The Forgotten Trinity Part 2

The Trinity’s Distinct Roles in Salvation

Let me ask you this, I think this is a good question. You mentioned that in the Bible when we look at this construct of the Trinity we can see that there are different functions between Father, Son and Holy Spirit and we mentioned already that sometimes there is a lot of confusion surrounding the functions and because the functions are different therefore the Son and the Holy Spirit are made to be less than the Father.

In the economy of the Trinity and I know who was it, Karl Barth, that mentioned the ontological Trinity is the eminent Trinity or the functional Trinity, something like that. I try not to quote Barth at all.

Okay, edit it out. We see quite clearly that there is an exchange but also a function or a difference in function in scripture especially when it comes to salvation. Can you lay it out for us and just explain to us how it will look if we look at the triune God for instance in their function of salvation?

Well I think when you look at some of the key passages on what we call soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, you see the general outline being that it originates in the Father, it's accomplished in the Son, it's applied by the Spirit.

Now that doesn't always hold completely true, but it's a pattern that the New Testament authors function with. So when Paul lays out for the church at Ephesus, he starts with the Father and then he transitions into the accomplishment of the Son and then the ministry of the Spirit in the church and so there is I think a value in being able to see that and making that somewhat part of the paradigm, part of the model that you would utilize.

And so what that helps with is a very common problem amongst evangelicals who have this idea that the God of the Old Testament is this mean judgmental being and that what you have is Jesus comes and basically convince God to be a nice guy.

I mean I've literally heard that kind of thinking from people that Jesus is the nice guy who convinces the Father to be, you know, to give us a break basically. And the reality is that that's a non-Trinitarian, anti-Trinitarian understanding by any stretch of the imagination.

Ephesians 1 tells us, you know, blessed be the God and Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus in the heavenly places. So the origin and font of the love of God is God the Father.

That then becomes embodied and enfleshed in the demonstration love of Jesus Christ and now is shed abroad in our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit. So it's again to have a balanced understanding is a Trinitarian understanding.

It's not... I feel sorry, honestly. I really, really do feel badly for Unitarians because, you know, not only are they just simply wrong on the nature of God, but they're always left with this shallow shell of Christianity because however they end up making it work out, at least the Unitarians that are popular today end up being subordinationists.

You end up with a Jesus who is significantly less than the Jesus of Scripture, and inevitably the gospel, the doctrine of salvation becomes altered fundamentally by that non-Trinitarian aspect. Now again, it doesn't mean that everyone who has a solid grasp of the gospel has fully seen the relationship that this has to their belief in God and the Trinity and things like that, but that's one of the great things you can call people to is, you know, some people, if you ever get to the point where you think you've got it all figured out, that's probably a good demonstration that you took the wrong turns in place because there's so much more actually to be considered.

So when you think about the Trinity and salvation, you not only have those illustrations, but then you likewise, Romans chapter 8, you have the idea of the Father as the righteous judge, the Son as the intermediary, the advocate for the people who dies and rises again in their place, resulting in the permanence of their salvation, the inviolability of their salvation, and then the Spirit intercedes with groanings that cannot be uttered, and this becomes the foundation of the continuing intercessory work of the Spirit.

How can the Spirit intercede for unrighteous people? Well, actually, they are now accounted righteous because of the imputation of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and you have the intercessory work of the Son.

Like I said, a Unitarian just simply cannot even begin to enter into the depths of what you see in Hebrews and Ephesians and Romans. It just has to flatten all of that out, and it really robs it of so much of its meaning, but they're doing that to their own destruction, and unfortunately, many Christians who have access to the truth about these things just don't find it interesting enough to pursue, and hence have a truncated view of these things as well.

The Great Commission and the Authority of Christ

Now, the interesting thing is that you've mentioned earlier as well that when we look at the Great Commission, we can see that the very mission that Christ gave for us to accomplish in actual fact is found within this Trinitarian direction, and I think sometimes for the church that should show the importance of this doctrine.

