The Practical Doctrine of the Trinity

When Ronan was about five he asked something like this: ‘If God is God and Jesus is God, does that mean there are two gods?’  I answered, ‘one day I am going to tell you something called the facts of life, but your mum is responsible for explaining the doctrine of the Trinity.’  It takes a child’s question to remind us how complicated the Trinity is!

The word I most commonly use when trying to explain the Trinity is ‘mystery’, but one of the words I want you to associate with the Trinity is ‘practical’.  I want you to see that the Trinity is the most practical idea in the whole world.

One God in three persons

We are not polytheists.  We do not believe in three gods.  We believe that there is only one true and living God.  This truth is expressed in what is called the shema: ‘Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one’ (Deuteronomy 6:4).  The Hebrew word translated ‘one’ actually refers to a unity rather than simply to a singularity.  This word is used of a bunch of grapes, and when Adam and Eve become one flesh (Genesis 2:24).  Hints of this idea of Trinity are found in the very first chapter of the Bible, when God says, ‘Let “us” make man in our image’ (Genesis 1:26).

No-one denies that the Father is God.  After all the apostle Paul uses the word ‘God’ as shorthand for the Father.  He writes about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (e.g. Romans 15:6, 2 Corinthians 1:3, Ephesians 1:3).  But there is a long history of denying that the Son is God.  The Muslims claim that he is just a prophet and the Jehovah Witnesses actually think that he is the archangel Michael.

There are five New Testament texts that explicitly claim that Jesus is God (John 1:1, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, Hebrews 1:8 and 2 Peter 1:1), the most famous being in John’s prologue, where he says, ‘in the beginning was the Word [Jesus], and the Word was with God and the Word is God.’  Unfortunately, the Jehovah Witnesses will debate each of these texts.  But there are a number of other ways to show that Jesus is God.

Staying with John’s Gospel, you could point them to Jesus’ use of the term ‘I am’.  This goes back to the famous incident of the burning bush, where Moses asks God who he should say has sent him to the Israelites.  God responds, ‘I am who I am.  This is what you are to say to the Israelites, “I am has sent you”’ (Exodus 3:14).  To the Pharisees, Jesus declares ‘before Abraham was born, I am’.  We can see that they knew what he was claiming by the fact that they responded by picking up stones to kill him (John 8:58-59).  At the climax of John’s gospel, Thomas looks at the risen Jesus and proclaims, ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 20:28).

It is not just John’s gospel that shows that Jesus is God the Son.  We can see it in all the gospels.  In Mark, the earliest gospel to be written, we see Jesus do things that only God does.  So, when a man is lowered through a roof to meet Jesus, Jesus tells him ‘your sins are forgiven.’  This leads the religious leaders to rightly observe, ‘who can forgive sins but God alone?’ (Mark 2:7).  Jesus calms a storm (Mark 4:39), and in the Psalms God asked the rhetorical question, ‘who stilled the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves…?’ (Psalm 65:7).   Jesus walks on water, and the careful reader of the Old Testament might have recalled the following verse from Job: ‘he [God] alone stretches out the heavens and treads the waves of the sea’ (Job 9:8).

One of the most fruitful ways to show that Jesus is God is to look at the titles given to him.  He is Immanuel, meaning ‘God with us’ (Isaiah 7:14).  He will be called ‘mighty God’, said the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 9:6).  Jesus said that he was the good shepherd (John 12:11), yet in Ezekiel it is God who says, ‘I myself will tend my sheep and make them lie down’ (Ezekiel 34:15).

In the book of Revelation, the Apostle John is given a wonderful vision while he is in exile on the island of Patmos.  Near the end of this, John gets carried away and falls down to worship the angel who is speaking to him.  The angel responds, ‘don’t do that!  I am a fellow servant with you with your brothers and sisters who hold the testimony of Jesus.  Worship God’ (19:10).  We are only to worship God, yet in the same book of Revelation we see Jesus being worshipped as the Lamb of God.     

So, God is God the Son, but is the Holy Spirit God.  It actually follows naturally that if the Son is God then the Spirit is too.  The most famous text to show the existence of the Trinity is when Jesus commission the disciples and tells them to baptise people in the ‘name’ [singular] of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:18).

