The Trinity

Knowing God — Steve Gregg

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The Trinity

Knowing GodSteve Gregg

Steve Gregg provides a thought-provoking exploration of the concept of the Trinity in his teachings. He addresses the challenges in understanding how God is referred to as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in different parts of the Scripture. While some may argue for a modalist or oneness view, Gregg suggests that a Trinitarian formulation better aligns with the testimony of the apostles and Jesus himself. He acknowledges the difficulty in comprehending the Trinity and leaves it to individuals to draw their own conclusions.

Transcript

I almost never teach about the Trinity, but we are obligated to at least consider the teaching of the Trinity in any series about knowing God. We've talked about the attributes of God. We've talked about the character of God.

And it is unavoidable that we must talk about the subject of the Trinity. Now, if I sound like I'm reticent to talk about the Trinity, I am. And if one wonders why I would be reticent to talk about any doctrine so orthodox and so widely and universally accepted among Christians as the Trinity, it's only because, well, it's not only because, but it's very largely because it's so hard to explain the triune nature of the Godhead, as it is sometimes called, the Godhead, the divine being.

We know, for example, that there is one God. There are not two, three, four, or any more than that. There's only one real God.

We also find in Scripture that the Father is a term that is used for God. God is called the Father. And yet we read also of a son of God, who is himself at times referred to as God.

And we read additionally of someone called the Holy Spirit. And he also, in some few places, is essentially equated with God himself. And there have been many ways in which people, theologians, have tried to harmonize these things.

We have three individuals or persons or somethings. The word persons is a traditional term that has been used, but the Bible doesn't use that term. The Bible doesn't say that God exists in three persons.

That is more the language of some of the creeds that developed in the early fourth century. But we do find the phenomenon of God referred to in more than one way, and sometimes more than one way at the same time. You see, one could perhaps suggest that we find God sometimes called the Father, sometimes called the Son, and sometimes called the Holy Spirit.

But these are really all one and the same. God, they're just different modes in which God has been known. It has been suggested that in the Old Testament times, God was the Father.

And in the New Testament, or at least when Jesus came to earth, he changed modes from his early form into the form of Jesus. And God became the Son. And then when Jesus went to heaven, he became the Holy Spirit who resides in the church.

Now, I don't know that I'm correctly representing this view in any detail. That view or something like it is called modalism because it speaks of God going through three different modes. And this is an effort to explain how God could be the Father, and God could be the Son, and God could be the Holy Spirit, and still be one God.

That he's changed from one mode to another at different points in time, from Father to Son to Holy Spirit. But that he does not exist in any two modes at the same time. Now, there's problems with modalism, and that is why the Christian church has generally not accepted modalism as orthodox teaching about solving the problem.

Another way that some people have tried to deal with the phenomenon of the three and the one in God, I've heard people say, well, you know, I am one person, but I am a body, and I am a soul, and I am a spirit. I'm three parts of one person. And therefore, they say, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit may well be simply not so much separate persons anymore than my soul and my spirit and body are three different people.

Three different persons, but just three different components within one person. And some have felt that that's a better way of trying to explain the mystery that is the triunity of God. There are some who have said, well, you know, although I am one person, I am somebody's father, and I am somebody's son.

And I also have a vocation. I'm somebody's employee, and so if I spoke of myself as a father, and also spoke of myself as a son at the same time, I would not be contradicting myself because I'm the son of one person and the father of another at once. And I could describe myself in other terms.

I'm not only a father, I'm also a son, I'm also a Bible teacher or an engineer or a gas station attendant or a banker or whatever. All these terms can be used to me, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm only one person. It's simply different functions or different relations which I bear in different situations or institutions.

And they say that's sort of like God. God is just one God, but in one sense he's a father, in another sense he's a son, and in another sense he's a Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit. These are all ways that some people have tried to put together the idea that there is only one God, and yet the Father is called God, the Son is called God, and the Holy Spirit is called God.

The problem with all three of these options, that is the modalist option, or the idea that God is sort of like a body, soul, and spirit, man is body, soul, and spirit, God is Father, Son is the Holy Spirit, but all one person. Or with the idea that God is just one person and he is at once a Father and a Son and a Holy Spirit. The problem with all of these explanations is they do not deal adequately with the fact that the Scriptures sometimes speak of the Father and the Son or the Son and the Holy Spirit as separate entities existing at the same time.

For example, there is no question in anyone's mind who is a Christian that Jesus was the Son. And on earth he referred to himself as the Son, but he also spoke of his Father as someone additional to himself, and even in contrast with himself, he said, my Father is greater than I am. Jesus said, I don't come to glorify myself, I come to glorify my Father who sent me.

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And Jesus prayed to his Father as somebody additional to himself, he didn't just pray to himself. And that makes it very clear that there is some way of making a distinction between the Father and the Son.

Likewise, Jesus said, if I do not go away from you, the Holy Spirit will not come to you. And he said, I will give you another comforter, meaning the Holy Spirit. And the word another means another of the same kind, but not the same one.

And yet Jesus was clearly the comforter that they had at the moment, but he was going to send them another, and that was the Holy Spirit, and thus making a distinction between himself and the Holy Spirit. So we have this rather mysterious problem that Christians have wrestled with from the earliest times. It would appear, although I've heard otherwise from some people, but I think most scholars would agree, that the Jews before the time of Christ did not hold a Trinitarian view of God.

That is, they didn't hold a view like that of the Nicene Creed, where God is in three persons, a Father and a Son and a Holy Spirit, always existing together. And yet the three of them are all one God, not three gods. That's essentially what Trinitarianism teaches, but it's very difficult, if not impossible, to explain how it can be that there can be one God in three persons and that isn't three gods.

Some might compare God to a committee of three persons, that God is not really any one of them, but contrarywise, each makes up one third of the committee, and that committee is called God. But that doesn't work either, because it says of Jesus in Colossians 2, 9, that in him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, that Jesus was the embodiment of the whole Godhead, not just part. And likewise, when we find Jesus in Matthew 28 saying to go and baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, then we find the apostles who heard him say that, and apparently were attempting to carry out his orders, going out and baptizing in the name of Jesus.

If you check every case in the Book of Acts where it records the name used by the apostles when they baptized, or not only the apostles, but all the early Christians, they always baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Apparently equating that name with the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit indicated that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not a committee, but the name of Jesus encompasses all three names, and that all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Jesus. Now, this leads to, at least leads some people to, a view that is called oneness.

