Understanding the Trinity, Part One, The Three Persons of the Trinity

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Today our podcast topic, is Understanding the Trinity Part 1. The three persons of the Trinity.

The Challenge of Understanding the Trinity.

Many people believe that the idea of the Trinity is one of the most difficult to understand in the Christian faith, and I very much disagree.

God does not intentionally confuse us as to who he is. He desires a relationship with us. The challenge to understanding the Trinity is the same challenge of understanding everything else in our faith.

We need to look at what God's Word says about it, which I'll help you to do. So you won't simply accept statements like this of, oh, I can't understand the Trinity.

It's just a mystery that, well, we just don't know what it's all about. We're going to look at God's Word and the passages that specifically deal with the Trinity to understand it.

This is a different method of study than, say, reading through the Bible as a whole, which I really recommend that you do each year.

But once you understand the message of the Bible as a book overall, it's valid to pull out verses on particular topics, making certain that you don't take them out of context or twist them to say something they don't say.

The verses that I quote are not exhaustive on our topic of the Trinity, but they're representative as the whole Bible clearly teaches the reality of the Trinity. Here's our overall plan for learning about the Trinity in three parts.

First of all, in this lesson, we're going to do part one, the three persons of the Trinity. I'm going to introduce you to the topic overall.

Then we are going to look at how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are uncreated, coequal and eternal persons. The next lesson, understanding the Trinity. Part two, we'll look at the one substance of the Trinity.

We're going to look at the attributes that are shared by the members of the Trinity and what that means to us. And then in Part three, Understanding the Trinity. we're going to look at descriptions of the Trinity and the roles of each member in in the Old and New Testaments.

Notes, videos, podcasts, charts, all sorts of associated resource links are all available on www.bible805.com and before I get into this, I just want to say that I trust that you will find this a truly exciting lesson series. Again, our God wants to be known. This isn't confusing. This isn't heavy duty theology. We're going to be going into some.

Sort of challenging topics, but I trust that they'll be presented in a way that will be easy to understand and that will help you get to know your God better than ever. Now here's why we need to understand the Trinity. First, an understanding of the Trinity is important to Our personal faith, our relationship with God.

One of the most frustrating things, now think about this in any relationship, is if we feel that the person that we love does not understand us. God loves us and he wants us to understand him. And he's gone to great lengths to make that possible. God's given us creation, His Word and Jesus.

God incarnate, God made flesh so we can understand Him. So many of the problems that we experience in life because we don't know our God and have false ideas about Him.

This series of lessons hopes to change that. And second, we need to understand what is false in other religions.

A proper view of the Trinity is one of the key differences between Christianity and non Christian religions such as Islam.

It is also a key difference between the cults that are distorted interpretations of the Christian faith such as the Mormon religion and Jehovah Witness. All of those, all of the ones I just mentioned and all other cults.

And false religions have distorted incorrect views of the Trinity based on teachings totally in disagreement with what is in the Christian Bible in place of the Christian Trinity.

Speaker B: 00:05:07

Now listen to this carefully. This is important. Other religions and cults, all of them.

Speaker A: 00:05:12

Believe in a primary God, an overall.

Speaker B: 00:05:16

in God as Father, and none of them doubt or deny that Jesus or a Holy Spirit exists. But they do not believe Jesus is God or the Holy Spirit is God.And part of the eternal Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They make incorrect distinctions.

They say Jesus is either a lesser God or created part of the Godhead. That's what the Mormons do. Or they simply look at him as a revered prophet as the Muslims believe.

Very wise perhaps, but totally human. Other religions views of the Holy Spirit are that he's always lesser than that of God the Father and they define.The Holy Spirit as more of a force than a person.Now none of these opinions I just stated agree with what the Bible says about Jesus or the Holy Spirit.

As you'll see. Now here's a really important thing.

The problem understanding the Trinity isn't only with other religions, because most Christians don't understand the Trinity and that's why it's hard for them to spot the problems with other religions views of it. In addition, because most Christians don't understand it, they fall back on saying oh, it's just too hard.

Or they accept what are basically heretical views of the Trinity without thinking. Now here's one of the most common examples of wrong thinking about the Trinity. It's popular to say that the Trinity, well, it's like water.

