity defended. Be with our pastor as he brings these words to us and prepare our hearts in Jesus' name.
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Amen. Amen. I couldn't bring myself to teach the
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Trinity in anything other than three parts. Part one, part two, and part three.
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So here we are at the last of the three -part installment on the teaching of the Trinity. And the first one was the biblical exposition.
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This is where we saw the Trinity revealed. And that is revealed in scripture to us.
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That is where we learn everything that we know about who God is. It's his self -revelation. Now, Jesus came in the person, in the flesh, and that's when the
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Trinity was revealed because here you have God in flesh, distinct from his Father as he communicates with his
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Father. He prays to his Father and then promising to send another who turns out to be the
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Holy Spirit. John 14 to 16, Jesus gives that promise of another, another, empirically, another helper.
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So there is distinction and there is unity of being or essence, we went over that in the first week.
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The second week, then, we traced the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, not that anything was being invented, but against heretics, things needed to be clarified.
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So when Arius comes along and says, well, this Jesus whom we worship, he's a created
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God. Well, Athanasius and Alexander from Alexandria, they had to stand up to that lie, and all the bishops, 313 of them, from all over Christianity came together at the
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Council of Nicaea in 325 and condemned the heresy of Arianism. Jesus is not a created being.
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He is true God, true God, and has always and eternally existed. And if anybody says that he was made, let that person be anathema.
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Fully or truly? Ha, fully or truly, depends if you're MacArthur or Sproul. In 381, at the next council, there was more development of the doctrine of the
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Holy Spirit, because Nicaea only said, and the Holy Spirit, period. But at Constantinople, that was fleshed out more with the explanation that the
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Spirit is a person who can be grieved and can delight and can respond and do all the things that God does, including killing
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Ananias and Sapphira. You lied to God, you lied to the Holy Spirit. So there is the person of the
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Holy Spirit. This is all fleshed out at Constantinople. Then along comes a guy named Nestorius, remember him?
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And he denies the hypostatic union that Jesus exists as one person with two natures.
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Now this hadn't been spelled out yet, but he comes along saying it's really two persons, almost as if there's the human
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Jesus and the divine Jesus, and they're two separate persons. Like God came onto the body of Jesus, rather than there being one person, the real acting subject, who is
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Jesus, who has two natures. And Nestorianism was condemned at the
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Council of Ephesus, and I believe it was 431. And then about 20 years later, at Chalcedon, that controversy continues to rise with Eutychus and other teachers.
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And at Chalcedon, a very clear definition of the deity of Christ in hypostatic union.
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Hypostatic is the hypostasis, the person, that under which there is nothing else. The very substance of this one person, who is
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Jesus, has two natures, both a divine and a human. And from Chalcedon on, we had a full description of who
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God is. It's not that we didn't have it in scripture. The reason for the councils was refuting these liars, like Arius, and Nestorius, and Eutychus, and others.
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So today, we come to a more modern dealing with the defense of the gospel.
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As the councils in church history had to defend against liars who deny the trinity, so we must stand for the truth as God handed it to us.
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Once and for all, Jude 3, handed down that we must defend. It's been handed down.
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And so, let's look at some of the most prominent denials of the trinity against which we need to be able to defend.
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Raise your hand if you've ever had a Jehovah's Witness knock on your door. There's an example right there.
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But I put them in order of one to seven that I think is the most prominent that we will encounter where we are.
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And believe it or not, I would say that the greatest threat, in turn, there's no threat to the sovereignty of God, let's be clear about that.
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But from an earthly level in which we operate as instruments, the greatest threat, the greatest danger, the greatest attack has been that of Islam.
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If there are two billion Christians on earth, now obviously, there's not as many Christians as there are people professing to be
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Christians, but however many there are, there are maybe 1 .2 or more billion
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Muslims. Islam is an anti -Trinitarian cult.
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Muhammad learned from Judaism and from Christianity that there is only one God, but he was living in pagan
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Mecca where they worship the Kayaba, this black stone that pagans would come to worship and encircle as they do to this day.