The people who hold the oneness doctrine, many of them are Pentecostal people. It is, I don't know if the doctrine arose among Pentecostals, but it's most closely associated with a certain kind of Pentecostals today, especially the United Pentecostal Church, UPC. They are called oneness in their theology, or more popularly known as Jesus-only.

And one of the things that has given them the label Jesus-only is that they believe that you should be baptized only in the name of Jesus, not in any additional names, not in, for example, the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but only in the name of Jesus. On this point, I must disagree with them, but I understand some of the things that lead them to this conclusion. What I'm saying is there is much mystery surrounding the particular nature and relationship within what has sometimes been called the Godhead, the triunity of God.

The word trinity comes from two particles of, one is tri, which clearly means three, and unity. Three and unity. Unity means in one.

And so a trinity, or triunity, would be three in one. And this is such a vexed problem, and has been ever since the New Testament came into being, that the Church was at odds over how it is to be resolved right up until the time of the Nicene Council in 325 AD. In fact, much of the Church, prior to the Nicene Council, held a view very similar to that of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

I will not say the whole Church did. In different parts of the world, the Church held different views on this, because there had not yet been unified into a creed one particular solution to the problem. But in some sectors, some countries, the whole Church was essentially what was called Arian, named after a man named Arius, who taught that Jesus was not God, that there is only one God, and that is the Father, and that neither Jesus nor the Holy Spirit are God, but rather only the Father is God.

Jesus is the first and highest created being of God, according to Arius, and the Holy Spirit is simply a term that is used for God's active power or active force in the universe. Anyone who has had conversations with Jehovah's Witnesses will recognize that Jehovah's Witnesses hold that very view, that should be called Arianism, because it was the view of Arius and his followers. And what may be surprising to us is that until the Nicene Council, some parts of the Church in some countries considered Arius' views orthodox.

But of course there were always others who recognized that these views do not give adequate weight to the full testimony of Scripture, especially about the nature of Jesus. And there was conflict in the early Church for a few centuries over how the relationship of God the Father and Jesus the Son was to be resolved, and that was one of the issues, probably a principal issue, that was decided for orthodoxy at the Nicene Council in the early 4th century, which is the 300s A.D. And since that time, that orthodox position that was hammered out there at that council has prevailed as Christian orthodoxy. Now I need to state my position that basically I am a Trinitarian myself.

I believe that the Nicene Council probably did a fairly admirable job of solving the problem. But I need to say this also as a way of disclaimer. The Nicene Council and its formulations are the formulations of man.

They may be accurate, but they are not stated in Scripture. If we say that God exists in three persons and yet there is one God and there are three in person but one in essence and so forth, if we use the language of the Nicene Creed, we are using language devised by humans to try to describe a mystery that is only hinted at in Scripture. You cannot find a statement in Scripture that explains or defines the doctrine of the Trinity, which is the very reason why there was so long a conflict over it.

And even since the Nicene Council, it's not as if the matter settled for everybody. It's just that those who accept the Nicene Creed are considered orthodox and those who still struggle with that formulation are considered heretics, at least have been historically. I am encountering more and more evangelical Christians these days who wonder whether the Trinity doctrine really is taught in Scripture.

Now, I personally do not believe that the Trinity doctrine is taught in Scripture in the sense that a teacher sits down and teaches a doctrine about something. None of the writers of Scripture sit down and teach the Trinity doctrine. I do believe, though, that the Trinity doctrine in some form or other is a deduction that is made necessary by the taking of the whole counsel of God, which is to reframe it this way.

I don't believe that the teaching of the Trinity is actually taught in Scripture, but I believe it is implied in Scripture and provides an underlying set of assumptions from which the biblical writers presented their ideas, their presented God's truth. Now, we don't know for sure how the Apostle Paul or Peter, if you could ask him today, or John, would have explained the Trinity doctrine. If you'd sat down and said, well, what is this exact... Tell me, you know, just clear this up for me.

I'm really confused about this idea of three and one. How am I to understand this? We cannot know for sure because they never said how they would solve this problem. But we can say that of all the possible models of the Godhead that one could contrive, modalist, oneness, Trinitarian or whatever, it would appear that the Trinitarian formulation or something very much like it must have been the underlying belief of the Apostles and of Jesus in their speaking about God in general.

Now, having said that, I'm saying that we are now talking about a... ...publicly proven in the... ...citation of a Scripture that says this. The closest thing we have to a Scripture that teaches the Trinity doctrine... And by the way, while I do define myself as a Trinitarian, that is a believer in the Trinity, I would possibly want to modify a few of the words in the way the Creed states it for my satisfaction to be a little more tightly scriptural in the definitions. But in 1 John chapter 5, we have a verse that is generally regarded to be the clearest statement of the Trinity doctrine in Scripture.

That is 1 John 5, 7, which says, For there are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. And these three are one. Now that statement, these three are one, certainly if you've got three, that's the tri-part of the word Trinity, and one is the unity part of the... You've got tri-unity, you've got a Trinity there.

You've got three who are one. And furthermore, we have the names of the three, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. So you have something that is extremely close to the Trinitarian formulations of the Nicene Council, but not quite as expanded as some of the descriptions in the Nicene Creed would be.

Now, there is a serious problem with using this Scripture to prove the Trinity, and that is that this particular verse in Scripture has a very questionable pedigree in terms of its authenticity. You may be aware that there's essentially two families of manuscripts that both claim to be the closest to the original. We don't, for example, in the book of 1 John, which we're looking at, we don't have the original document written with the hand of John.

That perished apparently long ago. No one has it. What we have, as with the other books of the Bible, is copies of copies of copies of copies.

Now, many thousands of copies have been made of the New Testament through the ages, and we have... many of them have survived. We have thousands of copies, 13,000 to be exact, if we would include both Greek and early Latin manuscripts, of the New Testament. And therefore, we can compare early copies with later copies and so forth.

And what can be deduced from this is that the very earliest copies of the New Testament, of 1 John, that exist, do not contain this verse. And only considerably later copies do. Now, this is no proof in itself of whether the verse is authentic, but if it stood alone without any other considerations, it would perhaps suggest that the original documents of 1 John did not contain this verse and that it was added later by somebody other than John.

Now, the evidence does not necessitate this conclusion, but at face value it kind of looks that way. Now, there's also an interesting story about how this verse came to be in the set of manuscripts, which we call the Textus Receptus. That's the manuscript used by the King James and the New King James version.