Water is one substance, yet it can also be three in that it can be in the form of ice, liquid and steam. Well, that kind of sounds good and it's well meaning, but it's actually what is known as the heresy of modalism.

The true Trinity is nothing like this. As you'll see, this and similar analogies are not truly useful because they're incorrect and can lead to false beliefs.

And an example of what's known as oneness theology. This is a false belief held by the United Pentecostal and United Apostolic Churches.

And this is like that whole water thing where it's ice, steam, liquid, where they believe that the Father, that they're all just this one thing. The Father becomes the Son and the Son then becomes the Holy Spirit.

The Father was in the Old Testament, who, then became the Son in the New Testament, who becomes the Holy Spirit today. And that doesn't make any sense. I do not understand it. I'm just being honest with you.

I want to be respectful, but I absolutely do not understand how anyone can believe that. Especially when you think about the many times in the Bible where the members of the Trinity are talked about in the same place as separate persons.

The biggest example of this, of course, is in the baptism of Jesus. And this alone completely disproves what's called modalism or oneness. Pentecostalism or the water analogy. Now let's look at it.

In Matthew 3:16,17, it says, "When Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water and behold, the heavens were open to him. And he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him.

And behold, a voice from heaven said, this is my beloved Son, with whom.I am well pleased."

All three members of the Trinity are here at the same time with the Father speaking, the Spirit descending like a dove to empower Jesus for ministry and Jesus being baptized. They're all three there simultaneously.

All members of the Trinity are united in the initiation of Jesus earthly ministry and prefigure their different roles in it.

The New Testament continues with many references to both the separate and united work of God the Father, God the Son, who is Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit, as does the Old Testament. And I'll go into detail on that in lesson three of this series of the Trinity.

Now, in summary, modalism falls apart when you look at what the Bible says about our triune three in one God, as was shown in the example of Jesus baptism. That's true of other incorrect views of the Trinity. Also, you'll see what's false by looking at what the Bible says.

We won't go into the terms and definitions of various heresies about the Trinity and there are a lot of them

Though they may be useful to memorize in seminary, rather than discuss them, we'll use the often repeated illustration of how we spot counterfeit currency.

You don't study all the varieties of the counterfeit. You study the real thing, which is what we're going to do in these lessons.

But first I need to bring up a rather important and slightly bothersome issue about this whole thing, and that is that the word Trinity isn't in the Bible. But think about it. Nor is the word Bible in the Bible, nor is the word Christianity in the Bible.

There are many words we use to properly explain biblical concepts that are not in and of themselves precisely in the Bible, but they are biblically correct.

Just as reading many passages helps us identify what defines a Christian, so too looking at many passages in the Bible about the Trinity will help us define it. To begin, let's look back in history at the person who first used the term Trinity to describe our God.

That was a man named Tertullian.

And he clarified the true nature of the Trinity. Now, Tertullian was a Roman lawyer.

He lived between 155-220 A.D. That was just a few hundred years into the Christian faith being around. Prior to his becoming a Christian and being a leader in the Church, he was a Roman lawyer. And he was arguably one of the most brilliant men of his time.

Now, as a result of his study and in response to what he believed were false views of the Trinity in his day, he's the one who coined the term Trinity and he defined it in this way. Now, he spoke Latin, so he defined it as una substantia, tres personae meaning God is one substance in three persons.

Now, I created a chart to illustrate this. This is available on the Bible805.com website. And what it is, I'll describe it for those of you that are listening on the podcast.

It's across the top, it has a bar that says one God. And then below it in light blue, is a column that is the una substantia, or the one substance.

These are the attributes that are shared by all the members of the Trinity equally and eternally. They're all holy, just, merciful, loving.

They're all truthful, omniscient, they're all knowing, omnipresent, they're everywhere and omnipotent, all powerful. They're not changeable, and they're eternal.

Now, those characteristics are all shared by the members of the Trinity, but they are in three separate persons, the tres personae, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

The three persons now are what we're going to look at in this lesson, and then we're going to look at the characteristics they share in the next lesson. Okay? Now hang in there with me. I'm not sure how you're doing on this making sense, but it's really not terribly hard. So let's press ahead.

