Trinity                                     

                                                  2^nd Corinthians 13: 14

 

 

          Several years ago on a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning, the kind of morning when you want to get the yard work done in time to get to a pool or a river or your favorite fishing hole before the day gets away, I was at my desk trying to put the finishing touches on the Sunday message when the doorbell rang. Since everyone who knows us comes to the kitchen door, I knew it was a stranger because it was the front doorbell that rang. So I stopped what I was doing, trying to retain that last thought, and went to the door.  There stood an eager Jehovah’s Witness with a tract in his hand, just thirsty to share his thoughts. I was impatient. He persisted. Then I told him I was a minister. That really got his juices flowing. He asked me what I believed and I said that I believed in the message of the Holy Scriptures and the gospel of Jesus Christ.  When I said I believed in the Trinity, he stopped. What’s the Trinity? He asked. I didn’t know at the time that Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the doctrine of the Trinity. So I sat down on the front steps and told the young man about the Trinity. He was amazed. Not convinced, but amazed. As he left, I encouraged him to drop in on the New Testament for a little light reading on a man called Jesus.

          Trinity. If you do a word search for trinity in the Bible, you will come up with blanks. There is no such word, no such combination of words. That’s okay. For instance, here’s another word not found in the Bible: Bible! The fact that they are not found in the Bible doesn’t make either word any less useful or invalid. Trinity is a concept or doctrine that became part of church dogma in the fourth century, though the use of its three parts is present in Scripture and was being used as early as 110 A.D. by Ignatius of Antioch. A lot of theories bounced around those first several hundred years, as the Church Fathers struggled to deal with competing concepts over the bible’s meanings. Sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? We are still doing that today.

          Trinity is one of the Bible’s great mysteries. Put simply, it means God in three persons. Many images have been used to explain it. Here is one:

                             

I’m sure that clears it up nicely for you. The Father is not the Son is not the Holy Spirit is not the Father, and the Father is God and the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. Makes perfect sense, right? Well, yes it does…providing you are God.

          Cut open an apple. What do you see? Skin, fruit and seeds. Three parts that go together to make the whole. Well, that’s true of virtually any fruit or vegetable, for that matter. Even a human is composed in his or her outer shell of skin, hair and nails.  But the Trinity is different. When we talk about apples and people, we are talking about the parts that go to make the whole. When we talk about the Trinity, we are talking about three completely independent persons that function alone, think alone, act alone and yet are not alone. Only God can do that.

          In the book of John, we are told that the Word was with God in the beginning, that the Word was God, that the Word (Jesus) became flesh and dwelt among us. In the opening chapter of the Bible, God says “let us make man in our image,” referring not to a one dimensional being, but rather a Trinitarian being. In Genesis 1: 2, the Spirit of God hovers over the face of the waters.

          In their book, Teaching the Faith, Gary Parrett and Steve Kang say this about the trinity: “All of the divine work—from creation to redemption to culmination-is accomplished by the triune God revealed to us in the Bible. Our worship, therefore, must be explicitly Trinitarian.”

          How do we come to God? Who is our intercessor? Who sits at God’s right hand? Who died for you and me? Jesus is our intercessor as we are told by Paul and Peter and the writer of Hebrews. And how do we find Jesus? How do we come to Jesus to begin with? We come, we find, we pray, because we have been drawn and we have been coached and because we have been inhabited by the Holy Spirt! It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that we can abide in Jesus and him in us and it is down these blessed avenues that we can come to God. It takes three!

          These days, church leaders spend a lot of time talking about community. The church is community. The church comes together to worship our Lord, God in three persons. When we look at God in his three persons, we again see community. There is the sovereignty and power and unadulterated love of the Father. There is the grace of Son, fully human, fully divine, he who intercedes to the Father for us whom he loves, and there is the abiding comfort and fellowship of the Holy Spirit, guiding us to a more rich existence through life in the Trinity, the community of God himself. He…they is/are unified and diverse simultaneously. Such is the job of the church.          

          The understanding of the Trinity, the quantifying of it, may be out of our grasp, for we are only humans and this concept is Godly. But such is the nature of God. There are indeed high mysteries which in the end may not be grasped, but should be accepted.

          The apostle Paul understood God as triune. Listen to his benediction in the book of 2nd Corinthians, written to a church in trouble looking to be re-united, to whom Paul’s final greeting rings true for all ages: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”