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That's what the Kayaba is in Mecca when they take the Hajj and all these Muslims are circling around a stone, that's pagan idolatry as it was in the days of Muhammad.
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But he synthesized that with a monotheistic worldview. However, he from the very beginning was opposed to the deity of Christ.
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He did not believe that Jesus was the son of God, but only a messenger.
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And he himself, he read to be the chief of the messengers, the seal of the prophets.
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Now, this is what's so interesting about church history. Remember the Nestorians that we just talked about? These were the
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Eastern break -off who did not believe in the hypostatic union of one person.
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There was a Nestorian priest that came across Muhammad and affirmed him as a prophet, as well as Khadijah, his wife.
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And so Muhammad became convinced that he was a prophet completing what the
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Christians had already received, although he thought they perverted the word of God.
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Look with me in your notes at what Muhammad wrote in Surah 4. This is why
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I say Islam itself is just against the trinity. It's anti -trinitarian culture, religion.
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Oh, people of the scripture, do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allah except the truth.
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The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary was but a messenger of Allah and his word, which he directed to Mary and a soul created at a command from him.
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So believe in Allah and his messengers and do not say three. Or some translations of the
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Quran actually say, do not say trinity. Desist, it is better for you.
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Better to the degree that they say, if you say that, it's sure, you have committed the unpardonable sin.
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Indeed, Allah is but one God. Exalted is he above having a son.
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This is right in the Quran. It is a direct full frontal attack on the deity of Jesus Christ and upon the trinity.
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In Surah 4, 157, it also says, it is supposed that Jesus was crucified but really they crucified him not.
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A direct attack on Christianity. It's a demonic religion.
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To a Muslim, how would you answer this charge? That's what we'll do today.
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We'll take just a minute to hear what they're saying and then bring scripture to bear upon it. Where would you go?
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I think I'd go to Paul. Peter as well, but I'd go to Paul with regard to his specific,
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I think the resurrection is key with regard to the deity of Christ.
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And one thing that struck me was that Paul wasn't afraid to say that he had seen the
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Christ along with 500 others who were still alive. That gets pretty substantive with regard to.
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Well done, Bob, thank you. Well, if there's no crucifixion, is there a resurrection? No, and yet the witnesses, the eyewitnesses saw him risen from the dead.
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In fact, his resurrection proves his claims. And what did Jesus say? I and the
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Father are one. He said before Abraham was born, I am. And just John 3, 16, you could go to John 3, 16.
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For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son,
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Huyas. And yet here comes Muhammad saying, God does not have a
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Huyas, a son. So it's easily refuted from scripture. John 1, 1, somebody quote
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John 1, 1 for me. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Amen, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God.
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So that with indicates some distinction between father and son, but there's also identity of being, of essence, that the word was
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God. Jeff? Yes. The historicity of the
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Muslim scriptures and the historicity of our Bible, are they both substantially proven or with regard to their age?
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Yeah, as far as the age of the Quran, that began in 621, and it was only recited by Muhammad.
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That's what Quran means, recitation. And it was recorded once he died by his followers.
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But there were differences in the early track record of it until finally Uthman just burned everything but the one and passed it down.
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So, but the question though is, was what was being said consistent with what
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God already said in the past? Or what was that? Or is there a complete contradiction? Yeah.
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They wanna say Jesus is a prophet and a messenger of Allah. Okay, well then what did the prophet say? He claimed deity, he claimed to be the son of God, making himself equal with the father.
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And so they denied that revelation, therefore they are a false prophet. They bring false prophecy.
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What you will notice, look at the top part of your notes in the main idea, remember the three statements that define the trinity.
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There is only one God, there are three who are God, and each one is equally God. Every non -Trinitarian cult denies one of the three.
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Which one does Islam deny? Does it believe there is only one God? Absolutely, it gets that right.
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Does it believe there are three who are God? No, it denies the deity of the son and of the spirit.