And when I say it's not terribly hard, first we're going to look at the description that it's all about one God made up of three persons. Now, I have to admit, as I really studied this, I thought, why is that so hard to understand? Our world is filled with many trinities of three parts.

Now just think about it. We have one musical trio that's made up of three separate players. They might all be playing the same song, they're singing the same thing, whatever.

One trio, three players, three separate persons, one entity. We have one government, three branches, but it's still just one government.

We have one board of directors, a president, a vice president, a secretary. All these are all really common sense areas in our life. We're very familiar with them.

And it's kind of funny that when the whole idea of a trinity, of a trio and how it's made up of three persons, three entities, all sharing one thing is very easy to understand. But this understanding just seems to disappear when we use it, when the overall label is God.

Now, Tertullian again helped to explain it in this way.

He separated substance and personhood, because again, you can have a trinity of anything that has similar characteristics, that works together in the same way. A group of three chairs, a government of three parts, a Trio, a group of three people singing together, whatever it is.

But now here's what's important.

What makes the Trinity the Trinity of God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is that it is unique in its substantia, its substance, the attributes of it. The not just that it has three parts. Only the Trinity of God has the substance God has.

And remember, all three members share this of omnipotence, omniscience, total truth and justice, immutability. And that substance, those attributes that are shared equally and eternally by each member of the Trinity.

That's what makes the Trinity of our God unique. Now many scriptures point to this uniqueness of God. For example, in Isaiah 55:8,9.It says, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are.My ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Speaker A: 00:16:04

We have thoughts, we have ways. But God's are so exponentially different than ours. It is this unique essence of who he is that makes him God.

The una substantia, the one substance. The characteristics all the members of the Trinity share deserves much more study, which we're going to do in part two of this series on the Trinity.

But first let's dig deeper into this Tres Personas. Because this whole thing about being three persons, this in some ways can be a lot harder to understand. At least it was for me.

Now I'll tell you why in a few minutes. But first we'll define what it means to be a person. Then we'll see how this applies to the Trinity. Now hang in there with me on this.

It might be a little complex at first, but I think it's really going to make sense as we go along.

First of all,lets look at the definition of personhood: "The state or condition of being a person. Having those qualities that confer distinct individuality and the personal identity of a persisting individual entity. Now those qualities include first of all personal relations,the ability to interact with others, intellect, the ability to form independent thoughts and to be aware of those thoughts. Emotion, the opposite of no affect. Now in Deism, which is a popular view of that, you know, God's kind of this impersonal thing or whatever.

Instead of no affect, a person is interacts in what's called I-thou relationships. They feel things, they experience the emotions of love, hate, sadness, joy. This is key to being a person, not just a machine or some vague entity.

And then will volition, self-generated ability to act. So these are the things that define a person, not a force, not just.

Here's what a person is not.

A person is not a force, influence, solar object or myth as God or the deity is portrayed in other religions. It's also not just modes of existence.

Personhood, though, and this is really important, is more than form. It can be corporeal or incorporeal.

That means having or not having a body. This is really important to remember, to understand, because God the Father and God the Holy Spirit are not corporeal.

They do not have bodies, but are clearly persons as defined by the characteristics we just talked about. This isn't some weird, vague, hard to understand thing, as you'll see. It's how the members of the Trinity are clearly portrayed in the Bible.

That we could do this, that we could define the different members of the Trinity as persons. It was kind of surprising to me, I must admit.

Speaker B: 00:19:09

This is what I was confused about.When I first studied the Trinity, I thought of Jesus as a person. I mean, kind of obviously, you know, he was on earth and all these things happened and you could see him and people could touch him and all that.But that God the Father and the Holy Spirit were also persons was not.Something I really understood until I studied the Bible and looked closely at it. And so I'm going to share with you now how understanding of this whole.

Speaker A: 00:19:38

Personhood of the Trinity really changed for me.By looking at the verses that clearly.Identify the characteristics of personhood that I mentioned previously, of personal relationships, intellect, emotions and will for each other members of the Trinity. We're going to list the characteristics and then I'm going to quote verses in the Bible that clearly describe it.

Now, one more note on this. Like so many questions or confusions we have over seemingly complex issues, the Trinity is just one of them.

We need to carefully read and study God's Word to figure out answers. But the answers are there. Again, I was just absolutely delighted and amazed and just so excited when I really started studying these things.

