The Trinity… How Does That Work? | Ken McIntyre

The Trinity can feel confusing, even intimidating. One God in three persons? It’s easy to dismiss or avoid. But what if this isn’t something to be avoided, but actually the core of who God is?

In this message, Pastor Ken walks through what the Bible reveals about the Trinity and why it matters for your everyday life. At the centre of it all is something deeply personal: God is love, and through Jesus, you’re invited into that relationship.

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Transcript

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- Hey, this is Phil Kal, lead pastor at Hope City Church. Thanks for tuning into our podcast. My prayer is that this helps and encourages you, gives you some practical ways to live out your faith and ultimately fills you with hope. Enjoy the message.- What makes a Christian, a Christian at minimum, is to believe some things and to not believe other things. And so what are the things, what are the non-negotiables of the Christian faith? The capital C Church spans wide. We got Catholics, Greek, Orthodox Protestants, and within Protestantism we got thousands of denominations. It's like what are the underlying beliefs that hold all of that together? Under the banner of historical Christian faith, I like to think about it in terms of national and provincial boundary lines. We're in Alberta. If we go west, we're in bc, but we're in the same country still. If we go south, we're in a whole new country. In the Christian faith, you can cross some provincial boundary lines, things that are important, but they don't make or break it. Things like church governance or maybe your understanding of the sacraments important, but Christians can land in different places. But what are those national boundary lines that if you cross, you're no longer in Canada, you're no longer in the same country, you are no longer in the Christian faith. And so that's what this series is about. Last week, pastor Phil talked about the national boundary line, the non-negotiable of the Bible. Today I'm going to cover the doctrine of the Trinity. Doctrine of the Trinity answers the question, who is God? And so here's the definition, says this, God eternally exists as three persons, father, son, and Holy Spirit. Each person is fully God and there is one God. You don't have to be a genius to realize that there's tension in this. How do you make sense of that? It's this non-negotiable Christian claim that the world scoffs at Muslims use it as evidence that Christianity is incoherent. Jews use it to argue that uh, Christians are polytheists and the rest of the world just concludes that Christians can't do math. Christians can be embarrassed by this. Not only 'cause they just can't understand it, but there's no way that they can explain it. But the doctrine of the Trinity is not Christianity's embarrassment. It is our crown jewel. And I wanna show you why. So I'm gonna do that in two ways. Number one, reveal to you what the Bible says about the Trinity. And number two, to tell you why it matters. So when we talk about the Trinity, again, we're talking about who God is. We're talking about who God is. We're talking about two things. Number one, God's character. And number two, God's nature. God's character are things like his love and his justice, his kindness, his patience. Theologians call these God's communicable attributes, meaning they can be communicated to us. They are in part shared with us because you love, you could be kind, you could be patient, not as patient as you wanna be, but you understand it. God has those attributes in perfection, but we can understand them in part. But God's nature, that's tough. That's tricky. These are his incommunicable attributes means things that are not shared with humans. They're His and his alone. God is categorically other. And this is really tricky. Let me show you why, by asking you a seemingly simple question. And it's this, what is your nature? What's your nature? That seems like something you should know, but it's really difficult to answer that question. We know ourselves better than anyone and that trips us up. And now we wanna try to wrap our heads around the nature of God. We have a gender. God does not. We have parents. God does not. We had a beginning. God did not. We are created. God was not. He is categorically other, which means the only way that we can understand God's nature is what he chooses to reveal about himself. And he's done this partially through creation, partially through our conscience. Romans one speaks to this, but fully through the revelation of the Bible, Jesus says this, no one knows the Father except the Son. And anyone whom the son chooses to reveal him too, God is revealed to us by God. And even then, we cannot know God. Exhaustively the Bible says that no one knows the thoughts of God except the spirit of God, meaning no one knows God exhaustively, but God himself. So we cannot know God exhaustively, but we can know him accurately. And from cover to cover in scripture, what we see is that God eternally exists as three persons, father, son, and Holy Spirit, and that each person is fully God. And there is only one God. A little while ago, I was praying with my youngest daughter before bed and I finished my prayer saying, in Jesus' name, amen. And she says, dad, why do you always end your prayers in Jesus' name? And I thought about it and I said, well, because Jesus is, is God. And she goes, I thought Jesus was God's son. I said, well, yeah, I mean Jesus. I mean, that's true, but, but Jesus is God and and the Father is God. Oh, there's two Gods- .- It's like, wait till I tell her about the Holy Spirit- .