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So it's done right there. Okay, let's move on to the Jewish people. Yes. When they say
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Allah, do they think that is God? I mean, are God?
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Yeah. They just don't believe in the other two parts? Correct, they just believe in monotheism, just one
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God. Okay. God just, Allah for them just means God. And Muhammad's role?
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He's the prophet, only a messenger, not divine. Not God. Although it sure seems like they worship him because if you say anything against him, they'll kill you.
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That's true. They treat him like it's blasphemy. So the
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Jews. This is an interesting subject. A lot going on right now regarding the
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Jewish people. The days of Esther, there was one named
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Haman who got in his heart to exterminate all Jewish people. We know from the second world war that one named
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Hitler tried the same thing. There are many people who look at the
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Jewish people and they notice this about them. There's something different about the
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Jews. I saw Andrew Torba, who's the founder of Gab, point out that the
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Jews are outperforming in everything and he takes that as a sign that there's something nefarious about the
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Jews. Even in our day, even in America, and this is on the extreme right, there's an element of anti -Semitism.
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Nefarious. How would you... Describe the nefarious.
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Oh, the word nefarious? Oh, something evil or... We don't want to make it clear. That there's something bad.
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Right. Why not say, God must be blessed? Well, because if you look at the influence of the institutions of our world, are they generally good or bad?
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Is the world good or bad? Good. Bad. So if you have outsized influence in Hollywood, which
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Jewish people do, is that generally to the good or the harm of the world? To the harm.
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Same thing in corporate institutions, banking, media, all of the ways in which
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Jewish people are outperforming. There are many people, including
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Hitler, and again, a rise in our country of people who become anti -Semitic for that reason.
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But what that fails to understand is that the Jewish people are the chosen people. And you would expect, if there's an ethnic specialness to this people, the
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Jews, that if there are people like Dennis Prager on the right, who's having an outsized influence in influencing a generation towards the good, or Ben Shapiro, maybe there is something ethnically different about the
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Jewish people. Maybe they're still the apple of God's eye. Maybe God still has plans to use
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Jewish people. But every individual, see, this is the difference between Christian ethics and worldly ethics.
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What the social justice warrior does, the woke, is they say, look, there's disparities of outcome among people of higher melanin in our culture.
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Therefore, they must be the special victims of systemic racism. What's wrong with that reasoning?
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The amount of melanin in your skin does not determine, that's just superficial. There's plenty of people like Thomas Sowell who are the anti -woke of the anti -woke, right?
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And who have brilliant minds and do well, and they outperform. We should, like Martin Luther King Jr.
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said, judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Christian ethics judges people by the content of their character.
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It's called individualism. But the same error on the left that says, well, look at these disparities of outcome in the world, that would judge people by the color, hey, look, you must have white privilege because look at the color of your skin.
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Which is just nonsense. That same error can turn against the
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Jews, either to the left or to the right. Now, of course, the left hates Israel and all things
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Jewish, but the right can fall into that same trap in overreacting against wokeism and begin to ascribe the evil of the world to the
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Jewish people. And that's when another Holocaust is just around the corner. You see the danger? Yeah.
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You suggest that the Jews have had an outsized influence in this world in areas of science and development and Jews are dispersed throughout the world.
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Right. What about the Hittites and Moabites? Yeah. Where are they? They just disappeared into the dustbin of history.
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I mean, just look at the Pulitzer Prize winners in the history of the world. The Jews make up less than 1 % of the world's population and yet have something close to 50 % of all of the great discoveries that have received the
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Pulitzer Prize. That's amazing. Think of that. It's because they are a special chosen people.
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There's something different and unique. Yeah, John? You said discoveries and that Pulitzer Prize, you mean Nobel Prize? Nobel Prize, yeah.
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Yeah, what is Pulitzer? Ready, John? Oh, writing. I don't know how many Pulitzers they have.
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Nobel Prize, yeah. I'm sorry about that mistake, yeah. You mentioned a fact that the left is anti -Semitic.
