Shorter Catechism on God (Q.6):1 – There are Three Persons in the Godhead

Read: Matthew 28:19

 

Jigsaws make popular Christmas presents. I got one last year. One jigsaw I’ve never tried is called, “the hardest jigsaw in the world”. You can find it on the internet – it’s basically a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with no picture – just pieces. So you have no idea of where the pieces fit together. It’s really hard. The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity is a little bit like a jigsaw puzzle where you don’t have the full picture to make up your puzzle from. You just have to fit the pieces together and then see what the jigsaw looks like. You have hints, but no final picture. And the doctrine of the Trinity – that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God – is the hardest puzzle in Christianity.

 

Albeit however, our fathers give a good account of it in Q. and A. 6 of their Shorter Catechism, “How many persons are there in the Godhead? There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory”. Over the next few studies, I want to go through this answer with you piecing together this doctrinal puzzle. Tonight I want to speak in general terms about the Trinity – to summarise the whole doctrine in the space of 12 minutes! I want to first look at what we mean when using “Trinity”-type words; secondly, I want to trace the doctrine of the Trinity through the Bible and lastly, I want to apply some Trinity teaching.

 

[A] Using Trinity Words

Theologians use words not just in order to be understood, but also not to be misunderstood. These words are used with precision and are loaded with meaning. 2000 years of Christian doctrine and teaching have yielded the Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity as we know it today. William Cunningham, Professor of Systematic Theology in the Free Church in the 1850’s wrote, “it can be satisfactorily proved that the doctrine of the Trinity was generally held in the primitive church from the age of the apostles.” There are three words we need to try and grasp: first, Trinity; secondly, Godhead and thirdly, Person. However, if after I have defined them, you are still unsure of what they mean then that makes two of us:

 

1. Trinity – the word ‘Trinity’ is a conflation of two words – Tri (meaning three) and Unity (meaning one). It means ‘three in one’. At very basis it insists that there is only One God. It does not suggest that there are three gods, but only One. Our previous studies have established that the Bible clearly teaches that there is only One God. Now it must be admitted that the word ‘Trinity’ is nowhere found in the Bible. However, the concept is written in large letters and the use of the word is merely a way of doing verbal justice to the doctrine. Other popular doctrinal words are not used in the Bible – even a word such as ‘theology’ itself. The great Princeton Theologian B.B. Warfield once wrote, “it is better to preserve the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture.”

 

2. Godhead – to use the word ‘Godhead’ is to ascribe to God what we ascribe to ourselves when we use the word ‘mankind’ or ‘humanhood’. It is variously described as ‘essence’ or ‘being’ – it is what makes a human being a human being and not an animal. Godhead is what makes Him God. The Catechism says, “and these three are One God, the same in substance.” It is the essence of His being. However, whereas, when we use the word ‘mankind’ we often mean the 5 billion or so human beings walking on earth today, when we use the word ‘Godhead’ we are talking of One God. And so, to use the word ‘Godhead’ is both an issue of quantity – there is only One God; and quality – this is His essence, His being. There is only One being who has the properties of God.

 

3. Person – the word ‘person’ is the most difficult of these words to define. It labels the truth that in the Bible, to use the words of Donald MacLeod, “there are differences in the depths of God’s own being that correspond to these three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” These three persons are spoken of in the Bible as relating to one another – the Father sends the Spirit; the Son is begotten of the Father; the Spirit speaks the Words of the Son. These persons are not different faces of God – and they are certainly not three gods – they are One God and three persons. Each of these three persons is His own agency who does things and can fairly be called He. We can call God ‘He’; but we also call God the Father ‘He’; God the Son ‘He’ and God the Holy Spirit ‘He’. At the risk of attaching human categories to that which is unspeakable, each person of the Godhead has His own personality.

 

If you want to learn more about word definitions consult Donald MacLeod’s book, “Behold Your God”. Again, I’m as confused as anybody else – but the simple fact is this – the Bible teaches us that there is One God and Three Persons.

 

[B] Tracing Trinity Doctrine

Whilst we do not possess a fully-fledged picture of the Trinity anywhere in the Scriptures, there are convincing pointers both in the Old Testament and the in the New. In fact, we should never have formulated the doctrine had not the Scriptures taught it! The trinity is an altogether revealed doctrine – and it is only revealed to us in the context of the redemptive work of God where each person of the Godhead plays their own individual role. Tracing the doctrine of the Trinity through the Bible is like taking a jar of sea water and leaving it in a warm, dry place in your house. At the beginning, all you can see is water. At the beginning of the Bible, all you can really see is One God. But as time goes on and the water evaporates, the salt begins to crystallise round the sides of your jar and you begin to realise that there was more to the water than you at first thought. As the Bible goes on, God reveals more and more about who He is in Himself – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What hints then do we get in the Old Testament and in the New of the Trinity? You are going to have to excuse me for not going into them all – time permits us to look at only two from each Testament:

