I put this study together for our adult class during VBS and I thought I might share this online for anyone that would be interested. I will continue to share installments in this series.
I.
God as
Trinity
One
of the basic tenets of the Christian faith is the idea of a triune God that
reveals Himself and is characterized as perfect love.
The
Trinitarian nature of God would not be known by man unless it was revealed by
God. One could not just look at the created
order around him and determine that God is Triune. This fact must be revealed by God.
A.
God
the Father, Son, and Spirit
The
Old Testament reveals God as ‘Father’ as the creator of the world (Deut
32:6). Israel is known as God’s
firstborn son (Exodus 4:22). God is also
known as the Father of the King of Israel.
God is also revealed in the Old Testament as the Father of the poor, the
orphaned, and the widowed (2 Samuel 7:14, Psalms 68:6).
From
the Old Testament revelation of God the Father we can learn two things about
His nature and they are the following:
He is the origin of all things and He is intimately involved with His
creation.
The Son Reveals the Father: Jesus
states in Matthew 11: 27, “All things have been handed over to Me by My Father ; and no one knows the Son except the Father ; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.”(NASB)
Jesus states that the Son reveals the Father
and one can turn to the pages of the New Testament and find this to be
true. It is in the pages of the New
Testament that the doctrine of the Trinity is made clear in the annals of
salvation history. The Father’s
relationship to the Son is an eternal relationship in which the Father is
eternally the Father and the Son is eternally the Son. In other words, there was never a time that
the Father did not exist or the Son. The
Father –Son relationship revealed in Scripture does not mean that the Father
created the Son but just denotes the relationship.
John
1:1-2 states, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning
with God.”
John
leaves no doubt that the Word (Son) has always existed through all eternity
with the Father.
Jesus,
just before His final Passover, mentions another ‘Helper’ (Paraclete) that will
be sent to empower the Church (John 14: 17, 26; 16:13).
John 14:16-18, 26
16 "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever ; 17 that
is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. 18
"I will not leave you as orphans ; I will come to you. 26 "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.
John 16: 12-15
12 "I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 "But
when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth ; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak ; and He will disclose to you what is to come. 14 "He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. 15 "All things that the Father has are Mine ; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you. (NASB)
The completion of Christ’s revelation of the
Trinity is found in the sending of the Holy Spirit into the world especially
after His glorification by the resurrection from the dead and coronation in
Heaven (John 7:39)
The
Spirit will share in the life of God the Father and the Son to Christ’s
followers after His glorious ascension.
Jesus
taught His disciples that it would be better for Him to ascend to the Father
because of the gift of the Spirit. The
Spirit would bond the followers of Jesus together but would also reveal God’s
truth to them. This idea of truth and
unity go hand and hand.
Spheres of Work in the Trinity:
In
the relational names of the persons of the Godhead we can observe the
following: the Father is related to the
Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both. While they are called three persons in
relation to one another we believe that they are one nature or substance (the
early Church used the term ‘Consubstantial’ to illustrate this one nature-
which literally means of the same substance).
1) All
Things Come from and originate in the Father (Romans 11:36, 1 Corinthians 8:6)
2) All things are created through the Son- The
Son is the instrument of the Father in Creation.
John 1: 1-3 “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was
in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” (NASB)
3)
The Holy Spirit brings life into the world and
energizes. The word Spirit in Hebrew
(Ruah) is synonymous with breath or wind.
The word in Greek (Pneuma) is also connected with breath or wind. The Holy Spirit also brought order from the
primordial chaos in the beginning. (Job 26:13; 33:4, Psalms 33: 6; 104: 30,
Genesis 1:2; 2:7)
This
community of Love found in the Trinity is evidenced in the role of the Trinity
in the redemption of man.
One
of the earliest evidences of this is found in the baptism of Jesus found in
Matthew 3: 13-17. In this passage we see
Jesus go into the waters of the Jordan River and when he comes out of the water
we witness the descending of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove and the
voice of the Father. In this one
instance we see the confirmation of the Trinity together in the plan of
redemption by the ratification of Christ’s mission in His baptism.