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Yes. Why do so many, it seems like a huge percentage of the population of Jewish people in America are
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Democrats? Right. I do not understand that. Right, yeah. That's a great point.
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I would say it's probably 70 to 80%. Like the Dennis Fragers and Ben Shapiros are a small minority.
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Why? Yeah, I think it has to do with whether someone has accepted the Old Testament or not.
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So a Jew who has become liberal and approaches with that kind of reformed
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Judaism mindset, or even just they're not, I met a couple of Jewish people at Princeton and they were completely irreligious.
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They don't believe that. One of them, he was the chemistry professor at Princeton and I talked to him for about 20 minutes on Thursday, last week.
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He invited me to come sit in on his class, but he's a Jew and his parents are Orthodox Jews. They have like the whole thing going, right?
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But he's rejected all that and he has a Buddhist mindset. I'm sure he's a Democrat. I'd bet $1 ,000 right now he's a
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Democrat. But this professor, but they don't believe the Torah. They don't believe the word. The difference between someone like that and a
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Dennis Frager or Ben Shapiro is those guys actually believe the 39 books and especially the first five.
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Yeah. Yeah. We have an eye doctor who is very
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Jewish, I guess is the only way I'd put it, but he's faithful to his faith and he is such a delight to talk to with regard to the
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New Testament, the Old Testament. He's interested in our side, we're interested in his. That would be a
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Jew that I would like to spend some time with. Yeah. Right, so I wanted to preface this before getting into the claim of Judaism by saying every individual
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Jew is an individual. Paul was Jewish and yet wrote so much of the
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New Testament, right? In the Mishnah, so Judaism as we have it today is an anti -Christ religion.
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It's an anti -Christ cult. Tiamit 2 .1, if a man claims to be
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God, he is a liar. Who claimed to be
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God? Jesus. How does Judaism regard Jesus?
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And I'm saying Judaism as the religion, not as an ethnicity. How does Judaism regard
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Jesus? As a liar. As a liar. Outright liar is how they see that. Yeah.
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Yeah, but there's a great movement of the Messianic Jews. Yes. Caught the revelation of the
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Passover. Right. Where Jesus, you know, God told Moses, keep the
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Passover as a memorial for all your generations. Yeah. Forever. And so Moses, you know, got inside revelation there that the
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Lamb of God without blemish is the key to coming out of Egypt, out of bondage, out of sin.
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It was their salvation to get out of bondage. Yeah. And now with the
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Messianic Jews, they're getting that revelation. Amen. And the
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Messianic rabbis that are teaching, they are teaching in the Trinity. Correct. But that's another thing that's the average
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Jew that, you know. Yeah. It has to be a revelation. Yep. You know, when
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Jesus said to Peter, who do you say that I am? And he said, you are
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Yeshua Hamashiach. Yes. Jesus the Christ, the son of the living God. Amen.
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And that's a revelation that turned, I mean, that's why we're here.
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Amen. I mean, because Jesus said, flesh and blood in that, that Apte said to you, put my father in heaven.
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Right. So that's what's got to happen with it. And so the simple claim is that Jesus claimed to be
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God. Before Abraham was born, I am. That's the revelation that you bring to every individual. And those who will accept that and believe, call them
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Messianic Jew or completed Jew, or they're still Jewish by ethnicity, but they're
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Christian now. They're believing in Christ. They believe in the Trinity. And there's only one body in Christ, right?
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So this is what Ephesians is about. We've been studying in Ephesians three. He's brought, made the two one. So the first and biggest worldwide anti -Trinitarian cult is
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Islam. Judaism as a religion, Judaism following the
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Mishnah, not following the New Testament, is an anti -Trinitarian religion, anti -Trinitarian lie.
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The third biggest, and I asked for a raise of hands, all of us have encountered Jehovah's Witnesses, was founded by Charles Taze Russell in the 1840s in America, where many of these cults have arisen.
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During that second great awakening in the wake of that, you have teachers that were trying to restore things back to the original and rejecting the religion and the tradition of man, but they have left the scripture in so doing and departed from the true faith.