How would you explain that to someone? How is the Commission found in a Triune God? The contention is not so much that the Triune God is highlighted by specifically announcing the one name, but how does it look in its outworking when the church functions missionally and evangelistically in a Triune aspect of this word?

Well, what it allows the church to do is to maintain its connection to what God has done in the past, to God's old covenant people, therefore to see the prophecies and fulfillments in Jesus, which becomes one of the primary demonstrations of who Jesus really was, is that, look, he fulfills these prophecies.

He himself gave prophecies. These prophecies came true, etc., etc., so you have that aspect of things, and then really those astonishing words in Matthew chapter 28, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

Do we really believe that? I mean, does the church ever really honestly live in light of that proclamation, that claim? If you really believed that all authority has been given to Jesus in heaven and on earth, first of all, it tells you a lot about who Jesus has to be.

It tells you a lot about what the resurrection means, the vindication of his claims. He is the perfect one to act as the judge because he is the God-man who's conquered death, etc., etc. It says all those things, but it also says a lot to the church as to how the church is to relate to its calling and its purpose in this world.

If Jesus really does have all authority, and he commands us to go and to disciple, that's a powerful, motivating factor, and it should give us hope. Even when it has frequently been God's purpose for his church to walk through tremendous persecution, you can either have a negative, we're on a sinking ship and this is done anyways, or a positive, Christ the King is establishing his kingdom.

He's not going to do it the way the world expects to do it. He's going to do it by changing hearts and minds. It's not going to look the way the world expects it to look, but he's still going to accomplish these things.

I think the fact that I'm an American sitting in South Africa sort of demonstrates just how worldwide that success has been, because I can come down here and I can minister in churches with people from all sorts of ethnicities and backgrounds, and yet we share that one common confession, which demonstrates that Christ has been exercising that authority and has established his church.

Amen. And how does it look when we worship as a church, when it comes to a triune God? Because sometimes what I find is in our services, we've got the Holy Spirit syncopated. We've got the Holy Spirit being that which inspires us in the service, rather than him being a very central person or reality in our worship.

How do we worship the triune God? How should we as Christians pursue and.

Worship him?

Trinitarian Worship, Prayer, and Hymnody

Well, one thing's for certain. If we really have an understanding of what Scripture reveals about the Trinity, our worship is going to be informed by that and is not going to be constantly muddled. I mentioned previously, and prayer is a part of the worship of the church, the appropriate addressing of the divine persons, not attributing to one person the actions of another person in our prayers, which is done constantly, but a recognition that the Son is addressed in prayer.

The early Christians were identified as those who epikaleo, call upon his name. That was done in prayer. And Jesus himself said it in John 14, 14, that after he ascended, you will ask me anything in my name and I will do it.

The only way we can do that now is in prayer. And so it informs our prayers. It's going to inform our music. There's beautiful, beautiful Trinitarian hymnology. And in fact, some of the most stunningly Trinitarian music I've ever heard are Advent hymns about what the meaning of the incarnation was, and it's just beautiful stuff.

Unfortunately, those are the verses that frequently get skipped because people are like, I can't find Santa Claus in there. I'm not sure when I'm going to do that. So you have that, but it should impact the very orientation of the service there should be.

Calvin quoted, if I recall, it might have been Cyril in the early church, who said, whenever I contemplate the three of necessity, I'm brought back to the contemplation of the one. And so if our doctrine of the Trinity is sound, we will be able to resist the temptations that you mentioned, and that is the imbalanced focusing upon any one of the divine persons to the detriment of the other divine persons.

And so there would be a recognition of the Father as the fountainhead and giving thanks to him for that eternal status that is his. There's going to be, as in most evangelical churches, an emphasis upon the accomplishment of the Son, but not separated out from the purpose of the Father or the purpose of the triune God in his own.

