THINKING DEEPER ABOUT THE TRINITY

I have been reading John Owen's profound and wonderful 17th century work titled Communion With the Triune God. It has caused me to think deeply about the doctrine of the Trinity. I believe unequivocally in the truth that there is one, and only one, true God, and that there are three divine persons in the one God: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit. I believe this because the Bible unshakably speaks of one true God, not three Gods, and yet reveals the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit all as God, and as distinct persons.

In his systematic theology Wayne Grudem summarizes the teaching of scripture in three statements:
1. God is three persons
2. Each person is fully God
3. There is one God

Justin Taylor wrote about trying to explain the Trinity to his daughter and put it this way:

One simple way to get at the difference between person and substance/essence/nature is to say that the Trinity is “three who’s” and “one what.” Who is God? Three persons: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What are they? The One true God.

Any way you put it, the doctrine of the Trinity is highly perplexing and exceedingly difficult to understand. It is a mystery. John Piper writes:

If this perplexes you, keep in mind: We are in no position as creatures to dictate to our Creator what he may or should be like. God is absolute reality. He was there before anything else was, and he did not come into being, but always was. Therefore nobody made him the way he is, and there is no reason he is the way he is. He simply is. That is his name: "I Am Who I Am" (Exodus 3:14). Our role is not to say what can and can't be in God, but to learn who he is and who we are, and to shape our lives according to his reality – his will. We submit to the way he is. He doesn't submit to the way we are or the way we think he should be.

People have tried to use analogies to attempt to understand it, all of which are helpful in an elementary way, but invariably turn out inadequate and misleading:

1. God is like a three leaf clover, which has three parts, yet remains one clover.
2. God is like a tree with three parts: the roots, the trunk, and branches that all constitute one tree.
3. God is like water that comes in three forms:steam, ice, and water liquid, solid, and gas.

I have wrestled with understanding the Trinity for 36 years. Nothing I have ever read has ever really satisfied my deep desire to understand. that is, until I read what Jonathan Edwards had to say about it in his An Unpublished Essay on the Trinity. You can read it for yourself at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/trinity/files/trinity.html.

He does an amazing job in communicating the meaning of saying God is three in one. It is well worth the read if you would be willing to go deep and bask in such wisdom. John Piper is helpful in summarizing Edwards profound understanding.

"There is God the Father, the fountain of all being, who from all eternity has had a perfectly clear and distinct image and idea of Himself; and this image is the eternally begotten Son. Between this Son and Father flows a stream of infinitely vigorous love and perfectly holy communion; and this is God the Holy Spirit. God's image of God and God's love of God are so full of God that they are divine Persons, not less.

So Jesus Christ, God the Son, is the perfect image of God the Father. He is a complete and living duplicate of the Father’s perfections. This is a great mystery. How can an idea, or reflection, or image of the Father actually be a person in His own right? Remember that God is God, and have neither the ability nor the right to try to manage who He is. We rest and wonder in faith.

Listen to how Piper describes the Holy Spirit:

I find it helpful to observe that the mind of God, as reflected in our own, has two faculties: understanding and will. In other words, before creation God could relate to himself in two ways: God could know himself and God could love himself. In knowing himself he begot the Son, the perfect, full and complete personal image of himself. In loving himself the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son.

Piper goes on and says,

So the Son is the eternal image that the Father has of his own perfections, and the Holy Spirit is the eternal love that flows between the Father and the Son as they delight in each other.
How can this love be a person in his own right? Words fail. But can we not say that the love between the Father and the Son is so perfect, so constant, and carries so completely all that they are in themselves that this love stands forth itself as a person in its own right?

C.S. Lewis tries to get this into a conceivable analogy:

You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club or a trades union, people talk about the “spirit” of that family, club or trades union. They talk about its spirit because the individual members, when they’re together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they wouldn’t have if they were apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course it isn’t a real person: it is only rather like a person. But that’s just one of the differences between God and us. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.

All these things are deep, deep, and profoundly difficult to comprehend. Jonathan Edwards concludes in his essay,

I don't pretend fully to explain how these things are and I am sensible a hundred other objections may be made and puzzling doubts and questions raised that I can't solve. I am far from pretending to explaining the Trinity so as to render it no longer a mystery. I think it to be the highest and deepest of all Divine mysteries still, notwithstanding anything that I have said or conceived about it. I don't intend to explain the Trinity. But Scripture with reason may lead to say something further of it than has been wont to be said, though there are still left many things pertaining to it incomprehensible.

I am glad that God has revealed Himself in the word as one God, who exists in three persons. It is helpful to me to read Edwards and Piper and find some deeper understand in my belief and affirmation that there is only one God, and that He exists in three Persons.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! "For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been His counselor?" "Or who has given a gift to Him that He might be repaid?"For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen. Romans 11:33-35

Loving and communing with the Triune God,
Pastor Bill