All other versions use another set of manuscripts called the Alexandrian Text, which are a little earlier but are not as well attested from numbers of existing manuscripts by any means. For example, the Alexandrian Text, I believe, is based on essentially two manuscript copies that date from a few hundred years earlier than any other copies of the New Testament that we have. But the later version, the Textus Receptus, is much closer to what thousands of copies of the New Testament say, although they date at a later time.

So it's a hard debate to know. Do you go with the earlier copies that have not survived very well, only two copies, or do you go with the other reading that's in more manuscript copies but of a later vintage? That will probably never be settled finally. But this is one thing.

A lot of people are big on King James only. And I hope I've made clear the fact that I have great respect for the King James. In fact, it's my favorite version of the Bible.

And we're using New King James here, which also, like the King James, both follow the same manuscript set called the Textus Receptus. And the people who are into King James only often will say the Textus Receptus is the only true uncorrupted text of the New Testament. And the other text used by the other versions, the Alexandrian Text, that's corrupted by Gnostic heretics and so forth.

This claim cannot be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt. And it's not my point or my interest in clearing up how true that claim is at this moment or false. But one thing is interesting, and that is that what we call the Textus Receptus manuscripts today are based upon an earlier set of an earlier manuscript copy made by a man named Erasmus.

And he was authorized by the Catholic Church to take all the existing Greek manuscripts of the New Testament at the time, that existed at the time, and take the best attested reading of every passage and put together what's called an eclectic text. And an eclectic text would say, okay, we've got a verse here that in 5,000 manuscripts it reads this way, but in 10 manuscripts it reads a different way. Therefore, since we've got 5,000 manuscripts that say this way, and some of them are older than these over here, we'll take it that way.

Next verse. How's that work? You look at all the manuscripts, look at each verse, and you come up with the best attested reading for each verse. And so Erasmus was given the task of taking all the scattered manuscripts and making an eclectic text from them.

Well, when he did, when he finished his work, 1 John 5, 7 was not found in his work. It was found in the Latin text, but it was not found in his. And he was challenged by the authorities, and they said, why did you leave out 1 John 5, 7? They said, well, it's for one simple reason.

I couldn't find it in any good Greek manuscripts. It was found in the Latin, but it was not found in any of the Greek manuscripts. He said, I'm working from Greek manuscripts, not Latin, and it just doesn't exist in any of the Greek manuscripts.

He said, if you'll provide me with a Greek manuscript that contains it, I'll put it in. And so they did. And he did keep his promise.

He did keep his promise. He did include the verse, and therefore it became part of the textus receptus at a later date, because it was included by Erasmus. But in his own work, he put a footnote at it, and he said he doubted the authenticity of it.

He put it in because he said he would. He suspected that the Greek text that they gave him, they created in order to include that verse. Because none other Greek text had had it previous to him requesting it, and then they came up with one.

And they had prior to that, no doubt, given him all the best manuscripts available. So I think he suspected that they fabricated that one. But he put it in anyway, because he said he would if they provided a Greek manuscript.

But he put a footnote in saying he doubted its authenticity. Now, does that mean this verse is not authentic? The fact of the matter is, it did not exist in any of the early Greek manuscripts that have been found. And even its inclusion in the textus receptus is of very questionable legitimacy.

But before we throw the verse out and say it has nothing to do with reality, I would consider a couple of things that may be in its favor. One is that it did exist in certain Latin manuscripts. Even Erasmus knew it was there.

But he wasn't working from Latin manuscripts. He was working from Greek. So somewhere back there, someone making a Latin manuscript from a Greek original included it.

Now, the question we may never be able to solve is, did that person who put it in the Latin manuscript, did they copy it out of a now lost early Greek manuscript, which would mean it was authentic, but the early manuscript that had it has been lost since then. It's only preserved in the Latin translation. Or did the Latin copyist make it up? And I think most scholars today would take the latter view.

Most scholars would say that the verse was never penned by John himself. Now, even those who say that usually do not doubt the Trinity doctrine. It is not as if we need this verse to prove the Trinity doctrine.

But one of the problems with using this verse to prove the Trinity doctrine is anyone who is knowledgeable is aware that there are serious questions about the authenticity of this particular verse. Is it found in the Alexandrian text? No, it's not found in the Alexandrian text. And therefore, any modern translation, which does not use the textus receptus, and that's going to be virtually every modern translation, which does not, all of them don't, will not include that verse.

If you look in the NIV or the New American Standard, you may find it mentioned in a footnote that some manuscripts include verse 7, and they'll say what it is, but in the actual text you're not going to find it in modern translations. And I learned this very early on because I've been locked in debates with Jehovah's Witnesses since my teenage years, and I learned very early from them that this verse is open to question because their Bible does not include it. Now, I don't care anything, I have no respect for their Bible, but upon doing research, because they challenged it, I found that they had reason to challenge it.

There is some question as to its authenticity, and notwithstanding my great respect for the King James Version and the textus receptus in general, I don't believe that either are flawless necessarily. And so this verse, which may be fully correct in its content, is nonetheless very questionable as to its originality coming from John, and it makes it a very weak foundation upon which to base the doctrine of the Trinity. Now, one thing that's interesting, let's suggest just for a moment that we did accept the authenticity of this verse.

Let's, just for the sake of argument, say this verse is authentic, John wrote it, and here we have the clearest statement of the Trinity in the Bible. If this is authentic, and it truly is the clearest statement of the Trinity doctrine in the Bible, although he doesn't explain how the three can be one, he just affirms that the three are one. I would point out to you that John does not say there are three who bear witness to heaven, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

He says the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. Now, we know, of course, that the Word is a term that John used elsewhere for Jesus. In his gospel, in John 1, he said, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Now, in saying that the Word was God, we know that John truly would say that God and the Word are one. In fact, John goes on to say in John 1, verse 14, he says, And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And he's referring to Jesus.

So, we know clearly these things. Jesus is the Word. The Word was God.

And the Word was with God. With God the Father, but in himself God also, in some sense, and became a man. And we know that the same author, John, recorded Jesus saying to the disciples, or actually, Jesus made the statement to his opponents on this occasion, in John chapter 10, he said, I and my Father are one.

In John 10, and verse 30, Jesus said, I and my Father are one. Now, put it together. John, in John chapter 1, said that the Word was God.

The Word became flesh and was Jesus. And Jesus said, I and my Father, I the Word and my Father, are one. So, we know that John, whether he wrote 1 John 5, 7 or not, we know that he would at least agree with a part of it at this point.

We know that he would say that the Word and the Father are one. Because he affirms that by what he records in his gospel. Even if John did not write this in 1 John 5, 7, he certainly said part of it, if you put the facts together, in the gospel.