That's the other thing is if we recognize that the triune God is seeking his own glorification, there's a strong corrective to the man-centeredness that is so popular in many churches, if you really understand the doctrine of the Trinity, and that the three persons are bringing about their own glorification in this tremendous work.

That is important as well, but as you mentioned, there is in certain sectors of the church today an imbalance in regards to the Spirit of God, but not so much to a sovereign spirit, but to a spirit who almost becomes our whim-maker, our emotion-maker, a servant rather than the reality that, for example, the Spirit is described as giving the gifts to the church as he wishes.

A sovereign spirit who accomplishes what he is going to accomplish. That would, I think, help correct a lot of the misunderstandings.

Anthropocentric Worship and Trinitarian Prayer

Of people. The interesting thing is when you look at modern worship, it is anthropocentric. Oh, very much so. The thing that's really bothersome is that I would speak to my students and I would say, how many times in a Christian song are you declaring your benefits or are you singing about your greatness in Christ, where the object of your worship is not really focused on Christ, but really it is yourself?

And similarly with prayer, I find that Christians, first of all, don't know how to pray in a Trinitarian fashion. They don't know who they should address. I had somebody say to me, who should we pray to?

Do we pray to Christ? Do we pray to the Father? Do we pray by the power of the Holy Spirit? So how do we pray in a triune aspect? Because it is a big question, trust me. Oh, it is, and I remember the.

First time that I experienced a more formal form of, well, we use the term liturgy because liturgy has a meaning. It is the form in which a church worships from the very term to worship, and every church has a liturgy.

Even the churches that eschew liturgy, that's part of their liturgy, whether they want to accept it or not. But I remember the first time I heard someone address the triune God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and then in what followed very carefully recognizing the biblical roles that each one of these persons partook, and it was an enlightening thing.

What we must strive for is the banishing of confusion from our prayers based upon our not being able to understand or ignorance of the relationship of the divine persons. So in other words, as I said earlier, not attributing, cross-attributing actions and activities between the divine persons, praying biblically.

So there's everything natural about thanking the Son for His great condescension. I think it's perfectly appropriate to, for example, in speaking of His sacrificial death, to thank Him for what He went through and the fact that it was personal, it was specific.

We were united to Him in His death, rejoicing in the power of His resurrection. And though I think it needs to be done within biblical parameters, thanksgiving to the Holy Spirit for His comfort, His guidance, the role that He Himself has taken, recognizing that it is His primary function to direct us to Christ.

So seeking to reflect the biblical reality and not just being monotheists. Monotheism is good, it's proper, it's necessary, but we want to be Trinitarian monotheists rather than egalitarian monotheists.

And a lot of people think that that's a false distinction, but it is an absolutely necessary distinction that has to be made. And of course, the people that are...the best way to teach that is not necessarily to have sermons on it, but just to model it as pastors and teachers in the church, because that's what people are going to focus in upon, is how we handle the Word of God, how we pray, how we worship.

It's going to be the model that's going to communicate most clearly to the people in front of us.

The Holy Spirit’s Sovereignty and the Balance of Trinitarian Theology

Interesting. What would you say to a church that is endeavoring to create what is known as a triune community that is solely focused upon the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit equally? Not just in prayer, but I've seen churches intentionally trying to create not just the liturgy, but also various aspects of the church ministry that is focused, for instance, on the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the operation of the gifts as a result of the functioning of the Son, and then also the lordship of the Father even.

Would you say that is something that we should do in our liturgy or in our structure of the church, or do you think that it's just, again, an overemphasis on trying to find some.

Proximity? Well, sometimes I wonder if we don't spend a whole lot of time just trying to find some new way of doing things just for the sake of having a new way of doing things. If we have biblical grounding and basis for making that kind of distinction, I guess I could see it, but the reality is that when you look at how the church functioned, I don't see them making those kinds of, you know, having special service focused upon this aspect of things or that aspect of things.

For me, and this is a completely different issue really, but for me the central aspect of the worship service is the proclamation of the truth of God. That's what we need to hear. That's what's going to conform us to the image of Christ.