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So Charles Taze Russell dies and then Judge Rutherford takes over and eventually you have the
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Watchtower Magazine and you have people knocking on your doors. Let me read off JW .org as it sits today.
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For one thing, the Bible does not mention the word Trinity, to which you would say, this is us.
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Look at the first chapter of Genesis, the first chapter of John.
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Right, well, their claim is it doesn't use the word Trinity, fine. It teaches the tri -unity of God.
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It doesn't use the word omniscience, but it teaches that God knows everything. It doesn't use the word omnipotence, but it teaches that God has all power.
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It doesn't use the word Bible, but it is a Bible. It teaches the Trinity. This doctrine simply put, that God is only one being.
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That's the Shema of Israel. There's only one God. There's not many gods, there's not three gods.
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That'd be tri -theism. There's only one God. There are three who are God, three persons in the
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Godhead. That's clearly taught, John 1, 1, and all of the Trinitarian verses, Matthew 28, verse 19.
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We're baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
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So that's the first line of argument a JW will bring. A second that they bring is, for another,
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Jesus never claimed to be equal to God. Remember as we were studying
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John 5, it says, he said, I am always working and my Father is always working.
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And the Jews said he makes himself, what was the word? John 5, 17, and 18, equal with God.
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And rather than refuting that, he doubles down and teaches that very thing, his equality with his
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Father. As his Father works, so does he, and he claims unity with the
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Father. So he does claim to be equal with God. In fact, he claims the very name of God. Given to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3, who should
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I say send me? I am who I am. And John, you referenced as we were talking before about how all the soldiers fell down.
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If you read the Greek of that, he simply said, ego eimi, I am.
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He claimed the name of God, I am Yahweh, and all the soldiers fell down. He claimed for himself equality with God.
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Third, the JW will say, a third line of evidence concerns Jesus's relationship with his followers.
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Even after he was raised from the dead to the spirit realm, Jesus called his followers my brothers.
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Were they brothers of Almighty God? Of course not. So they would argue that if he can call them brothers, then he can't be
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Almighty God. God could never have brothers. What does this miss? The condescension of Jesus, the incarnation, the word became flesh and dwelt among us.
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He became human as our representative head to die in our place, and so he calls us brothers as he does in Hebrews 3.
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He has a human nature by which we are his brothers. He has a divine nature, which is why we likewise call him father.
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Remember Isaiah foretold of the Messiah? He shall be called wonderful counselor,
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Almighty God, Prince of Peace, everlasting father. He's our father, and in a sense he's our brother as revealed by scripture.
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So Jehovah's Witnesses claim to believe the Bible, and yet this is one of their objections. Yeah. The guy that started the
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Jehovah Witnesses, was he blind? No, I don't think so. Because I don't think I've ever seen a white
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Jehovah Witness come to my door. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I don't know if that, again, we wouldn't want to make racial.
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I was just wondering if that's why. I think that is observable, that it tends to be the case, but no, it was not originally that way.
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No, it's just the opposite. We've never seen a JW being born white. You've only seen white
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JWs. Yeah, I haven't seen one. See, this underscores the point. Every individual must stand before the father and give account for every careless word spoken.
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Yeah, it doesn't have reference to skin color. It has to do with what an individual, or ethnicity, whether someone's
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Jewish or not. Okay, next, we move on to? Mormon. Okay, so by the way, what do the
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Jehovah's Witnesses deny of the three statements? Do they believe there's only one God? Yes, they believe that.
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Do they believe that there are three persons who are God? No. Well, in a sense they do, because this created
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God they call a God, but they deny the third point. Each person is equally
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God. They've made Jesus a demiurge, a created intermediary kind of God. Now we go to the
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Mormons, and they actually are the only ones who deny the first statement, the
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Shema of Israel, that there's only one God. There is only one God. They literally say this, the
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King Follett Discourse. This is Joseph Smith in 1844, right when his friend had died, and only two months before Joseph himself had died, he kind of gets loose and shares some of his deeper revelations, and here's one of them.
