God in three Persons...

Matthew 28:16 – 20

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 13 June, 2004

LAST SUNDAY was Trinity Sunday, and we had a guest speaker, so today I want to talk about that most difficult topic: the Trinity, the three–in–oneness of God. If you are like me, you want to know what interest this topic could have.

As a young Christian I had no clear idea of the Trinity. I knew Catholics believed in the Trinity and perhaps Anglicans, too. I wasn't sure if anyone else did. I vaguely knew that God somehow worked in and through Jesus, and I knew that Jesus’ death on the cross clearly demonstrates God's love to us. The rest was very hazy.

I worked with a Christadelphian. He certainly didn't believe in the Trinity. In effect, he called me an idiot to believe it. There's not much more of a red rag that you can flap in front of my face than calling me an idiot!
Then, to add insult to injury, he whinged about how badly the Catholics treated the anti-Trinity Party at the Council of Nicea. That got me even more stirred up. I didn't know much church history, but I knew enough about people to doubt his story.

I read some church history and I read my Bible, and I began to see that Jesus is God and the Holy Spirit is God, and that the antitrinitarian Arians handed out as good as they got at the Council of Nicea — and they probably deserved most of what they got!

But knowing it still doesn't deal with the question of whether it is meaningful.
So today our questions are, “Is it so?” “What does it mean?” and “What should I do about it?” I believe that it is one of the most basic questions we all need to confront.

IS IT SO?
When I was grappling with the issues of what I believed about the Trinity, our pastor preached a sermon on this passage, on the Great Commission. He stated that it taught the doctrine of the trinity. I didn't find that sermon very convincing, so I hope I'll be more convincing to you today!
He reminded us that there is one “Name” given for the three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You are familiar with that formula. Even if you had never been to church, you would know the expression, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” And it is easy for us to assume that we are speaking of the name of each person in turn. We don’t necessarily assume that there is only one name, though there are three persons in the being of God.

But there is more to this expression.

  I’ll tell you the story of The Pirates of Penzances, which is one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas. I told it at the prayer meeting a couple of weeks ago, so I hope I don’t bore John and Gloria too much.
  Frederick is a young man whose nursery maid made a serious mistake when Frederick was little. Being hard of hearing, when Frederick’s father asked her to take him to get an apprenticeship as a pilot, guiding ships in and out of harbours, she misheard him and got him an apprenticeship as a pirate instead.
  But now Frederick is at the end of his 21st year, and plans to leave his pirate ways and go straight, because he has ended his apprenticeship.
  At Penzances lives a retired Major General with about twenty daughters, all between around 18 and 22. Don’t bother about the logic — it doesn’t really matter. Frederick has fallen in love with the prettiest, Mabel. You know she’s pretty because she is a soprano. The pirates have seen the rest of the girls from afar, and are smitten, too.

When the Major General sees that his daughters and the pirates are getting too chummy, he calls the police.

  The police arrive, and there is a skirmish. The police are thoroughly defeated, and the pirates each stand over a policeman with a sword at his throat.
  At the very last minute, the Chief of Police calls out, “In the name of her majesty, Queen Victoria, I call on you to surrender!”
  You can imagine how this affects the pirates. They are stunned for a moment, then they drop their swords and submit to arrest. They might be pirates, but they are not disloyal to the Queen!
  Of course, the police aren't inclined to push the matter much further when the pirates are such good citizens, as long as they promise to give up being pirates.

It turns out that the Major General has enough daughters to marry all the pirates and all the policemen, and so they all live happily ever after.

I like the story, but I also like what it illustrates, that a person’s name is not only a kind of place-holder for the person, but it is a symbol of the person’s authority.
When you hear the name, Peter Green, you probably think of that elderly, overweight bearded chap who preaches on a Sunday morning. When some of the people I work with hear that name, they think of the scripting guru at the back of the office, and if they need to know how to convert the output of our database reports into a form that Excel can read, they ask me. It's not the bearded preacher they are looking for, but the person who knows, the authority.

If you remember the passage we read, it has a lot to say about authority. Jesus says,

All authority is given to me...

Then he says,

...baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, “Baptise them under the full authority of everything that God is.”

This is very practical trinitarianism. It says that we make disciples and baptise them, but that is not in our own authority. Jesus commands it. Nor is it in the authority of Jesus, independent of the Father, or in the authority of the Holy Spirit, independent of the other two persons. The full authority of the fullness of God lies behind any disciple-making, any baptising that we do.
When you think about it in those terms, what can you say? Only that the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. It is not just the same name in a catalogue, but it is the same authority.

And this is backed up everywhere throughout the New Testament. John says,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

"The Word was with God." In Greek that is pros ton theon. There are several words for “with” in Greek. There is the common word, meta. There is the word for alongside, para, and there is the word for face to face, pros. In Greek, the word for face is prosopon. It is the part of us which confronts our eyes.

If you think about those times, if you were in the presence of a king or of an emperor, you didn't look him eyeball to eyeball. You lowered your eyes. In some situations, you crawled in and you crawled out, and you didn't get up or look up at all while you were there. But, in the court of heaven, the eternal Word is always face to face with the Father.