- And so, listen, I've had theological training. She's only eight. I can answer this. So I just think catch my, you know, catch myself for a moment. And I say, you know what, sweetie? It's really late. It's time for bed . This isn't just a tricky conversation between parents and their kids. This was the most crucial conversation of the early church. And it wasn't theologians in their ivory towers trying to wrestle with it is ordinary disciples, people like you and me, people who had seen and experienced Jesus of Nazareth and then worshiped him. Yet the backbone of their life was that there was only one God. Deuteronomy six, four, the Lord is one, one God non-negotiable. Yet they have encountered Jesus of Nazareth and they worshiped him. How do you make sense of that? Saint Augustine was uh, what's known as a doctor or a church father. And he lived in the fourth and fifth century and he did a lot of work on, on the idea and wrote a lot extensively about the Trinity. And there's a story about him that's likely just a story, but it's a good story and it's helpful for us. It goes like this, that Augustine was walking, walking along the seashore, and he was trying to wrap his mind around the idea of how can God be Father, son and Holy Spirit. So he's just wrestling. He's wrestling and he looks up and he sees a boy off in the distance, and he's running from the ocean to this little hole that he dug. And he had his shell and he was scooping up water from the ocean. He's running to his hole and he's putting water in the hole. And he wrote back and forth, back and forth when he reached the boy, he said, boy, what are you doing? You look so silly. And the boy says, I'm trying to fit the entire ocean into my hole. And Ian says, the ocean is far too vast and your hole is far too small. And the little boy says, yet you're trying to fit God into your mind. Trinity is mystery. That is a feature, not a bug. Proverbs 25 says this, the, it's the glory of God to conceal a matter. The glory of God is like all that makes God. God. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and to search out a matter is the glory of kings, meaning the honor and the joy and the meaning of our lives is to discover how God has revealed himself, father, son, holy Spirit, only to realize when we think we got a glimpse, we realize that there's an ocean more. So grab your shell, scoop up as much as you can, and put it in your little hole because you're gonna be doing that for the rest of eternity and still will not be able to know God exhaustively. Yet we can know him accurately. And so let's turn to the Bible to see how he has revealed himself. Beginning the Old Testament, we have what's called partial revelation, meaning we see traces of the trinity in the Old Testament, but not a full blown doctrine. Right at the outset. First line says this, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Okay? Many of us are familiar with this. What's interesting here is this word, God. This is the word Elohim, which is a plural noun. A plural noun. Okay? So this is plural. So you could, my wife warned me about my writing. I have very bad writing. You could translate it maybe as in the beginning, the gods created the heavens in the earth. That would've, uh, been weird to people of ancient cultures, but, but to us, that sounds very strange. We'd never say that. But it says in the beginning, then there's plural God. So why do we translate it as in the beginning, God singular. Here's where things get a little bonkers. Created. The verb is in singular. Okay? Oh, she was right. Anyway, singular. I'm not gonna, I'm gonna spare you in English lesson, okay? But verbs and nouns, they have to agree and they don't, both in English and in Hebrew. And so something is going on here. The author has in mind some sort of plurality in God, yet one act in one creator. But you continue on and you see things like this. This is God speaking. Let us make man in our image. After our likeness, we got plural. Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. And then Isaiah six, eight, whom shall I send singular and whom will go for us? It's like, what's going on? What's going on? The common explanation that you'll see is that these are plurals of majesty. That it's like a king saying, we are pleased to grunt your request. Something like that. The only problem is that that explanation is about a thousand years too late for the writing of these texts. They don't really appear historically until maybe the second century ad at best. And this was written far, far, far before that. So it doesn't work. Something else is going on. So in the Old Testament, we have partial revelation. It's dim, but it's there. But when you got the light of the New Testament on it, things become a blazing fire. Here's what you read right at the beginning of Luke, before Jesus is even born. This is what it says, the Holy Spirit. All right, count with me. One will come on you and the power of the most high. All right, we're almost there. We'll overshadow you. So the holy one will be born and be called the Son of God. Okay, maybe that was a fluke. Let's keep on going. Three one, Matthew three, this is at Jesus' baptism. At the outset of his public ministry, he being John the Baptist, saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him. That's Jesus and behold a voice from heaven. So it's not Jesus' voice, it's not the spirit of God's voice. Okay? A voice from heaven. Where are we here? Voice from heaven said, this is my beloved son, with whom I'm well pleased. So we have the spirit descending. We have the son in the water, and we have a voice from heaven at the very end of Jesus' public ministry, he says this, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name. This is singular. What is the