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You won't find this in the Book of Mormon. You will find hints of it in the Book of Abraham and Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Christ, but the
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Book of Mormon doesn't have this kind of insane stuff, as insane as it is.
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Here's what he said at the King Follett Discourse. God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens.
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This is the great secret. So Mormon doctrine of God is that God himself was once a man on a planet called
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Kolob, but as he progressed and was deified, he eventually became the creator who made this planet in which we live, and then follow this train of thought.
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His first spirit offspring was Jesus. Second was
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Lucifer, and then all of us are created spirit offsprings of Elohim, and the spirit mother, who they also believe in.
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Do you see what's happening here? Elohim, they say, also had a father and a mother.
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The grandparents of Jesus, and above them would have been their parents.
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This is an infinite regression of God's, and so what's the logic to the Mormon? There's also an infinite progression of God's, as God is, so they can be.
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So they can then have the sealing in the temple, spirit union with wives, in Joseph Smith's case, 33 wives, but then go off to populate in the next world new planets that they create and procreate to make a spirit world.
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They think they can become God. My sister's mourning. Oh, yeah.
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Death is messed up. Yeah, have you ever tried to broach that subject? Well, I wanted to hear more about this before I.
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Yeah, well, I have a book I'll give you. I wrote a book called What Every Mormon Needs to See.
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Okay, because she's a tough nut, but I'm willing to give it a whirl.
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Yeah, you have to, because this is eternally damning stuff. Part of the difficulty in being able to talk to the
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Mormons, they have five layers of authority, and the
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King James Bible they accept, but it can be overridden by Pearl of Great Price, by the next revelations, et cetera, et cetera, but they will tell you, oh, we do believe in the
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King James Bible, and then they will tell you, oh, we do believe in Jesus, the same Jesus that you do.
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It's not the same, but they will very passively say, we agree with everything you're saying, we agree with everything you're saying.
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It's when you get down underneath what they're agreeing to is where the information needs to get to.
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Very difficult to get into any apology or logical dissertations with the
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Mormon for the very same reason that they're almost there enough, or they think they're almost there enough to be able to semi -share that faith of someone who's coming after you, and they're right, and anything that's not right with them is wrong.
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Yeah, and that's a subjectivity. We need to get going to the next one, but they will rely on the burning of the bosom, their own personal inward testimony, which can't be refuted, because it's just subjective, post -modern kind of view of truth.
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All things aside, though, they've got a heck of a choir. Yes, they do. Good singers. Mormon Tabernacle.
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Yeah, yeah, well. The other thing about the Jehovah Witnesses, though, before we...
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Yeah. They think they are the 144th band. Yeah, they do. Out of all these people.
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Right. So, you know, where do you fit in that 144th band? That's my first question.
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Yeah. And they have to meet each other. Yeah. Do better than each other. So, the fifth one that you'll encounter, and you can go watch online and see a guy right there in Philadelphia.
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When I was in Kensington, we were missionaries with Cornerstone Church, Cornerstone Community Church, and right around the corner from us was the
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First Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Sounds like a good title. Until you dig down a little deeper and you watch to see what
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Geno Jennings is teaching, it's oneness Pentecostalism, okay? Oneness correctly emphasizes that there is only one
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God, the Shema of Israel, or Isaiah 44 .6. There's none besides him, the one
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God, the one King. There's only one God. But it denies distinction between the persons.
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So here's what it does. It's called modalism. Modalism. God exists in Moses.
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So, in the person of Jesus, you have deity. They'll affirm the deity of Christ in the flesh.
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But just like Nestorius did, they're making a distinction between the Spirit who had the name
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Jesus in the Old Testament as the Father, who takes on the flesh of this person who came from Mary.
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And for that time, you see Jesus as the Father. The expression of God, an operation of God.
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And then the Holy Spirit could be defined as God that way, as an operation of God. But what they deny is any ontological, meaning inherently to who they are, any distinction between Father and Son.