That's what the Spirit uses to make us more like Christ, and so it's just been my experience in a lot of the churches where I've seen sort of going after different ways of doing things. That's almost always been joined with a diminishment of the centrality of preaching, and you know you're in a sound church when the people there recognize that they are there to hear from God, not outside of what He's already revealed, but in a greater depth of what He has already revealed.

That's the common deposit of the faith, and if we come recognizing that we need a greater understanding and a greater application of that once-for-all delivered-to-the-saints faith. See, a lot of people come with a fundamental lack of appreciation for that once-for-all delivered-to-the-saints faith, and really thinking that's not enough.

I need something more, but if we come recognizing that once-for-all delivered-to-the-saints faith, and yet that we get the opportunity of growing in our depth of understanding of that faith and what that faith means in application to our current situation, I think God is truly worshiped by that, and I think that's the deepest worship that we're going to experience.

So again, that's going to lead us to see the roles of the Father, Son, and Spirit, and to appreciate that the Spirit would be willing to come and do the things that the Spirit does for us. I mean, how many times do we walk into that service at all prepared to hear, to worship, to pray?

We're so distracted. We're focused on what's coming on Monday. We didn't get things done that we needed to get done, and it's almost a miracle that we ever walk out of a service with a blessing. Talk about forcing the Spirit of God to work a miracle.

If you walk out of a lot of church services, given how utterly unprepared you were going in, if you got a blessing, that was a miracle right next to Lazarus, pretty much, because your dead spirit just got raised up from the dead in a pretty amazing way.

So yeah, there's that aspect to it.

The Spirit’s Personhood, Gifts, and Leading

The interesting thing is that a lot of people feel that the role of the Holy Spirit is all over-emphasized in our services, and all the Holy Spirit's not.

Mentioned at all. Well, there does seem to be an imbalance one way or the other. You're either totally focused upon what the Spirit needs to do in us to get us through to the next service, and so it's all about Spirit, Spirit, Spirit, Spirit, speak, Spirit, do that, or there are people just absolutely deathly afraid of the Holy Spirit might actually do something that would be out of the normal.

So there does seem to be a...and again, I think sound Trinitarian theology helps to counteract that, because yeah, I can think of churches that formally have a very strong Orthodox Trinitarian theology, but they would never let it dare influence the worship, because we've done it the same way.

All we've got to do with the bulletin is change the numbers, and it's always the exact same thing, so we're not expecting anything to change. So yeah, I do realize there are people who can have that external commitment, but having a real solid Trinitarian theology can help you to avoid a lot of those imbalances that are just all over the place.

I think something we might have skipped past is the reality of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, and I've heard people pray and say, Lord, give us the times of the book of Acts, bring us and take us back to the Acts Church.

Like the spirit of striking people dead.

Exactly, Acts 5. He killed two people in the worship service for not honoring God's economy. And we have that today in church. We have people really being desirous to see the Spirit of God move, and you've got people saying that, well, whatever we need to do and wherever we need to go, we need to do so in the power and might and the work of the Holy Spirit.

I just think that sometimes the way it is depicted is sometimes, for lack of a better word, weird. And first of all, we know that the Spirit is not just a force. We can agree upon that. When we look at the New Testament, we can see quite clearly He's referred to in personal pronouns.

He's an actual person separate from the Father and the Son, yet being God Himself as well. Peter speaks of this in Acts chapter 5, isn't it, sir?

Very much so, and once you recognize that, well, this is the aspect that I mentioned briefly before, and that is the Spirit gives the gifts as He wills. The Spirit sent Paul here or there as He willed.

He has a will. He's accomplishing that will. That's not a will that exists separately from the Father and the Son. He's not going out there doing his own thing, but the point is, just as God is sovereign over the church as a whole, the Spirit is sovereign as well, and I just think that a lot of people have a sub-close-to-heretical view of the Spirit as sort of being a mega-angel that's put at our disposal for us to do with as we see fit, so that the idea, I mean, biblically the idea is, what unifies the body of Christ?