Now, the one part that is not as clear in this case is the Holy Spirit. In 1 John 5, 7 it says there are three, not two, that are one, but three that are one. The Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit.

And these three are one. Well, if it could be shown that the Holy Spirit is one with the Father, and that the Holy Spirit is one with the Son, this would go a long way to affirming the statement that the three are one. It's not just two, the Father and the Son, but there are three that are in fact one.

And again, the gospel of John seems to provide some basis for this. In John 14, when Jesus was with his disciples in the upper room, John 14, verse 16 says, And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another helper, that he may abide with you forever, even the Spirit of truth. Now, it is just about universally agreed among all who are Christians that the Spirit of truth is another name for the Holy Spirit.

I suppose there would be room for some people to challenge it and see if that's the case, but usage seems to indicate that the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of truth are the same Spirit. So, Jesus is talking about another that the Father will send at Jesus' request. Jesus will request the Father, and the Father will send another comforter, another helper who is the Spirit, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you. Now, this statement, Jesus says to his disciples, I will come to you, would appear to be in the context of his saying the Holy Spirit will come to you. I'm going to send the Spirit of truth, I will come to you.

Now, of course, let me just say at this point, it is possible that Jesus was talking about two different things when he said I will send the Spirit of truth and I will come to you. In other words, he could be saying, the Spirit will come to you soon, and I will come later in the second coming. It's not impossible, however, in the context, I don't think that's what he's saying.

Because if you read a little further in verse 21, John 14, 21, He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. Judas, not as scary as it said to Jesus, Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world? And Jesus answered and said to him, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Now, when he said that my Father and I will come and make our home with that person who loves me and keeps my commandments, what phenomenon was he predicting? Well, I don't know anyone who reads the Bible who would disagree with this suggestion.

He's talking about the Holy Spirit coming to them. He's just promised that a few verses earlier, the Spirit of Truth will come when he's gone, and they will have another Comforter with them, another Helper with them, who is the Spirit of Truth. And when the Spirit comes, this is essentially equated with the Father and the Son coming.

I mean, he says, my Father and I will come and make our home with him. In what form? Has Jesus in his resurrected body come down from the right hand of God and made his home with us? No, but his Spirit has. And it would appear that in the Gospel of John, right here, Jesus teaches that the Father and the Son and the Spirit are essentially one in some respect, but different in some other respect.

Because he talks about, I'm going to talk to my Father about this. Well, he's not talking to himself. He's not schizophrenic, and he's not mentally cracked.

He's not talking to himself. He's not going to ask my Father, and he will send you the Spirit. And the Spirit is another Helper other than me.

So there's a difference between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and there's a oneness. Therefore, if we would say, John wrote 1 John 5-7, that there are three, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one, we would be saying this is simply an encapsulation of what John teaches elsewhere, though not really deliberately in a sense. I mean, John doesn't anywhere sit down elsewhere and teach that there are three in one, but his statements and Jesus' statements recorded by him in various places when synthesized lead us to the conclusion that there are three who are one in some sense.

And therefore, whether John wrote 1 John 5-7 or not, it certainly seems to reflect what John bears record to elsewhere. And even if he didn't write it, whoever did was clearly informed by John's other writings on this subject. And has encapsulated what John taught elsewhere here.

Now, let me just show you what I said. I said something earlier, but I didn't demonstrate it. I need to do that.

That the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are all called God individually. We know there's a difference between the Father and the Son, and we know there's a difference between the Son and the Holy Spirit, at least if we take Jesus' words on this subject. Literally, he's got a Father who's separate from himself, that he defers to.

The head of every man is Christ, and the head of Christ is God, Paul says. Christ is subject to his Father. In fact, Paul says, and that was of course in 1 Corinthians 11-3, but elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul said the time is coming when the Son will have subjected all things to himself, and he'll turn the kingdom over to the Father.

I mean, there's clearly a distinction made between the Father and the Son. And yet, the Father is called God, and Jesus is called God, and the Holy Spirit is called God. Let me just show you rather quickly that fact.

You may be, of course, already aware of it, but I hate to make an affirmation without giving some actual scriptural support for it. Just for one of many examples where there is a reference to God the Father, Galatians 1-1, and of course, after we see this, we won't look at any other to make this point, because God is so frequently called the Father throughout Scripture, we won't have to go too far in establishing this point. But just as an example, Galatians 1-1 says, Paul an apostle, not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.

Now, Jesus Christ is mentioned, and God the Father is mentioned. So, we know there's somebody up there called God the Father, and that's a term that is used by Paul. Now, furthermore, I think we've already noticed that Jesus is called God, although I will point out to you that he is never called God the Son.

But a term very much like that is used for him. We know that in John 1-1, it says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now, in case this tape is listened to by any Jehovah's Witnesses, and they look in their Bible to see if this is so, and after all, we should search the Scriptures and see if these things are so, they will find in their Bible that this is not so.

But that's not a fault with what I said, it's a fault with their Bible. Of the approximately 100 English translations of the New Testament that have been made, the Jehovah's Witnesses alone have translated this verse differently. They translated, In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.

Now, they have their reasons for translating it that way, but the reasons are not valid, and at a later time, we're going to talk about the deity of Christ separately, and we'll talk about this verse in more detail. But suffice it to say that real Greek scholars understand this to be saying, The Word was God. And clearly, there are many, many places in the Scriptures that say the same kind of thing, that Jesus, in fact, was God.

And we know that the Word, in fact, was Jesus. So, we've got the fact that Jesus is called God. He's not called God the Son.

He's just called the Word, and the Word happens to be God there. Additional to that, though, in John chapter 1, verse 18, John 1, 18 is very significant, because it says, No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.

Now, when it says the only begotten Son, the word Son there is so rendered in the textus receptus, but in the Alexandrian text, which the Jehovah's Witnesses themselves prefer, and which many modern Christian scholars prefer, the Alexandrian text actually says in verse 18, No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. Now, it's obvious that the only begotten who has declared Him is a reference to Jesus, but the best manuscripts, according to those who go for the earliest, and call those the best, and that would include the Jehovah's Witnesses, but many others as well, say the only begotten God, not the only begotten Son.

Now, that's an interesting thing. Some would try to think God, the only begotten. Now, if we look anywhere in the Bible for the term God, the Son, we will not find that exact expression, but in the Alexandrian text, this says God, the only begotten.