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So what would they do with John 1 .1? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
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Word was God. They would say, well, that's referring to Jesus as the
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Logos, the Word, and He was God while in the flesh. And He is
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God because that's just referring to the one God. There's only one God, but as God exists in all eternity,
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He is only ever one. There are no persons in the Godhead. Does that make sense, what they're claiming?
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That's called oneness Pentecostalism. Now, obviously, we've been studying through the book of Ephesians, right?
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So how does Paul address the Christian life? Does he address the
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Christian life as if Jesus was only an expression, or a mode, or an operation of God for a time in the body, or as the reality of who
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God always is? Remember what we studied? He is an eternal trinity.
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So He exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so Ephesians can speak so casually like this, let me just remind you of a couple, turn with me, if you will, to the book of Ephesians.
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We have about five minutes left, so we'll just quickly review a few of them.
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Salvation in chapter one, verses three to 14, is couched in Trinitarian language, the
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Father who predestines, the Son who gives His blood, and the Spirit who applies that redemptive work to the believer, sealing that person with the
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Holy Spirit. Ephesians one, three to 14. Look at the casual reference to the
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Trinity in 117. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.
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There's still distinction, this is post -resurrection, this is decades later as Paul writes
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Ephesians, he speaks of the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. There's distinction, one being one essence of God, but there are two persons here.
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In fact, in verse 17, there's also a third. The Father of glory may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation.
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This is that same spirit of Isaiah 11 that was on Jesus. This is
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Ephesians 117. A couple more in Ephesians, we'll just do a few. 218 and 22, this is what prompted us to do the
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Trinity, right John? When we came across this, we're like, we need to emphasize this Trinitarian doctrine.
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Because Paul is writing from a Trinitarian perspective. Would you read 218? For through him, we both have access, we both have our access in one spirit to the
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Father. Him, the spirit, the Father. Who's the him? Jesus. In that context, it's
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Jesus, yeah. He came and preached peace to you who are far and peace to those who are near. For through him, preposition, the nearest antecedent is
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Jesus. He is the one through whom, we go through him by the instrumentation of the spirit, the spirit who lives in us to get to the
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Father. Do you see the threeness? As well as the unity of the one God. 22,
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John. And Jesus is seated next to the Father. Yes.
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Is there a distinction? There's a distinction there, yeah. They would call that a mystery because in John, in Acts 7, when
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Stephen sees Jesus standing next to the Father, they would quibble, is he standing or is he sitting?
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This is only speaking of the one God. The point is, the text here, as Paul writes, is making a distinction between Father and Son.
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Even past the resurrection, past the ascension, here we have an eternal distinction. In 22,
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John, would you read 222? And taking the pronoun, changing it to its antecedent, in Jesus, you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the spirit.
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Amen. And then in chapter three, verses all of 14 to 19 is
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Trinitarian. Let me just read this, because I'm going to read quick. For this reason, I bow my knees before the
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Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
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And even if you look at chapter three, verses 20 and 21, now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work in us, that's the indwelling spirit, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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Chapter four, verses four to six, there is one body and one spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one
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Lord. Just as when Paul expounds the Shema in 1 Corinthians, he refers to the
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Lord, referencing Jesus, and God, referencing the Father. One faith, one baptism, one
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God and Father, that's verse six, who is overall, can you see the Trinitarian conception that's behind everything that Paul writes?
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And again, you see it in 4 .13 and in 4 .30 and 31. So, the one is
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Pentecostals, they are joined by some major cults in the Philippines and in Mexico and even in places like Houston, as these cults, this is number six, branch out.
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La Luz del Mundo and Iglesia Ni Cristo, maybe you've heard of them. They're present in most of the big cities now across America.
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The one in Houston has this oneness way of baptizing. Real quick, we'll take just two extra minutes to do this.
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Baptized solely in the name of Jesus Christ instead of the Trinity. Why would they say that?
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Is it in scripture? Is it in scripture? Well, at a face value reading of Acts, I could see how you could get there.
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And you should read things at a face value. What is Acts doing with the name?