name? The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It's like, how do you make sense of this? There's always been people, ancient and modern who all of this sort of three in line one language, it just, it just hurts their brain. It's too cumbersome. So the argument is let's get rid of the theological mass. Let's get rid of the metaphysic and let's just focus on Jesus. Let's just concentrate on his words and his life and his example. And honestly, that's good advice. If you were to walk into my office because you just need to, someone to unload on you just going through things, life's hard. You got some stress in your life, things are going on in your family. I'm not gonna sit you down and say, Hey, listen, let's, let's walk through the historical de development of the doctrine of the Trinity . I'm not gonna do that. If I did that, you'd never come back, right? , you know what I'm gonna do? I want, I'm gonna encourage you, challenge you to trust Jesus. I'm gonna encourage you, trust his words, obey his words. That's what I'm going to do. The irony is that when you just focus on Jesus's words and what he said, you end up at the doctrine of the Trinity. You can't avoid it. He's the one who said, I and the Father are one. He's the one who said, anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. He's the one who said, I will ask the Father and he will send you another helper, the spirit of truth. So just focus on Jesus wonderful advice. But it leads you to the feet of the Trinity. And so the earliest Christians, they have their texts, the old and New Testament, and they know that God is one, but something else seems to be going on. And they encountered Jesus and couldn't help but worship him. And worship in the Jewish world was reserved for God alone. So this created pressure that demanded a response for the early church. And the response came in the form of creeds. Creeds are the national boundary lines of the Christian faith. They're thought to represent the, the, the ceiling of what human language can achieve when talking about God. Now, they do not explain God. They do not explain the trinity. They just state the trinity. And here's why. Every attempt to explain the trinity with the creaturely analogy fails because it creates a category error. You cannot explain an uncreated God with the created analogy without it eventually failing. Now I wanna cover three really common analogies that that are thrown around there to understand the trinity and why they don't work. The first one is the clover. Maybe you've heard this, okay, that God is like a three leaf clover, right? There's three leaves, but only one clover. Beautiful. Okay? The only problem, let's say I was to take out one leaf and now I'm holding one leaf. What's in my hand? Do I have the clover in my hand or to have a leaf in my hand? Have a leaf in my hand? The clover teaches that God the Son, God the Spirit, and God the Father is only one third God. And together they equal God. It doesn't work. Can't do it because the doctrinal Trinity says each one is fully God. So this doesn't work, it doesn't work. Next we have this illustration of water. Okay? You got water, and water can exist in three different states, right? Solid, liquid or vapor. Similarly, God exists as Father, son and Holy Spirit, it seems like it's persuasive. The problem again is each molecule can only exist in one state at one time. Meaning if you have ice, you have ice, you don't have vapor water cannot exist as solid water cannot exist as as vapor at the same time simultaneously. You apply this to God, it's saying God has to take turns. He can either be the Father, he can either be the son, or he can either be the Holy Spirit. But no, they exist eternally, simultaneously. The water example just, just doesn't work. The worst offender is this one. Okay? The sun, in my estimation, I think it's the worst. It says something like this. You have the sun, you have its ray, and then you have the warmth. Mm mm It's coming this week. The warmth is coming. I can feel it. Okay, . So the idea goes that the Father is the SUN, okay? The Father is the son. That Jesus is the raise. And the Holy Spirit is, is the warmth that sort of just wraps us up and makes us feel all good. Okay? That's the idea of that. The problem is that when you apply this to God, what it says is that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are derivatives of the Son, and they're creaturely, which are saying Jesus and the Holy Spirit were created and not eternal. Every creaturely analogy fails to try to describe the uncreated God. He simply exceeds our categories. And that's the point. A God that you could fully explain with the children's analogy would not be worth the ocean of worship that he deserves. The Bible tells us that all of heaven and all of earth cannot contain God. Yet we think that we could contain him in the three pounds of gray matter between our ears. It's like the height of human disillusionment and hubris. You just can't do it. So back to the creeds. The creeds don't explain the trinity. They state the Trinity. And the most important one in my estimation is the Naing creed in 3 25. Now, this creed was forged again under pressure. A church leader named S was teaching that Jesus was exalted, but he was ultimately created, that he was not of the same essence of his father, that he was not eternal, that he was not co-equal. And his famous line was, there was a time when the son was not. Now that's a lot easier to square in our minds, but it's really difficult to square with the Bible. John one, one says this, in the beginning was the word, the word meaning Jesus. And the word was with God. And the word was God. Aria's teaching was catching fire. It, it was, it was spreading fast, and it was splitting the church causing disunity. So much so that the Roman emperor of the time, Constantine, he called together a council, the largest gathering of church leaders that had ever been known to the world at that point, 300, roughly across the known world, to gather to a place called EA in modern day Turkey to hash this out. And the question on the table was, who is Jesus? Exactly? Now, for time's sake, I'm just going to go through a portion of the creed. This is what it says. It starts like this. We believe in one God. They're saying right at the outset, we're monotheist people. Okay? We don't believe in three gods. We believe in one God, the father, almighty, mighty maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. This next one is where things get a little tricky says this. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, light from light, true God from true God begotten, not made of the same essence as the Father. I'm gonna deal with two different words in here. The first is this begotten cool word. We don't use it very much. I've never said I've begotten three daughters, right? But that's kind of what I've done. Listen, what do humans beget? Humans, right? They, they beget humans of the exact same nature. You know, we're having a baby boom across Hope city just in staff. I think we've had like 75 babies in the last two days. There's so many babies, okay?, when you hold this baby, you don't say, this baby is of less nature than their parents. You say, no, they're equally as human as their parents are. Humans beget humans, gophers, beget, gophers. Humans don't beget gophers. Gophers don't beget fish. You beget something of the exact same nature of yourself. And that leads us to this word. And this was sort of the key in the whole thing. This idea, same essence. Now, the aria, he didn't really like this term. He fought for something different. He actually wanted this to say similar or like essence as the father. So he promoted this word called homo SIUs. Okay? Homo means like UUs means substance. You wanna say Jesus is like the father, but he's not, he's not the same as the father, meaning he's, he is not the same essence as the Father. He's not God the way the Father is God. Now, just so you're aware, Jehovah Witness and Mormons essentially believe as Arias did. It's just sort of a regurgitated error on Jesus. Now, Mormons will not come out and say that that's true. They, but if, if you follow the line, it's absolutely true. Jehovah witnesses are a little bit more forthcoming saying, no, Jesus is created. Okay, they're, they're fine with that. But that's essentially how Mormons and Jehovah witnesses view Jesus, which means they fall outside of the national boundary lines of what it means to be a historic Christian. They commit the same error as as Arias. Now enter the hero of the story. His name is Athanasius. Okay? And he knew what would happen if we kept this word in there. He's like, that doesn't work. That has cascading effects. And so he knew that if you kept Jesus as like substance, he's not fully God, that the atonement was at stake. Firstly, the atonement is the work of Jesus on the cross. Listen, the gap between a holy God and sinful humanity is infinite. And it could only be bridged by God himself. And if Jesus is not God himself, then that gap has not been bridged. In fact, Jesus as a creature will be part of the problem that needs redeeming. He could not save you. Secondly, worshiping Jesus would be adultery. If Jesus is not God, but he's just like God and you worship him, then Christians were guilty of idol adultery. Lastly, Jesus claimed to be God. And if Jesus is not God, but just like God, that means Jesus is a liar. So he's a lying idolatry, promoting non divine Jesus and that Jesus can't save you. And so the remedy that Athanasius was fighting for tooth and nail, he's a defender of the faith, was remove the eye, get rid of the eye, and go Homo Usis, okay, of the same substance. And so that's what we're left with. The question is, who cares? Right? Isn't that the question? ? So who cares? Okay, okay. Yeah. God, E eternal exists three persons, father, son, holy Spirit, each one is fully God. There's one God. Okay, what does that matter for my family, for my life, for what's going on inside for my work, for my Monday? Like why does that matter? That's the question. A few weeks ago I was, uh, leaving the house and I had a lot going on. There was just work challenges that were bouncing around my head. Um, there was Bills, large ones that kind of all just came at the same time as they tend to sometimes. And there were some things going on in our family that were just kind of eating away at my wife and I just one of those mornings, you know, you're just heavy, just distracted. Now, I was leaving the house and I was saying bye to my family as I usually do, say bye to my wife. Say bye to my three girls, say bye to my two dogs, right? And then you leave the house. Uh, and I was in another place, but I went through the motions. Um, and my daughter, my 14-year-old daughter, she, she just yells out as I was leaving the house, I was almost through the door. She goes, bye dad, I love you. And I was like, why did she say it like that? ? I mean, she's told me she loves me all the time. I know she loves me, but the way that she said it just caught me really off guard and made me laugh is so bizarre. It's like, okay. So I said it back to her like, I love you too. And now virtually every day we, we do that back and forth . And the strange thing though is that when she said that everything that I was carrying gone, all the pressure, all the weight, all the in your headness, it just like her words just like cut through. So I got in my truck and I went to work and I just