Now, a begotten one is a son, unless it's a daughter, and therefore we have here something very close to saying God, the Son. But God, the begotten. So we know that the Bible speaks of God, the Father.

It also speaks of Jesus as God, and He is the Son. And then what about the Holy Spirit? Is He ever called God? Well, kind of. Yes and no.

First of all, I don't have... We will talk about the Holy Spirit separately in this series, but let me just turn you to one key passage on this. It's in Acts chapter 5, when Ananias and Sapphira had lied to the apostles about the amount for which they had sold their property, because they were keeping back some secretly and pretending to give everything. Peter had it revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that this was a hoax.

It was a scam. And Peter, speaking to Ananias about this, said in verses 3 and 4, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the price of the land for yourself? While it remained, was it not your own? And after it was sold, was it not in your own control? Why have you conceived this thing in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God. Now, we can see there that he says that in verse 3, that Ananias has lied to the Holy Spirit.

In verse 4, he says he has lied to God. Those two expressions placed in such juxtaposition argue strongly for the idea that Peter was saying that the Holy Spirit is God. And there are other reasons to believe such.

And we'll, on another occasion, look more at some of the scriptures related to the Holy Spirit and his deity, but I just wanted to, at this point, suggest that we do have, in fact, in the scripture, a reference to God the Father. We do have reference to Jesus, the Son, who is also God. And we have reference to the Holy Spirit being God.

And yet, we must affirm, as the Bible does in many places, there's only one God. The fact that there is only one God is affirmed both in the Old and the New Testament. One of the key places in the Old Testament where this is brought up is in Deuteronomy 6, where we have what the Jews call the Shema, so-called because the first word in the Hebrew text of this verse is Shema, which means here.

And as I understand it, every synagogue service among the Jews, even to this day, begins with the reciting of the Shema. Jesus himself recited it when he was asked what the greatest commandment in the law was. He quoted the Shema.

But, in Deuteronomy 6, is where we find this, and verses 4 and 5, it says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, Jehovah, is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. Now, that statement, Jehovah our God, Jehovah is one, was the affirmation that the Jews, almost uniquely in the world in their day, in Moses' day, were monotheistic.

All other nations worshipped a plethora of gods. They had many gods. They believed there were many gods, but the Jews alone believed there was one God, and that was what was distinctive about the Jews among the ancient peoples.

They were monotheistic, means one god. Others were polytheistic, believing in many gods. And this is affirmed again and again with a vengeance, truly, in the Scriptures, because God got very angry when the Jews began to pretend as if there were other gods besides Himself.

But just to show you some of the ways that God affirmed this, if you look at the book of Isaiah, Isaiah 44, for example, or no, 43, we will look at 44 also, but look at Isaiah 43, and verse 10. Now, there's something ironic about this verse, because I mentioned earlier the Jehovah's Witnesses who deny the Trinity, and they believe that Jehovah is God, but they don't believe Jesus is God. And if you point to the fact that Jesus is called God in Scripture, they will say, well, okay, there's many things that are called God.

I mean, even Satan is called the God of this world, is he not? And Moses was said, God said to Moses, you will be a god to Pharaoh, and Aaron shall be your prophet. So, to say that Jesus is God doesn't necessarily mean He's the Jehovah God. He is a lesser God.

He is a mighty God. If you quote to them Isaiah 9, 6, which says His name, Jesus' name, shall be called wonderful counsel, the mighty God, they will say, yes, He is a mighty God with a small g, but only Jehovah is the almighty God. So, they make a distinction.

There's more than one God. You've got Jehovah in their theology, His name, Jesus. Now, the irony is that on the cover of the Watchtower, which is the publication of the Jehovah's Witnesses, they quote the first line of this verse that I'm showing you right now, Isaiah 43, 10, You are my witnesses, says Jehovah.

You can see why they would quote that on the cover of their magazine, because that's where the term Jehovah's Witnesses come from. You are my witnesses, says Jehovah. They do not read the whole verse, or quote the whole verse, which says, And my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me, and understand that I am he.

Before me there was no God formed, nor shall there be after me. Now, according to Jehovah's Witness theology, Jesus is a God, a lesser God than Jehovah, and a created being. That Jehovah created Jesus before he created anything else.

That is the theology of Arianism and of Jehovah's Witnesses. The problem is God himself denies this. God says, There were no gods formed before me, and there are no gods formed after me.

In other words, there are no gods formed at all. Just me. I'm the only one.

If you look, probably you can just pass your eyes across the page to Isaiah 44, verses 6 through 8, It says, Thus says Jehovah the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, that is Israel's Redeemer, the Lord of hosts, I am the first, I am the last. Besides me there is no God. And who can proclaim as I do? Then let him declare it and set it in order for me, since I appointed the ancient people and the things that are coming and shall come.

Let them show these to them. Do not fear, nor be afraid. Have I not told you that from that time and declared it? You are my witnesses.

Is there a God beside me? Indeed there is no other rock. I know not one. Now God is speaking.

He says, Besides me there is no God. In verse 6. In verse 8 he says, Is there a God besides me? I don't know of any. Now if there was another God besides Jehovah, it seems like he'd know it, if anyone would.

I don't know how the Jehovah's Witnesses would know it if God didn't know it himself. God knows of no other God other than himself. Now it is true the devil is called the God of this world.

It is true. That Moses stood in a position like God in one sense as God's spokesman. It is true that the judges of Israel were called Gods.

It is true even that the Bible refers to the idols of the heathen as the Gods of the heathen. But we should not be overly confused about that fact. If you keep your finger in Isaiah and look over at 1 Corinthians 8, we can clear some of this up I hope.

1 Corinthians chapter 8 verse 4 and following, 4 through 6 really, 1 Corinthians 8, 4 through 6 says, Therefore, concerning the eating of things offered to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one. For even if there are so-called Gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are many Gods and many Lords, yet for us there is only one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live. Now Paul clearly does make a distinction here as always between the Father and Jesus.

There is a distinction. And it may sound as if he is almost saying that Jesus isn't God because there is just one God, the Father, and there is the Lord Jesus Christ. But we know from Paul's teaching generally that his view of Jesus was that Jesus was God in the flesh.

He states it very clearly. For example, in Philippians chapter 2, he says that Jesus existed in the form of God and did not think of His equality with God as a thing to be clung to or to be grasped and humbled Himself and became a man. And there are other places.

God was manifest in the flesh, Paul says in 1 Timothy 3, 16. And so we have Paul saying there are many things that are called gods, but there is only one real God. And so when God says, I don't know of any other gods, there are no other gods formed after me or before me, He is not denying that the heathen have their gods that have been formed.