Speaker B: 00:20:28

And I realized, oh, all the members of the Trinity are persons. Let me go into it now. And I hope that you will just enjoy learning this as much as I did. First of all, on God the Father.

Speaker A: 00:20:41

He engages in personal relationships. In John 3:35, it said, the Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.

In Matthew 6, 6:8, it talks about God's intellect.Don't be like them, it says, for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him.

And in Psalm: 86:15

Matthew: 12:50

Heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

Then God the Son, the Son engages in personal relationships.

As John: 11:41

Intellect--In John 2:24-25, it says, But Jesus didn't trust him because he knew all about people. No one needed to tell him about human nature, for he knew what was in each person's heart and emotions.

Speaker B: 00:22:02

In Matthew 9:36 it says, he taught.In their meeting places, reported kingdom news and healed their diseased bodies, healed their bruised and hurt lives but when he looked out over the crowds, his heart broke.

Speaker A: 00:22:20

In John: 11:35

And we know this is meaningful because his friend Lazarus died.

But I loved it in the Chosen, how when Jesus approaches the grave, he doesn't just have a few little tears coming down his face, he just screams in agony and weeping and prayers and falls to the ground. His friend had died. And we really see the depth of emotion that he felt then and I'm sure at many other times.

Also in John 13:1 it talks about how having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.

, Jesus Will is shown in Luke: 22:42

Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.

And then God, the Holy Spirit. This was so interesting to me.

This was probably the one area that astounded me more that I learned more about in studying that I just didn't really realize before.

But for example, in Acts 8:29 on how the Holy Spirit engaged engages in personal relations, it says, the Holy Spirit said to Philip, go over and walk along beside the carriage.

Intellect. In Romans 8:27 it says, and the Father knows all hearts. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying.For the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God's own will.

Emotions. In Isaiah: 63:10

And then in Ephesians 4:30 a similar thought where is says Do not bring sorrow to God's Holy Spirit by the way you live. Remember, he's identified you as his own, guaranteeing that you will be saved on the day of redemption.

Now just for a minute here, think about that, we can all by our actions make the Holy Spirit sad.

and

st Corinthians: 12:11

As we just discovered, all three are persons having the characteristics of personhood, yet their personhood is unique, as all the persons of the Trinity are God.

The Father is God, as we see in these verses, where he is explicitly called God in John 6:27 do not work for food that spoils, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give.For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.

Romans 1:7 says to all in Rome.Who are loved by God and called to be his holy people, grace and peace to you from God our Father.And from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Galatians 1:1 Paul an apostle sent not.From men, nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the Dead.

First Peter 1:2 where it says to God's elect exiles who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ.

Speaker B: 00:25:44

Jesus the Son is also God.

He's explicitly called God in Titus 2:13 looking for the blessed hope and—glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Hebrews 1:8 but to the Son he says, your throne, O God, is forever and ever.

Jesus applied the name of God to himself, where in Exodus remember, in Exodus 3:14, God said to Moses, I am who I am.

And then in John 8:58, Jesus said to them, most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was I am.

By the way too, when they picked up stones to throw on him, it was exactly the proper response, because if he wasn't really who he said he was, that's what they were supposed to do. But of course we know he could in reality say that because he was and is God. Next he performed works only God can do, such as creating the universe.

Colossians 1:16 for by him all things were Created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all. All things were created through him and for him. And in addition, he forgave sins, healed, raised people from the dead, actions only God could do.

And he accepted worship as God when he did these things.

And then the Holy Spirit is God. It's called the Spirit of God.

In Genesis 1:2 it says, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

The Holy Spirit possesses the attributes of Deity, his omnipresence. In Psalm 139:7 it says, where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? The Spirit's omniscience, knowing everything but God, has revealed them to us through His Spirit.

For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.

For what man knows the things of a man, except the Spirit of the man which is in him.

Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God, and he's eternal.

How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God, Cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

In Hebrews 9:14, this particular verse is a specific refutation of the idea that the Holy Spirit is a created lesser part of the Deity. Again, he's called the eternal Spirit, not the one created later, but he is the eternal Spirit.

Eternal in the same way that God the Father and God the Son are eternal. So far we've shown how the members of the Trinity are separate persons and all are God. But how does that relate to us now?