worshiped the whole way there. And I thought, man, to be loved like that, the luckiest guy in the world to be loved like that, it's like, isn't that what it's about? Why does love like that cut through all the noise? How does it have the power to do that? The answer is the trinity. The Bible says this in one John four, eight, that God is love. Not that God loves, although we know that he does. It's one of his communicable attributes. But this is a nature statement. Incommunicable God is love. How could that be? You would never say that about a person. You would say that this person loves something or that they can receive love, but not that they are love themself. Because love needs a subject, someone to do the loving and love needs an object, someone to receive the love. But if God eternally exists as love, who did he love? Did he start loving? Once he started creating, we would say no because God's nature is also immutable. He doesn't change. He's always existed as love. So if God is love and has always been love and you need a subject to do the loving and you need an object to receive the love, who did God love? The Father loved the Son and the Spirit and the Son loved the Father in the Spirit and the Spirit loved the Father. And the Son at the very center of God's mysterious nature is that he eternally exists as a fellowship of perfect love between Father, son, and Holy Spirit. How does that work? I tricked you. You actually don't need two things for love to be possible. You actually need three. You need someone to do the loving. You need someone to receive the love, but you actually need the bond of love itself. Lemme explain what makes my wife and I our relationship special is not that I am a person and that she is a person. That's not what makes it special. There's something different qualitatively about our relationship than my relationship with any one of you. What is that thing? It's maybe the spirit between us. You would say the bond between us, whatever binds her to me, whatever binds me to her, that's what makes that relationship so special. Now, Augustine, he drew this out. He said, you have the Father and you have the Son. And the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between them, meaning the way that the Father has eternally loved the Son and the Son has eternally loved The Father is through the Holy Spirit. Okay, here's where this gets good. Stay with me. Romans five says this, God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us. The same spirit that bonds the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father overflows and is poured into our heart. It's wild. Okay, so what? Then what happens? Romans continues and says the Spirit you received by him, through him because of him we cry Abba, father Abba is the intimate word for dad. It's the word that Jesus used when he was praying to his father. Meaning when the Spirit is poured into our hearts through faith in Jesus Christ, somehow some way we are caught up and we are raptured and we share in the relationship that is existed between the Father and the Son for all of eternity. Okay? Lemme say it way more simply. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. This is the father's way of saying, I love you. And through faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is poured out into our hearts that allows us to say it back. I love you too. To be loved like that by God himself. It's amazing. It's amazing. That's why it matters. The Trinity is not primarily a doctrine to be understood. It's a relationship that we are welcomed into. It tells us of a God that is so far beyond our capacity to explain, yet somehow within our capacity to love and to be loved by him, the Father, son, and the Holy Spirit have existed throughout eternity in a relationship of perfect love. And that relationship has been thrown open to you through Jesus Christ, who is God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Begotten not made. Let's pray. Father, we bless your name. We thank you that so long ago you have put in the plan of salvation that we would be invited into this perfect relationship that has existed for eternity. Jesus, we bless your name. We thank you for accomplishing that relationship and that salvation on the cross through taking our sin and bridging that infinite gap. We bless you, Jesus, holy Spirit, we bless your name for applying that work of Jesus to our own hearts, that through you we can cry out Abba Father. And we are joined in enraptured in this relationship that has existed for all of eternity. Lord, this is too great for our minds. Yet you've asked us to receive it in faith and to walk in it in confidence. So I ask for each person here who does not feel loved by God, that they would know, that they would know that they're loved by God. Lord, I pray for those who do not have faith in Jesus or haven't had faith in Jesus, but even right now, wanna put their faith in Jesus. Holy Spirit, would you do the work that only you can do and convict them of that sin? Not to bring them away from you, but to draw them in? Lord, we thank you. We pray this in the wonderful name of the Father of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. One last thing. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, one and the love of God two and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, three, be with you all. If you need prayer for anything, we would love to pray with you today. If you'd like to take a next step in your faith and want to commit your life to Jesus, we love to pray with you. We also have a tap disc on the front of your seat that you can tap, that can help you take that next step. Thank you for being in church this morning, and we'll see you next week. Thank you.