Or you could think of the writer to the Hebrews describing him as

...the reflection of God’s glory, and [is] the exact likeness of God’s own being, sustaining the universe with his powerful word.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Some facts just don't have a lot of impact on us. I believe from what I have read, that platypuses have pink milk. That might be very useful for a platypus to know, but not too many off us have a great deal of use for the information. You wouldn't even be asked about it in a trivia quiz!

On the other hand, we all find use for things like how you use a knife and fork. Some information is of practical use and some is of academic use.

Knowing that God, by nature, is a community, knowing that God consists of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each sharing the same divine nature, is a very practical thing.

  Here's the first thing it says to me. It says that, if God is truly love, then God has always existed.
  Does that seem a strange statement?
  Think about it. The New Testament declares very clearly that God is love. Love is the central attribute of God's existence.
  We all know that love can't exist without a lover and a beloved. Love needs an object. You can't say, “I love,” and not have someone or some group of people, whom you love. God is the same. His love needs an object. It's like saying, “I cross,” without having anything to cross.
  So, as soon as we admit that God is love, then we have to look for an object of that love. If God is eternally and indivisibly single in the way that the Muslims, for example, believe, then either God is lot love, or the creation is eternal alongside God, so that there was always something for God to love.
  If God is not love, then love is foreign to our universe. And, if the universe itself is eternal, then God is not God as we know him. If the universe is eternal, God is part of the universe, as the Hindus say.
  But, if God is love, and if the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit is a relationship of love, then God can exist independently of all he made. Only the Trinity puts everything in its proper perspective.
  Only the trinity makes sense of God and of love and of the universe.

Second, if God is a trinity, and God is love, that means that love is essential to God’s being, so it has to be essential to our own lives. If we are created in God's image, then we are created to love. It's sad that we even need to be told this! It shows how far we have fallen. If we need to be told it, we have already lost much of our grip on it.
The fact is, that God created us to love, and that is what we are called, above all else, to do. When John says,

Little children, love one another,

he is telling us to do exactly what we are created for.

  The Trinity also declares to us that we are made for community.
  The relationships between Father, Son and Spirit are community relationships.
  If you think about it, a lot of what passes for community in our world is really only self–interest. Most of our relationships are built on power, sex, wealth or pleasure. We like to seem to love, we like to seem to be in community, but we pursue our own agendas as hard as we can go.
  God’s plan through the ages has been to unite all things in one Head, that is in Jesus. It’s all about community.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?
So here's our last point, What should we do in light of these facts?

The first and foremost fact is that every word that comes from Jesus is the word of God. If he says it, we do it. I want to emphasise that, because it’s easy for us to grow slack at that point. We know that everything God says to us is a command of the supreme ruler of the Universe. In the same way, everything that Jesus says to us is a command of the ruler of the Universe, filtered through the person of Jesus.

When we read in Hebrews,

...the reflection of God’s glory, and [is] the exact likeness of God’s own being, sustaining the universe with his powerful word.

the writer depicts Jesus as like a window through which the light of God’s glorious splendour shines on our lives, or like a mould taken from the face of God himself.
That means that, when Jesus tells us, for example, to make disciples, then he means it. We need to hear and obey.

I can’t tell you exactly how you are to make disciples. But you know you have a calling. If you are a Christian, you have some kind of picture in your mind of what you could be doing to reach the world. That's part of what Jesus meant when he said,

As you go, make disciples...

He didn’t tell us to be something we are not, or to go somewhere we weren’t going — not at this point. He told us to make disciples as we go.

I write, I publish, I talk. I might need to sharpen up what I do: I understand that. But that is what I do best.

It’s not all that I do. I have my other pictures of outreach, but that will do for now.
John loves literature, too. He always has tracts and booklets. He's a distributor of literature, and I’m a writer of literature. That makes a powerful team.

I won’t name everyone and tell you what it is that you can be doing to reach out. All I want to say is that we’ve heard the word, it’s a word from God, because it’s a word from the Lord Jesus, so we’d better get about doing it.

I also point out that we are called to reflect the being of God ourselves. We do that in two very closely related ways. We do it through love, and we do it through community.
If we are created in the image of God, then we are created to love.

Juan Carlos Ortiz once preached a very short sermon. He read from I John 4: 7

Dear friends, let us love one another, because love comes from God.

  Then he preached his sermon. It was,
“Love one another.”
  Then he sat down. but no one moved. So he stood up again and said,
“Love one another.” and sat down again.
  This time, they started moving. They spoke to one another. They heard each other’s needs, they prayed with each other. Love began to break out.

And when love breaks out, community will begin, because community is about people living together, bound in love, just as Father, Son and Spirit are bound together in love.
When we love, our worship, witness and fellowship will all start working, because they are driven by the quality of God — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

So let us love, let us become a community, and let us obey everything that Jesus commanded us.

And may all the glory be to the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and forever more,

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2004. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.