It's important in their interactions, particularly with humanity. Each person of the Trinity has a different role, though they share the same characteristics.

The theological term when discussing these roles, it's what we call the Economic Trinity. The term economic, as in Economic Trinity, comes from the Greek word oikonomia, which means literally household management.

It's the term that describes the different roles that the members of the Trinity have, the different parts they play, while all working toward the same goals. We see this illustrated in different ways throughout the Bible.

Here's how it works out in our God--the Father, initiates he sends.

John 3:16 tells us, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, God the Son.

Jesus accomplishes the work of salvation. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. It tells us in first John 2:2 and

Then in Titus 3:5, It tells us about the work of the Holy Spirit, where the Holy Spirit regenerates and renews us according to his mercy. He saved us by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit.

And they do each of their roles and tasks together in perfect love and harmony, deferring to one another when appropriate, communicating with each other, working to glorify each other. All examples of how we should work together. Now, this lesson in review.

In summary, I did another little chart for you to show you that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a mysterious, hidden teaching, but one that is clearly taught throughout the Bible. And you'll see this illustrated more in the other two lessons that I'm going to be sharing with you.

In this lesson we saw how the three persons, the three members of the Trinity, are persons uncreated eternally and equally coexisting. Now, in this particular chart I use and I'll describe it to you for those of you that are listening.

And again, it is available on the Bible805 website. We see it.

I use the classic illustration of a triangle where the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, but all of them are God. And then I show wrong views such as modalism. It is wrong to assume that the Father becomes the Son, who then becomes the Holy Spirit. That's modalism.

That's wrong.

Also Arianism, which is basically the Mormons, the Muslims, well, particularly the Mormon Church holds to this, and the Jehovah Witness are basically contemporary recreations of the old Aryan heresy, where they believe the Father creates the Son, and either the Father and Son or just the Father alone also creates the Holy Spirit. That's incorrect.

Again, to go back to the correct view of the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are three persons eternally coexisting.

Speaker A: 00:32:41

Next, we're going to look at the attributes that are shared by the members of the Trinity and what that means to us. It's really a neat lesson. I think you'll enjoy it.

And then, then we'll go into understanding the Trinity, Part 3, the Trinity throughout the Bible, where I will share with you descriptions of the Trinity and their roles of each member in the Old and the New Testament. I think you're going to find a lot of that incredibly interesting.

One more thing.

I wonder often if our questions about the Trinity aren't so much about the Trinity as about us.

What I mean by this is that from all eternity, the three members of the Trinity, the Persons of the Trinity have existed in perfect love, unity, oneness of purpose and peace and joy. In other words, I think it's really hard for us to imagine that kind of love and perfect interaction. So we dismiss the reality of the Trinity.

And that's sad, because the truly extraordinary reality is that we are invited into that relationship of perfect love, not where we lose our individual personalities, but to participate in becoming all we were created to be, not only after we die.

But Jesus prayed for us and our relationships with each other in one of his last earthly prayers when he says, I'm praying not only for these disciples, the ones that were there, but also for all who will ever believe in me through their message. I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one, as you are in me, Father, and I'm in you.

And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me.

Jesus was praying for us, for you and me, and that as we work to grow in unity and love with fellow believers and our God, that the world will want to join us in that. A final reminder about the Trinity.

I pray that this study of the Trinity hasn't been merely a theological exercise, but an opportunity to get to know our God better.

And in closing, consider this trinitarian benediction from the Apostle Paul when he said, May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Because our God, the Trinity of three persons existing from all eternity, have shared grace, love and fellowship among themselves, they can now pour it out on us.

And invite us and our world into it. That's the essence of the Trinity. Now, that's not so hard to understand, is it?

That's all for now.

Please check out the show notes, a complete downloadable transcript, graphics mentioned and related materials at www.bible805.com

Until next time, I'm Yvon Prehn your fellow pilgrim, writer and teacher for Jesus, and I'd like to close with this benediction.

May you know the invitation of God to move from confusion to clarity, from wandering to rest, from loneliness to knowing you are loved, from turmoil to peace, from wherever you are in your spiritual journey to a growing knowledge of God's word and in your personal relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.