Well, we're all indwelt by the Holy Spirit, so since the Spirit is ubiquitously present in the sense of indwelling every true believer, then it's like, well, if I've got Him, then I might as well use Him instead of, well, if He's got me, He might as well use me.

There's a big difference between those two, a big difference between those two, and so if you really recognize the Spirit as the equal triune person as the Father and the Son, then there's going to be less of a willingness or ability to treat Him in that rather disrespectful fashion, but I think we end up with forms of subordinationism, maybe not intending to, but if it makes you, if it helps you to sell lots of books, that might work out too, and it ends up building upon itself, and so I really do think that major portions of modern Christianity have a view of the Spirit that in many functional ways makes Him subservient to the commands of mankind, whereas if you really see Him as the eternal triune person, well, the triune being of God, the nature of God, then you're not going to be trying to use Him like a baseball bat or throwing Him around knocking people over.

How do you...can you imagine anybody doing that in reference to the Father because we've seen the pictures of the worship in heaven of the Father and the 24 elders before the throne and stuff like that.

You're not going to be throwing the Father around, but people throw the Spirit around. What does that say? There's a fundamental problem there.

Interestingly enough, I think adding on to the issue of prayer, I sometimes think that the lack of prayerfulness in the church is simply deduced from their lack of seriousness when they look at the triune God itself and the seriousness of His results.

How the Holy Spirit Leads Through Scripture and Obedience

How do we discern the will of God currently? There's so many things happening in the world, and sometimes we hear that there is a global concern on certain issues which the church can pray about and endeavor to pursue, but for me personally, there's also whenever we speak on the Holy Spirit, we always hear that synonymously mentioned with how did the Spirit of God direct us in everyday life, and He is active in everyday life.

We're not saying He's not, but how does it practically work? How does the Holy Spirit lead us?

When Jesus quoted from the words of David in the Psalter, He specifically said, David said by the Holy Spirit. There is an intimate relationship between the Spirit and the Spirit's words that He has inspired and preserved over the ages, and I think one of the tragedies is that a lot of people will get taught about the Spirit and will take what they are taught as an indication that they are to look into their own thoughts and their own feelings and their own emotions to try to discern something that the Spirit is revealing to them rather than recognizing they've been given this tremendously great gift in Scripture, and that Spirit then is the one that makes those things to come alive in their hearts and makes applications, so when I was a teenager, there was a lot of discussion about how you discern the will of God, and that was all about who to marry, what to do, what college to go to.

That's always what it was all about, but the reality is that if you obey the commands of Christ, you can only do so by the power of the Spirit, and that's going to be the will of the Spirit is that you do what Christ commands.

I know it doesn't sell books, but that's the simplistic. Can you repeat that? Yeah, well, doing the will of God is doing what Christ commands powered by the Holy Spirit of God, and that's not going to get me in front of 10 ,000 people anywhere in the world, but I think that's the reality of what it is.

If you love me, keep my commandments. That's not nearly as exciting as if you love me, you get the Maserati. Yeah, for sure. But one leads to eternal life, and the other leads to eternal debt.

The Comma Johanneum and the Text of 1 John 5:7

Doc, also, I just want to go back to a scripture that we've missed because a lot of people use the scripture in actual fact to affirm that this is evidence of the triune God being present in the scriptures, and they go to 1 John 5 -7, and they say, you see here we can see the three stipulated.

It's given this is a triune passage of scripture, but we only find that passage of scripture, I think, in the King James Version of the Bible. And the New King James. And the New King James Version of the Bible, and what would you say to somebody that used that as the proof text to explain or even to say, here it is, the emphatic scripture for the triune God?

Yeah, unfortunately, to do so fully is a very long response, but because it requires talking a lot about the history of the text of the New Testament and its transmission over time, so I'll try to be accurate yet brief.