He is not arguing even that there are not people or individuals who in some sense, by some way of accommodation, can be referred to as a god, either because they are representatives of God or because they are false gods, falsely worshipped or whatever. But in terms of real deity being really God, there is only one God, and that is Jehovah. According to Isaiah 45, verse 5, Jehovah says, I am Jehovah and there is no other.

There is no god besides me. It is fairly strongly affirmed. In the same chapter, Isaiah 45, verses 21-23, it says, Tell and bring forth your case.

Yes, let them take counsel together. Who has declared this from ancient times? Who has told it from that time? Have not I Jehovah? And there is no other god besides me. A just God and a Savior.

There is none besides me. Look to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth, for I am God and there is no other. I have sworn by myself the word that has gone out of my mouth in righteousness and shall not return, that to me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall take an oath.

Now what is interesting about this is that a lot of this language is later on picked up and applied to Jesus. God says in verse 21 here, there is no other god and there is no other Savior. And yet, Jesus is called both, God and He is called Savior.

Furthermore, in verse 23, when Jehovah says, to me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall take an oath, Paul obviously picks up this language in Philippians chapter 2 and says that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. He is obviously using language that Jehovah uses and applies to himself and Paul applies it to Jesus. But there is more.

In Isaiah 46, in verse 9, God says, remember the former things of old, for I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me. Now, I don't know that we would need it affirmed any more strongly than that or additionally to that.

But the Bible teaches in both the Old and the New Testament that there is only one God, there are not many. There are not two or three or more. In fact, Paul refers to God as the only wise God.

There are of course dumb gods, dumb idols, but there is only one intelligent God. Now, does he mean the Father or does he mean the Son? Which one is unintelligent? Well, obviously the Father and the Son, if they are both God, they are both intelligent and wise and yet God is spoken of as the only wise God in 1 Timothy 1.17. There is only one wise God. Jesus himself affirmed this in John 17.3, which we quoted earlier.

John 17.3, Jesus said, This is life eternal, that they may know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. There is only one true God. Is Jesus that true God or is he a false God? When Jesus is called God, is the Bible affirming that Jesus is in some mysterious sense that one only true and only wise God come to earth in human form or is it affirming something else, that he is a false God? Because if someone is God, they are either true or false.

And so we have this mystery. This mystery is that there is only one God, yet the Father is called God, the Son is called God, the Holy Spirit is called God and the three are not identical. The three are in some sense distinguishable from one another and yet in another sense one.

How do we solve this problem? Well, the Trinitarian formulation of the Nicene Creed has been satisfactory ever since it was made to most Christians. Most Christians accept the wording of it. I do think that I would be inclined, if I were making the Creed, and no one has asked me to do so, so probably this is a moot point, but if I were writing the Creed, I think I would reword it a little differently at some points, but in essence I cannot argue with its essential core thought, that there is in some sense three persons who make up the one God without being three gods.

Now, here is how I would see things a little differently. And let me just say this, if you are in the habit of taking what I say without criticism, without analysis, which I don't recommend that you ever do that, but if you are in the habit of doing that, don't do that now. You need to just hear what I have to say, and put it in your data bank, and work with it, and study it, and make up your own mind about things, and it is quite alright if you reach a different conclusion.

But here is how I would differ from the standard formulation. The formulation of the Trinity is usually that it is the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, I have no problem with that, because Jesus is known to us today as the Son.

But the Trinitarian belief historically has been that Jesus through all eternity was known as the Son. That for all eternity there was the Father, and for all eternity there was the Son, and for all eternity there was the Holy Spirit. Now, I could accept this, and I did for many years accept this as the most legitimate way of explaining it for many years, if it were taught in Scripture, and yet I don't think it is.

That's why I am just letting you make up your own mind. I don't think this is taught in Scripture. That is, that Jesus was always the Son.

I do believe that it is taught in Scripture that Jesus was always part of the Godhead, but I don't believe that that second part of the Godhead was known as the Son prior to the Incarnation, prior to Bethlehem, in other words. Now, in this, I am at odds with what most Orthodox teaching on this would say, and therefore, you might as well exercise caution. I grant you that permission.

In fact, I urge you to. But just because something was the accepted way of saying it through the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages and the Reformers held on to it and the heirs of the Reformation held on to it, doesn't mean that that formulation was the most scriptural. Each must decide for himself.

But it seems to me that Jesus is never referred to in the Bible prior to His Incarnation as the Son. Now, I need to clarify what I mean by that and what I don't mean. I'm not saying you will never find in the Old Testament a reference to Jesus as the Son.

You will. He is referred to as the Son in Psalm 2 and verse 7. He is also referred to as the Son or a son in Isaiah 9, 6. These are the principal places that speak of Jesus in the Old Testament and call Him the Son. But the problem with this is that both of these places are prophecies about His earthly life.

And I do not deny at all that Jesus was during His earthly life and is now the Son. But I'm saying that prior to His earthly life, His existence was in the form of God. He was, as the Bible uses the term, the Word.

Until the Word was made flesh, He was known as the Word. This I take on the authority of John himself. And even if we accept the Trinitarian passage, 1 John 5, 7, as authentic, that would support it too.

The three that bear record in heaven are the Father and the Word and the Holy Spirit. Now, some would call this splitting hairs. And it perhaps is.

And I'm not interested in splitting hairs. And that's why I wouldn't want to haggle over the matter too much. But just in the interest of precision and biblical accuracy, I do not believe that you can find a reference anywhere in the Bible that indicates that Jesus, prior to His incarnation, was already known as the Son.

And this is in contrast with what is considered orthodoxy ever since the Nicene Council. Because there is a doctrine, and we will consider this more when we talk about Jesus' deity, there's a doctrine that is considered orthodox called eternal generation. Generation means being generated.

Like Jesus was eternally generated as a son is generated from the loins of His Father. So, Jesus has been continually generated as Son of God from the Father for all eternity. And it's interesting how explanations of this work.

I taught this myself and believed it for many years because that's, of course, orthodoxy. And I was always taught it. And I will say the first thing that got me to look into it more carefully was an argument of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Because the Jehovah's Witnesses believed that Jesus had a beginning. And I don't believe Jesus had a beginning. I believe Jesus has always existed.

He's God, not a created being. And they disagreed. But I was still saying to them at that time, well, Jesus was begotten in eternity past by God.

That's the way that they commonly say it. Jesus was begotten, not made, in eternity past. And the Jehovah's Witnesses were saying, well, that's just a play on words.