 

1. Old Testament – Genesis 1:26 records God saying, “Let us make man in our image”. To whom was God speaking? Different commentators have suggested that He could be using the royal ‘we’, as Queen Victoria might have said, “we are not amused”. They also suggest He might have been speaking to the angels. Were there no New Testament we would think little of the words of Genesis 1:26, but in the light of the New Testament they seem to show distinctions within God Himself such that God may speak to Himself and refer to Himself as ‘us’ and ‘our’ whilst retaining one single image and one single creative agent.

 

In Genesis 16:7-13 we have the account of Hagar wandering through the desert after being thrown out by Abraham. She is met by the Angel of the Lord. Time and again in that passage, the angel makes promises only God can make; the text itself interchanges Lord and Angel of the Lord. The angel is differentiated from God and yet is also identified as God. We have One God and yet the angel is God. Again, we might think it only as strange if we merely had the Old Testament, but in the light of the New, we can perhaps glean a trace of the Doctrine of the Trinity.

 

2. New Testament – the New Testament proposes two things which in and of themselves, necessitate a doctrine of the Trinity. These are things we will go through in the next few weeks in greater detail, but just to point to them now: the New Testament assumes the divinity of the Father, asserts the divinity of the Son and applies the divinity of the Holy Spirit. The fact is, the New Testament pushes us to accept that Jesus Christ is divine – that He is God. And it also pushes us to accept that the Holy Spirit is a distinct person – sent from God the Father by God the Son. In Matthew 28:19, the risen Jesus possesses properties which belong only to God – namely, “all authority in heaven and on earth”. We also hear Him commanding the disciples to ‘baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ – one name (singular), three persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). We will look more into these things in weeks to come so if you are completely lost at the moment, don’t worry too much.

 

The Bible does teach the truth of the Trinity. It may only be latent in the Old Testament, but it’s pretty patent in the New.

 

[C] Applying Trinity Teaching

You may think that there could be no more abstract, useless doctrine than that of the Trinity. But you’d be wrong – in fact, theologians are now beginning to derive their practical theology from the doctrine of the Trinity – everything in the Christian life springs from the fact that God is One – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Although there are millions of them, I’ll close with 3 very brief applications:

 

1. Love – love must have an object to love; love must love another. And we read in 1 John 4:8 – “God is Love”. He loves Himself because there are three persons in the Godhead. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and they both love the Spirit. Were it not for the doctrine of the Trinity, we would be terrified, for how could God be love? Our redemption and salvation are overflows and outpourings of the love of God for Himself. God didn’t just start loving when He created human beings – He has always been love. That’s why we see Jesus dying on a cross; that’s why the love of God has been spread abroad in our hearts; and that’s why, if we want to do the most God-like thing possible, we will love each other as He loves Himself.

 

2. Community – in John 1:1, we learn about what, in practice, it meant for the Son to be God – we read that ‘He was with the Father’. That word ‘with’ is so important – it is the basis for all human society and community. Because God is One Godhead and three persons, God is used to being ‘with’ Himself. He is One but not alone. He lives in eternal community and ‘with-ness’. To be made in His image is to belong in community and society. We are social beings desperately dependent upon our relationships with others. The Church is God’s new society where we exist in Christian community. Just as He exists and functions in community with Himself; so we exist and function in the community of His Church. No Christian must be alone, else they will become sub-human. We must be together and we must be looking to work together, since Father, Son and Holy Spirit each worked together to win our salvation.

 

3. Individuality – within the Godhead we find Father, Son and Holy Spirit – individual persons. The Father is not the Son, nor is the Spirit the Father. Each person retains His own ‘personality’ and ‘individuality’. The Father does not subsume the Son into Himself but lets Him be the Son. Similarly, we must retain our individuality and personality. I am me and you are you. I am not you and you mustn’t be me. There may be things about each other which we respect and which we may even attempt to imitate, but we are individuals with our own psychologies and personalities and we mustn’t try to make everyone like us. We must allow others to be individuals and we must allow ourselves to be individuals, whilst never forgetting that we are to live in community with each other.

 

The Trinity is the most amazing and yet the most puzzling doctrine of the Bible. But what makes us really fall down and worship is that therefore, the Jesus who hung and suffered on the cross to take away our sins – He is God. He is just as God as the Father is God and the Spirit is God. And that, in fact, God being One, God Himself suffered and bled on that Cross because He loved a lost sinner like me. Now that is truly breathtaking and elicits a response from us, of life-worship and heart-service! Nothing less will ever do. AMEN