1 John 5 -7 in the King James and New King James Version of the Bible is what is called the Comma Johannium. It is an expansion of a verse primarily in the Latin manuscripts going back to as early as the fourth century, and it's orthodox in what it says, but we do not have any Greek manuscripts, and of course 1 John was originally written in Greek.

We don't have any Greek manuscripts that contain it as its primary reading until about the 14th century. So for well over 1 ,000, almost 1 ,000 and a half years, the church as it read the scriptures in its original languages did not have the expansion that is found there, the expansion being there are three, the bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one.

In that context, John is talking about three witnesses, and this was probably a scribe that in a margin interpreted what those three witnesses were as the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and then when the next person copied their manuscript, they just thought they had left that out and put it in.

That happened in John chapter five. It happens in 1 John chapter five as well, and so there is no meaningful mechanism of defending that as being original to 1 John. If you do so, you're basically saying that entire deeply theological text can disappear from the Greek manuscript tradition only to be preserved someplace else, which is a pretty radical statement, but I have had many a person tell me that I'm going to hell because I don't believe that 1 John 5 -7 in the King James Version of the Bible was original, so there are a lot of people that turn it into a litmus test of salvation itself, but from a textual perspective, I want to know what John wrote, not what someone 1 ,400 years after John thought he should have written, and in light of that, then the first time though as a junior in high school that I met with Mormons, that's all I argued is 1 John 5 -7.

I didn't know any better, so been there, done there, got the t-shirt, it didn't accomplish anything either, but it's a verse that has come into the New Testament at a much, much later period of time, and as accurate as it may be in its interpretation of the text, we have to recognize that it is not original to 1 John itself.

Sure, that is very interesting. Doc, then also another point is that when we look at how New Testament authors interpret the text, there is sometimes the emphasis given on the Greek septuagint, that which it was translated from, and into the New Testament, this was obviously now translated into English, and then there would be a change of words, like for instance the word kurios, Lord, in the Old Testament, and then its application in the New Testament.

A lot of people will say, well the word Lord is just a common term, and therefore we cannot say that Jesus in that context was the Lord God, but he was just the ascended chosen one of God, the firstborn of creation, and they will say, see you cannot make Jesus ultimately God just by referring to him as Lord.

Jesus as Yahweh and the Meaning of Kurios

When you look at that word Lord, and obviously when you look at it in its context in the New Testament, can we make a solemn argument that any passage of Scripture when it speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ, it emphatically.

Shows that he was God? Well, there is no question that there are utilizations of the Greek term in the New Testament that are not specifically in re-reference to deity, so there are men who are called lords.

The plural form is used. There's no question about that. The question is when Jesus is identified as the Lord, there are a couple places where someone addresses him, and they may not even know who he is, so it's just simply an act of respect, so no question about that, but when it's used as a title, and when it's used, for example, in 1 Corinthians chapter 8 where the Apostle Paul expands on the Shema and says for us there's one God, the Father, and one Lord Jesus Christ.

He's drawing from Deuteronomy 6 -4, and the term kurios there in Greek is the rendering of the Hebrew term Yahweh. That's the divine name, and so there are numerous places where the term kurios when applied to Jesus is drawing from Old Testament texts.

I mentioned one from Peter before where the original term is Yahweh, and so given that over 6 ,000 times in the Old Testament you have that term appearing, the Greek septuagint renders it as kurios. That was a way of avoiding having to deal with the divine name, but it's applied to Jesus, and when it's applied to Jesus in his exalted state, in his position as functioning, as king of kings, lord of lords, that type of thing, where he's being worshipped, in those instances there really can't be any question as to the meaning of the term, but without question when it is applied from an Old Testament text that was about Yahweh, there's just no way around it.

The problem is a lot of us don't see that in our Bibles. We don't see it in our Bibles because our Old Testaments don't actually translate the word Yahweh. They use L-O-R-D in all caps, and some translations don't even do that.