The
most obvious place in the New Testament that we witness the role of the Trinity
in God’s plan of salvation is in the Great Commission of Matthew 28. In Matthew 28:19 Jesus instructs His
followers to baptize new converts in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit
thus tying in the entrance into the Church with calling on the authoritative
name of the Triune God.
The
epistles of the New Testament make it clear the Trinitarian shape of our
redemption.
Ephesians 2: 18
18 for through
Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father (NASB)
Ephesians
2: 18 shows that through Jesus we have access to the Father through the
Spirit. Paul tells us that it is the
work of Christ on the Cross and the mediating of the Spirit that brings us back
into the courts of God the Father and back to the family relationship that God
had planned for us from the beginning.
God as Love:
God’s
Love is first revealed in the Creation of the Universe. God does not need anything but created man to
be able to share His love with man. Pure
love is always expressed by wanting to share and that is exactly what the Bible
reveals as God’s nature and desire. God
wants to share His love and glory with us.
One
analogy may help us understand why God wanted to create the Universe. We may ask ourselves, “Why do people have children?” The purest answer to this question is for the
woman and man to be able to share their love with a child. In marriage we see an example of Trinitarian
love (in a very limited and imperfect sense).
A man and woman love one another so much that they become ONE flesh and
that unity is so real that in nine months in becomes a tri-unity. That love that a child shares with their
parents was already there in the family before the child arrives. In the same way God the Father, the Son, and
the Spirit already existed in a community of love before we were created. We were created to share in that divine love
and to live in a covenantal family bond with God.
One of most revealing passages about the love
of God comes from Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer found in John 17.
John 17:22-26 "The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one ; I in
them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. "Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with
Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. "O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them." (NASB)
Jesus makes it clear that the ultimate
purpose for His ministry is for man to share in the love of God and that love
had already existed for eternity between the Father and Son. The Church is to ‘image’ that love of God by
loving one another. The love that the
church has one for another is to be a sign to the world about the unity and
love of God.
1 John 4:8 expounds a spiritual law
that is unshakeable and that is God is Agape.
God is Love. One should consider God’s love as a spiritual
gravity that pulls all men to Him. This
is God’s ultimate purpose is to call man back into communion.
Christ tells us in John 17 and in John
14: 23 that the person that keeps His words will have fellowship with God the
Son and the Father.
One can see this displayed in the
worship scene before the throne of God in Revelation chapters 4 and 5. We see in Revelation chapter 4 that the human
representatives and the entire created order worships God the Father as Creator
and a shift occurs in Revelation chapter 5 when that worship and adoration is
shifted to the Lamb (the Son) for redemption.
This worship is all enabled through the Spirit and this worship is all
in the Spirit.
Another way to understand the life of
the Trinity is to understand the inner workings of the love reflected in the
Godhead. Christ is the very image of God
and God the Father gives love to the Son in the form of the Spirit. The Son then reflects that love back to the
Father through the Spirit. This love is
then offered to man through the victory won on the cross. That victory on the cross was a victory over sin
and death. When Christ was resurrected
and glorified in His heavenly coronation the Spirit was sent into the Creation
to enable the communion with God.
We can see this theme over and over
again in Scripture. We can summarize it
as follows:
1) God the Father sends His Son Christ in an act
of Love (John 3:16)
2) Christ the Son submits Himself to God the
Father in humility and out of self-sacrificial love gives up His life for man
(see Philippians 2)
3) Because of this sacrifice and victory the
Spirit is sent into the world to bring communion between the Father and
man. (John 14, John 16, Acts 1 and 2, et
al)
Through this brief investigation of
the Trinity we can see that God’s purpose is to have communion with man and
bring His just Kingdom rule to this earth.
In this study, I will propose that the
vehicle to bring about this communion is the Church. The Church is best understood in this light.
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