Sermon: God’s self Disclosure

So let me start out by saying two things: 1. The Trinity is not something we made up. Concepts humans make up are very tidy. They may be complex like the combustion engine or the personal computer, but once you get the system everything falls into place. The Trinity is not tidy. It is not a practical, relevant, human-friendly system that once understood will make everything fall into place. That’s because the Trinity is not a human concept thought up by humans for humans. It’s the word humans use for God’s own nature that he has revealed to us. Everyone here can understand the basic facts about the Trinity because God has revealed these basics in a way that is fit for our finite minds, but we’ll never “get God” like we might “get” computers or mechanics, because God is infinite and we’re not.
    
Which brings me to the second thing: self disclosure is an act of love. Have you ever met someone who tells you way too much about himself. That strikes us as odd because self disclosure is an intimate thing. You know a lot about me. My close friends know more. But Anne, well, I let her know everything and she does the same for me. And because we love each other we’re interested both in knowing and being known. I want to know Anne. I want to know what she thinks. I want to know about her personality. I want to know what her life was like before we met, what she was like as a kid. I’m interested in these things even though they have no practical relevance to my life because I love her. When she tells me these things it’s a gift. How much more that the Creator of the Cosmos who owes us nothing and who needs nothing from us, reveals himself to us. Don’t sit back as if the Trinity is some dry dusty esoteric doctrine. It is God’s self disclosure. He’s inviting us to go deeper and to love him more. Christianity is a revealed faith not an intuitive religion. Christians do not take a mystical self-guided journey into the great cosmic yes. God reveals himself to us through his word. That’s an unwarranted unmerited immeasurably valuable gift. How stupid and selfish to be bored by it.
    
I’ve found that starting with what the Trinity is not, makes it easier to grasp what the Trinity is. So let’s start with four of the most common misunderstandings
    
Modalism: A couple of months ago someone in ST suggested this analogy for the Trinity. “Just as a single man can simultaneously be a son to his father, a father to his son, and a brother to his sibling so the one God can be Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” God steps into various roles depending on the circumstances. Sometimes he is the Father, other times, the Son and still others the Holy Spirit. 

This is called Modalism. 
    
Take a look at the gospel lesson this morning in John 16:13-15.
    
“13…when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. 14He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. 15All that belongs to the Father is mine.”
    
Is there anything in this text that would conflict with modalism? In verse 14 Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will glorify the Son. That requires two distinct persons. The Son and the Spirit are distinct and operating in relationship to each other at the same time. This relationship is impossible unless there are two distinct persons. In verse 15 Jesus mentions the Father. The Father shares everything with the Son: relationship. One person is not jumping into three roles. Three persons are relating simultaneously to each other. You see the same thing in the gospel accounts of the baptism of Jesus. Simultaneously Jesus, the Son, is baptized, the Father speaks “This is my beloved Son” and, the Holy Spirit descends as a dove. All three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, present and actively relating to one another. The New Testament is full of these kinds of events and from them we learn, God tells us, that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Father, and the Spirit is not the Father or the Son. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct…they are not the same Person.
    
Arianism: Well then, some will say, if Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct, then they can’t all be God because there is only one God. So only the Father is God. Jesus is like a powerful avatar or spirit being. And the Spirit must be like the force in Star Wars, this spiritual energy field that the Father emits. Arius, a famous heretic, taught something like this in the early 4th century but its back in vogue in liberal mainstream protestant circles where Jesus is often depicted as being a super spiritual human so in touch with God that the divine becomes manifest through him—kind of like the Buddha but without all the fasting.
It’s clear enough that the Father is God. But scripture clearly identifies Jesus as God as well.

1. In John 1:1 we read: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the word Was God”. Well who is the Word? Skipping down to verse 14 of John 1, “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”  Obviously Jesus is the Word.
2. Jesus himself claims to be God. In John 8:56-58, Jesus has this exchange with Jewish Authorities “Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.” “You are not yet fifty years old,” the Jews said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!” “I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” Those last words “I Am” or “ego eimi”, are the words used in the Greek Old Testament to translate YHWH. The Pharisees understand very clearly what Jesus means because in v. 59, they try to stone him for blasphemy.
3. And finally, Jesus accepts the kind of worship that belongs to God alone. What did Thomas’ say when the risen Jesus showed him his wounds?  “My Lord and My God”. And how did Jesus respond? “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”(20:29) The apostles claim Jesus is God, Jesus claims that he is God. Jesus accepts the worship only due to God.
The New Testament is also clear that the Holy Spirit is God. In Acts 5, Ananias and Saphira are caught in a lie. Peter says in vv3-4 “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit? You have not lied to men but to God.” The Holy Spirit is God. In 1 Cor 3:16, Paul writes, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and God’s Spirit dwells in you.” Why are Believers temples of God? because God’s Spirit dwells in us and, necessarily for the logic to work, God’s Spirit is God. So the idea that only the Father is God and the Son and the Spirit are lesser beings doesn’t hold up. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God.
  