Texts showing that the Holy Spirit is God are less numerous than those demonstrating that the Son is.  Two are often cited.  The first comes from the incident with Ananias and Sapphira, where Peter accuses them of lying to the Holy Spirit and then immediately declares, ‘you have not lied to men but to God’ (Acts 5:3-4).  The apostle Paul implies the divinity of the Holy Spirit when he asks the Corinthians, ‘Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and God’s Spirit lives in you?’ (1 Corinthians 3:16).

The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t even believe that the Holy Spirit is a person, yet alone God.  They think of the Holy Spirit as a kind of impersonal force, like electricity.  However, the apostle Paul warns us not to grieve the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4:30).  How can you grieve something that has no personality of feelings?

If we see that Jesus is God the Son, then the natural logic is to realise that the Spirit is God the Holy Spirit.  It has often been noted that Jesus commissions his disciples to baptise people in the name [singular] of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Before I attempt to show you that the Trinity is the most practical doctrine in the world, I want to clear a possible misunderstanding.  There is a heresy called ‘modalism’ which says that there is simply one God who consists of one person who appears in various forms.  So, the Father becomes the Son who becomes the Spirit.  We actually get close to teaching this when we tell children that the Trinity is like water that appears in three forms—water, ice of steam.  The Trinity is actually the mystery of one God yet three persons of Father, Son and Spirit.  The Father is God, the Son is God and the Spirit is God, but the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit.  It really is a mystery.

The Trinity is Practical

However, it is also the most practical doctrine in the world.  It changes how we see God, how we see being rescued by God, how we pray and how we live.

The Trinity means God is love.  In Islam, Allah is one god consisting of one person.  How could Allah be love for all of eternity past?  Before he created anything or anybody, who did he love.  He could only have spent all of eternity loving himself.  But God is love (1 John 4:8).  It is a part of his very nature.  If there was no creation, he would still be love.  For all eternity past, the Father has loved the Son and the Spirit, the Son has loved the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit has loved the Father and Son.

The Trinity means salvation is wonderful.  One theologian asks, ‘Why did the Father send the Son?  Because the Father so enjoyed loving the Son that he wanted his love to be in others!’  God comes to broken, rebellious people and invites us to join in the dance of delight.  God didn’t create humankind because he was lonely.  He was not like the ancient gods who created people to serve them.  He created because his loves overflows and he wanted to share it.  He wants us to enjoy the love he enjoys.  

The Trinity should shape our prayer.  We can pray to the Son or the Holy Spirit, but the most of all we should pray to the Father.  Jesus showed us the pattern of prayer by teaching us to say, ‘Our Father.’  But how can we come to the Father confidently?  We come ‘in Christ’.  Christ’s death and resurrection means that we are washed and pure.  We are received with the welcome that Christ has one for us.  We come in Jesus’ name.  But the Holy Spirit is also involved.  He empowers our prayer.  When we become to think that we might be unwelcome at the throne of grace, the Spirit reminds us, ‘God is your Father, who loves you and delights to listen to you.’  When we are apathetic in prayer, he makes us restless.  When we don’t know what to pray for, he guides us.  He even takes our frustrated groans and says to the Father, ‘if Paul knew you the way I know you, and Paul understood the situation that way we can see it, this is what he ld say.’   

Finally, as Christians we are told to submit to the state, to our employers and to our church leaders.  Children are told to obey their parents.  Husbands are told to be servant leaders of their wives.  Wives are told to submit to their husbands.  We are commanded to submit to one another in love.  All this submission is countercultural in our culture of self-assertion.  Gentle, delighting, loving authority is such a contrast to the common abuse of power.   But the Trinity magnifies the beauty of loving authority and glad submission.  The Son gladly submits to the Father and the Spirit gladly submits to the Father and Son.  When Jesus walked on the earth he allowed himself to be led by the Spirit.  There was no manipulation or bullying, no self-assertion or resentment.

It is said that when Saint Patrick came to Ireland he used the shamrock to teach about what the Trinity is like.  I don’t know if the shamrock is a particularly good picture of the Trinity.  In truth I can’t think of any object that illustrates the Trinity well.  It is a mystery to us.  But just because it is a mystery does not mean that it isn’t the most God-honouring, glorious and life impacting truth the world has ever been confronted with.