I mean, what's the difference between being begotten or being made by God? In any case, He had a beginning. I said, no, that didn't happen in time. It happened in eternity.

He was begotten in eternity. They said, but how can one be begotten and be as old as the one who begat him? How can somebody be begotten by another and yet the other one was not prior to him? C.S. Lewis wrestles with this in his book, Beyond Personality, which is part of the larger work now, Mere Christianity. And he says, trying to defend the idea of eternal generation, he says, imagine if you can, two books on a table, one resting on top of the other.

He says, the book on top, its position in space is determined and caused by the book underneath it because it rests upon it. If that book underneath were not there, that book would be sitting at a lower level. It is held up by a book that is under it.

Therefore, it holds its present position dependent upon or is generated from the position of the book under it. Now, he says, if you could just imagine it, suppose those books had always been there and had never been, they had never not existed, that those books in that very position were eternally there. Then you could say that forever, both books existed, they were, you know, one did not cause the other, but the position of the top book would have always been caused by the position of the bottom book for all eternity.

Therefore, although one causes the other to be in a certain relation or position to it, it does not necessitate a priority or a previous existence of one over the other. And what he is saying is that the relationship of Jesus to the Father has always been the relationship of a father and a son throughout eternity. And that the position of the son was determined by the position of the father forever, but there was never any one prior to the other.

Now, I love C.S. Lewis, and I love that book that I am quoting from, but I must say that even the best logicians does not always have perfect logic, and Lewis, I think, is missing a very important point. And that is that nobody has ever suggested that Jesus' position in space has been determined for all eternity by the position of the father under him, holding him up. This is indeed something that could be imagined, but what is argued by the theologians is that Jesus' existence as a son of the father has always been the case.

And that is a very different thing. The books in the illustration, one was not caused or generated by the other. They did not bear a father-son relationship to each other.

But if the terms father and son mean anything, if the word begotten means anything, it means that one has brought the other into being. That is how one becomes the father of another, or one becomes the son of another, is by the one bringing the other into existence, into being. And if we are going to argue that Jesus and the father have forever, or even that Jesus prior to the incarnation, prior to Bethlehem, that Jesus was the son of the father, then one is going to have a very hard time explaining how it is that he is also eternal and the father is eternal.

How did one become the father of the other without either of them having a beginning? Now, the solution I have suggested for your consideration is that neither did have a beginning. That as long as there has been the father, there has been his word. The word logos, word, means something like, well, it means word, but it also has a larger meaning.

It means the thought and the reasoning behind the word. We get the word logic from the word logos, the same expression in the Greek. And to say that as long as God has existed, he has been a reasoning, thinking, talking kind of a God, that is an aspect of himself, that is an aspect of his nature that has existed as long as he has existed, which has been forever.

Neither had any beginning. But that word was never known as the son of the father until that word was born. And that birth took place at Bethlehem.

Now, the doctrine I am teaching is not original with me. It has been one of the alternatives out there from the earliest centuries of the church. It is today considered probably heretical, I imagine.

There have been, there were teachers, there were bishops in the early church who taught just what I am saying, but their view was overridden by the more, what is now considered the more orthodox view, and maybe for good reason. But I am not sure it was for good reason. All I can say is, if there are two possibilities, namely that Jesus is called the son of God because he was eternally generated, always begotten, forever in the eternal past, well and good.

If the Bible says that, then that is fine with me. I have got no problem with it, except I don't understand it. But on the other hand, if the Bible doesn't say that, then I am not going to go looking like a fool in debates with Joseph, and this is for anyone else, for a point that is not taught in Scripture.

I don't mind being a fool for Christ, but I am not going to be a fool for the Nicene Council, just because they came up with something and they said this is the way it is. If the Bible doesn't say it, I just as soon not be dogmatic about that or argue for it at all. I would rather see, well, what does the Bible say? In my opinion, I think we can show that the Bible teaches that Jesus came to be known as the Son at the time that He came to be a human being.

And He is the Son of God by virtue of God being His Father and Mary being His mother. And that prior to that, there is no indication in the Bible, in any Scripture, and I have searched very hard, and this I did about 25 years ago in this debate with Joseph, because I wanted to make sure that if I am going to look like a fool in front of them, I am going to do it on biblical grounds. Because I don't mind being a fool.

I don't mind being humble. But I am going to be humble for truth. I am not going to be humble for a tradition.

And I looked up every Scripture that seemed relevant to the subject and I have never been able to find a Scripture that indicated that Jesus was called or regarded or bore the relation of a son to the Father before His birth in Bethlehem. He existed as equal with His Father as something in His Father forever, but never really referred to as the Son of the Father in any sense prior to His incarnation. There are one or two verses that can be taken more than one way, and in a few cases, one possible meaning of the verse could suggest that He was the Son before, but there is an equally possible other way of taking that verse.

And there are several verses that seem to affirm that Jesus became the Son of God when He was born. He didn't come into existence at that time. He had a prior existence for all eternity, but in terms of the actual term son applying to Him, it was when God became His Father.

And that would be not only something that we can find in Scripture, it's what we would kind of expect to be the case. We would expect someone to be called the Son because someone begot them. And if someone begot someone else, then that person was there before the someone else they brought forth was there.

And so, what I'm saying is that Jesus is co-eternal with the Father. But I would modify the language of the Trinitarian statement. I would say the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit are God and have always been God.

And Jesus, of course, the Word, has become the Son, and that is what His title is now. So again, if you ask, do I believe that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all one God, I would say yes. But if we're talking about before the Incarnation, I'd say I'd just make the little alteration.

The title for Jesus was the Word prior to that according to Scripture. And as far as I can tell from Scripture, never was it the Son prior to that. Now, there is, in the last few minutes I have to talk about the Trinity here, some, I would hope, clarification.

I don't know if this is clarification or muddies the waters more. But the Trinity doctrine is very difficult to understand. And many analogies have been sought to try to access this idea for Christians to understand the Trinity.

Because obviously, if you say there's only one God and the Father is God, someone's going to deduce that, well, maybe then Jesus isn't God. You say, no, Jesus and the Father are both God, but there's only one God still. So then already you're into a hard thing to explain.

I've known almost all my life how hard this was to explain, but it really came home to me when Benjamin was probably three years old and we were catechizing him in the Christian faith, and we told him that God is the Father and there's only one God. And later on we taught him that Jesus is the Son of God and that He's also God. And of course the natural question that came was, well, is God His own Son? Or is God His own Father? Now, what's the right answer to that? Is that a yes or a no answer? Is God His own Son? Is God His own Father? Well, I think we wouldn't want to say yes or no without rephrasing the statement.