Tritheism: So are we saying that there are three Gods? Muslims and JWs believe that we are. In Isa 44:6 we read: “This is what the LORD says…I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.” Does the confession that the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God in the New Testament undercut that basic Old Covenant truth? Not at all. The truth that there is only one God that is reaffirmed in the New Testament. Paul writes in 1st Timothy 2:5: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus”. And James in 2:19 writes: “You believe that there is one God? You do well. Even the demons believe and shudder”  So the very apostles who proclaimed that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God just as strongly proclaimed that there is only One God.
     
Tripartism: Well maybe God is like a giant peace sign with the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit coming together as the three sections or parts. That idea doesn’t hold up either. One example will suffice. In Colossians 2:9, Paul writes “9For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” The fullness of the deity, all that God is, Jesus is. The Son is not part of God, the Son is fully God and, on the basis of the texts we’ve already looked at, we must say the same is true for the Father and the Spirit. 
    
So here’s what we have so far: Scripture reveals, that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct persons, not the same. Scripture also reveals that the Father is fully God, the Son is fully God, and the Holy Spirit is fully God. And Scripture clearly reveals that there is only one God. How do we put this together? On the surface it seems like a contradiction but God does not contradict himself. So we are called to harmonize what he reveals.
    
That’s what the doctrine of the Trinity accomplishes. God is one in his nature or his essence, his being. God is three in Person. Take three pieces of paper—all three share the same substance: Paper. And yet they are distinct pieces. That’s my favorite analogy, but all analogies are inadequate. Perhaps the best visual to help keep all of this in your mind is printed on the front of your bulletin. 
     
So why is this keeping this straight important? We’ve already talked about the gift of love that this divine self-disclosure represents and how vital knowing who God is, as he reveals himself, is to loving God, but what do we lose if we lose sight of the Doctrine of the Trinity?
    
Letting the Trinity go is one of the fastest ways to fall into spiritual danger. Almost all of the heresies—the lies about God that lead people away from the truth, away from Christ—that’s what heresy does, that’s why its so dangerous—at the root reject one or more truths about the Trinity. Let’s say, for example, that you take the Arian path and deny that the Son is fully God. What happens?
1. if Jesus is not also God the Son then he couldn’t have borne the infinite weight of our sins, enduring eternal punishment in the place of his people. As St. Anselm wrote: Only an eternal God could carry the eternal weight of human sin. So without the divinity of the Son, you have no atonement.
2. And that would mean that our trust in the Son is misplaced. The core Christian belief that we are justified through trust in the work of Christ on our behalf would fall to the ground and we’re in our sins. If you reject one aspect of revealed truth everything falls apart.
3. Think about worship. What’s the very first commandment?: You will have no other gods before me. Scripture reveals that God is One in Three Persons. That is his identity. What happens if you refuse to worship him as he has revealed himself? Are you worshiping God as he is or are you worshiping a figment of your own imagination? I think in biblical terms a rejection of God’s self disclosure in favor of another image is the definition of idolatry. To do is to worship a false god. That’s what Jesus meant when he said to the Jewish authorities  “You do not know me or my Father…If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”(8:19) Rejecting the Son is tantamount to rejecting the Father. You cannot worship God without worshiping God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Since God has revealed himself to be Father Son and Holy Spirit, he must be worshiped in accordance with that truth. All other forms of worship Jewish, Muslim, etc are idolatrous because they are not Trinitarian. 
   
4. Relationships. In his first letter John tells us that God is love. Love, agape, finds its origin in him. He is its source and all forms of agape are modeled on the divine agape. Agape is self-giving love. Now how long have human beings been around? Are we eternal? What about angels? What about the cosmos? All these are finite, aren’t they? They each, we all, had a beginning. So how long do you suppose God existed before our existence? We are speaking nonsense at this point because the nature of God’s infinity and eternality are beyond our temporal comprehension. But we can say, I think, that if agape is an inherent characteristic of God, that it is not dependent on any part of his creation. So who was God loving before all worlds? Where was this agape directed? In order to be agape, there must be some other Person. The biblical answer to that question is quite clear. The Father has eternally agaped the Son and the Son the Father. The Spirit has eternally agaped the Son and the Son the Spirit…etc. If God is love, if love characterizes his moral nature then there must be more than one Person within the Godhead.

And this last is a very important point and one that we will need to pick up next Sunday. The eternal agape that stands at the center of the divine trinitarian relationships is also the grid or the model for all Christian relationships. His love is to characterize or at least stand as the model for our love.

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