I discovered while I was teaching in Russia a few months ago that the Russian Synodal Bible, which is what almost everybody has, makes no indication whatsoever. You cannot tell looking at the Old Testament where the tetragrammaton appears anywhere, and you should have seen the looks on the faces of people when I started explaining this to them, and they're sort of like, what are we going to do about this, and it's like you need to get a translation that lets you know, but they just never seen it because it's not there in their Bible, and that's because translators gave in to Jewish tradition of not using a divine name, and that was a bad step that's had some bad ramifications to it, but it's there,.

And the early church really focused in upon it. Yeah, for sure. How do we get the right language that is triune, because a lot of times, you know, because the Bible does not speak emphatically about the function of the triune God, we struggle to, in actual fact, articulate and to speak about the triune God.

For instance, when we speak of three Yahwehs, and I've heard some people say Jesus was Yahweh, the Holy Spirit is Yahweh, God the Father is Yahweh, therefore there's three Yahweh, you know, so how do we articulate, and what would you caution students to do whenever they try to speak about Yahweh God, and how they maintain the unity and the diversity, etc. etc.

What should we use when we speak about this? Yeah, anybody, and I know who.

One Yahweh in Three Persons

You're referring to who tries to talk about three Yahwehs is again assuming Unitarianism, and hence creating multiple Yahwehs. Yahweh is Trinitarian, not Unitarian. Yahweh refers to the being of God, and then we have three persons that are identified as sharing that name, so yeah, we do need to be careful how we utilize those things, and I think again biblically we are given some grounds for doing this, because we can look at Philippians chapter 2, for example, and when Paul says every knee will bow, every tongue will confess, again the person who knows the Old Testament for which he's drawing knows what he's referring to there, and that that was Yahweh.

Yahweh said to me every knee will bow, every tongue will confess, and then Paul applies this to Jesus, and then provides us with the perfect balance saying that every knee will bow, every tongue will confess, that Jesus Christ is kurios to the glory of God the Father, so notice the balance.

John chapter 5, honor the Father as you honor the Son, right in the same section it says the Son does nothing of himself. You always end up with that perfect balance there. First Corinthians 8, the Shema being expanded out.

There's the balance there of the relationship of the Father and the Son, so we just need to try to maintain that biblical balance, and the danger for people involved in apologetics is that if you are primarily dealing with one particular group, you tend to start thinking in categories of negating the claims of that one particular group.

That's dangerous. Yeah, sure. Because if you deal primarily with Muslims, then you start expressing your Christian faith in such a way that it is primarily a negation of the Islamic faith, and that's not a full Christian faith, and I've known people who've done the same thing with Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, humanitarianism, whatever else it might be.

You have to remain balanced. That's why one of the greatest deficits of Christian apologists that I see in our day today is so few of them are church people. For me, and I was talking to a fellow after the recent debate you moderated, a sharp young man, and I could tell he's gifted.

He was saying, how do I get past whenever I'm reading Scripture, I'm always thinking about how this could be abused, and this group's going to say this, and this group's going to say that, and as an apologist, that is something.

It's ruined many a good sermon because all you were thinking about was how this stuff could be abused by somebody else, and so he was asking really good questions, but one of my exhortations to him was, if you're going to go into apologetics, if this is what I can't dissuade you from doing this, which I normally try to do.

If there's anything else you can do, do it, but if you can't, then you've just got to love the church and be involved in the ministry of the church. That's going to provide you with the balance that you need, and all I can say is that in my life that has been the key issue is that I've always been a churchman.

I've always been a member of a local church, and for over 20 years in leadership in a local church, and so that helps provide the balance because I have to preach and teach the whole counsel of God, and I have to make it understandable to people who never talked to a Muslim or a Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness and maybe never will, and if I'm always telling them about people they may never even talk to, they're not going to get much out of what I'm saying, so I have to have that kind of balance, so I think that's good counsel.