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Rick would know this because he's done a study of the name. The name, the person of Jesus is the one upon whom our faith is to be fixed.
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The Jews reject his deity, but those who believe will be saved. And that name.
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And so, there are references in the book of Acts. For example, Acts 2 .38. It says, repent and be baptized in the name of our
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Lord Jesus. Interesting, right? Again, when
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Paul comes across some who haven't believed in the name, they've only had the baptism of John.
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This is Acts 19 .5. It says, they were baptized in the name of the
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Lord Jesus. See a problem here? Or Peter in Acts 10.
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The spirit falls on Gentiles even while they hear the preaching of the gospel and they begin to speak in tongues, which evidences that they have the same spirit that the
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Jews had at Pentecost. So, it's kind of like a Gentile version of Pentecost. It says that they were baptized, end of Acts 10, in the name of the
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Lord Jesus. What is Luke doing? He's descriptively, he's describing the conversion of someone to Jesus.
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It's descriptive. What's the difference between description and prescription?
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What's a prescription, John? What's that?
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Well, no, like say you went and you got your prescription filled. It's something that's prescribed for you to take, right?
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Okay, prescriptive passages in the Bible are commands. They're the imperative voice.
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They tell you what you have to do. Descriptive language describes things, right?
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Which one gives us our marching order? The prescriptive or the descriptive? Prescriptive.
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Prescriptive. Jesus himself in Matthew 28, verse 19 says, baptizing them in the name of the
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Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. That's prescriptive from the mouth of the Lord himself.
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Now, in shorthand, as Luke records the progress of the gospel, the believing in Jesus, he doesn't spell all of that out.
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He simply describes it as baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Now, we know from church history that there was always a triune baptism.
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In fact, they would often dunk three times in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We dunk one time in the name, emphasizing the unity of the being or the essence of God, one
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God in three persons. But prescriptively, you're to baptize just exactly like Jesus said you should, in the name of the
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Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Now, they'll just do a little rope -a -dope and say, well, the name of the
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Father is Jesus, of the Son is Jesus, of the Spirit is Jesus, so you only baptize in Jesus' name only because there's only one being and only one person of God.
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But what have they done there? They've rejected the clear teaching of Scripture that makes distinction with God, John 1 .1.
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In fact, as you read John 1 .2, it says he, personal pronoun, he was with, he was there in the beginning, right?
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So the word is a person, personal pronoun he, and there's distinction with the
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Father while being ontologically one being, one essence of God.
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So you have to reject something of Scripture to do that, but that's what the cults do.
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Every cult, Iglesia Ni Cristo, La Luz Del Mundo, and then lastly,
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I listed a bunch of other ones, this is a very common thing to do, Christadelphians, Christian scientists, the
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Living Church of God, Assemblies of Yahweh, Unitarian Christians, Unitarian Universalist Christians, The Way International, remember those guys?
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All of these, by the way, they have their shelf life, whereas the true gospel of Jesus Christ goes marching on from generation to generation.
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Arianism will come and then it died. It comes back up with Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1840s, it'll die.
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None of these things can last because they're not the true enduring word of God. All of these cults rise and they fall.
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The Church of God International, Restored Church of God, Christian Disciples Church, and the Church of God of the
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Faith of Abraham. That's on a storefront somewhere. What's that?
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Lincoln? Yeah, I don't know. Lincoln? Yeah, no, it's definitely a different Abraham. So to reiterate, the
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Trinity is actually a very simple doctrine. It is the concept that there is only one
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God. He exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and each one is fully, equally
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God. Amen, you wanna pray for us, brother? Lord God, we profess and we rejoice in the reality, the eternality of God in three persons.
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One God in three persons, all equally God. We thank you for the clear teaching of scripture.
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We thank you, Lord, that although man creates ways to deny, it's satanic, we do know,
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Lord, that you give us revelation empowered by your Holy Spirit so that we can worship you, and in truth, and in fullness of the
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Trinity, we thank you for this teaching. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Hey, John, should we sing a verse, a