But how do we rephrase it to make sense to a child? Now, I will say this. I don't think a child can understand the Trinity Doctrine. In fact, I'm not sure an adult can understand it.

I don't, but I don't believe you have to understand everything in order to believe it. Jesus said that our faith needs to be like that of a child. A child can trust in his parents' integrity without knowing everything about how they work biologically, without having any psychological training or awareness of why things work the way they do in their parents' minds.

I mean, there's all kinds of things about one's parent that a child could not possibly know or understand, but that doesn't prevent him from trusting the character of the parent. And I'm saying that whether we understand or know how the Trinity concept is to be properly arranged, it does not have to interfere with our ability to trust God. As children trust their parent without fully understanding everything.

Paul himself in 1 Timothy 3 and verse 16, 1 Timothy 3 and verse 16 said, and without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness. And then he gives this lengthy little paragraph, but just the first line of it is, God was manifested in the flesh. That's a great mystery.

Without controversy, that's a great mystery. However, that is a mystery that has not existed without controversy. There's been a great deal of controversy, but what he's saying is, to say this is a mystery is not a controversial statement.

Everyone will agree that this is a mystery. Now, what is a mystery? That God was manifested in the flesh. Now, I should alert you to the fact that there's a textual difference here.

In the Alexandrian text, it does not say God was manifested in the flesh. In the Alexandrian text, it says He was manifested in the flesh. Or who was manifested in the flesh, it does not say God.

And the Jehovah's Witnesses, of course, jump on that, because if it says God was manifested in the flesh, you've got a clear statement of the deity of Jesus, which they are at pains to disprove. And so they go with the Alexandrian text and say, no, it just says He was manifested in the flesh. Certainly it's referring to Jesus, but it doesn't say He's God.

But there's been whole book-length treatments written on this one verse and this textual difference. And without going into all the nitty-gritty, let me just say, I have become convinced that the Textus Receptus, which reads God was manifest in the flesh, is the only, all the arguments are in favor of that being the original reading, just on grammar and other considerations. That that's the original reading, and that the He was manifest, or who was manifest in the Alexandrian text, was a corrupted reading.

In any case, I'm not trying to establish here the point of the deity of Christ, although I will in another setting. What I'm trying to point here is that Paul said the manifestation of Christ in the flesh, the manifestation of God in the flesh, is a great mystery. And as such, it's something that we may not be able to fully grasp.

We may just have to accept. It's mysterious. We can accept that there are mysteries.

There are things we don't understand. If you don't understand the Trinity, and if that alone caused you to reject it, you must also reject the doctrine of the eternality of God. Because the Bible teaches that God has always existed, and yet we don't know how that could be.

We don't understand that. There are many things about God that boggle the mind of the human being, which is finite, and not able to grasp all things that God can grasp. So it is good for us to accept what God says about Himself, even if we cannot explain it.

Now this being the case, there are a couple of things I want to do in the last few minutes. One, I want to talk about how essential is belief in the Trinity. And the other is to talk to you about models of illustrations of the Trinity that people have used to try to explain.

And maybe if I have time, I'll give you a model that works better for me, but I don't know if it's any better than anyone else's. As far as the essentiality of understanding the Trinity, there are some who would make belief in the Trinity, according to the Nicene Creed, the litmus test of orthodoxy. And anyone who holds any slightly different view, for instance a person who is a modalist, or a Jesus only, then that person would have to be called a cultist or a heretic by these people's reckoning.

And I would have to take issue with that, because there were many Christians who were regarded as orthodox prior to the Nicene Council who had some view other than that which the Nicene Council came up with. It was hotly debated. At one point, the majority of the people on the Council disagreed with the Trinitarian formulation and agreed with Arius.

Now I'm glad they turned around and refuted Arius and ended up coming out on the right side of this, but what I'm saying is before it was settled there, there were a variety of views in the Church. All of them were regarded to be possible to be held by Christians. And therefore, if we could say that one has to hold an exact adherence to the Trinitarian formulation to be orthodox, then that means that we're making it more narrow to be a Christian now than it was before the Nicene Council.

And we're doing so on the basis strictly of the authority of that Council, which was a human Council, making up a human formulation trying to explain a divine mystery. I would say that the Trinity Doctrine is most likely the correct way to synthesize the biblical data into a statement of the nature of God. I do believe that the Trinity Doctrine is correct, but I cannot say that any writer of Scripture makes an issue of it.

Consider this. If belief in the Trinity and a correct understanding of the Trinity was somehow necessary for salvation, would it not be likely that God would say something about it in the Bible? I mean, why is it that you never have anywhere in the Bible, except in one verse of questionable authenticity, a statement, a formulation of the Trinity Doctrine? Why is it that we have to deduce it from scattered fragments here and there and say, well, the best way I can see to put these fragments together and make them all true is to have some kind of a Trinity idea? You know what I mean? If this is such an essential doctrine, why is it that none of the apostles, nor Jesus, ever taught it, never clarified it, never even enunciated it? It seems to me that a correct understanding of the Trinity is important for the sake of being accurate, and it best, as I say, best synthesizes the whole counsel of God on the subject. But it does not seem as if the synthesis of this material is absolutely necessary for salvation.

And therefore, so long as somebody upholds the deity of Christ, which I believe that belief is essential for salvation, I believe the deity of Christ is an essential doctrine, and it is affirmed powerfully in Scripture, as long as someone affirms the deity of Christ, I believe that a person might be at liberty to believe any one of several different possible formulations of the Trinity Doctrine, so long as they're doing their best to get it from the Scripture and not making up something for themselves, and still be in God's family. If God thought it was important, He should have said so. And He didn't.

Therefore, I will not accept just because the Church has for many centuries now decided that this is the essential point of orthodoxy against all heresy, I cannot accept the authority of the Church on that any more than I do on the subject of infant baptism or on the worship of Mary. I will accept only what the Scripture says on it. What the Scripture says is that we must affirm that Jesus is God.

That's a hard thing to do without having some kind of a Trinitarian concept, but some manage it. The Jesus-only's believe Jesus is God, but they're not Trinitarian. I disagree with their reasoning, but I don't disagree with their salvation.

I believe that they can be saved. In that respect, I take a lighter view than many do of the imposition of a specific model of Trinitarianism upon a person before we allow them to be a brother or in the family of God. I don't believe that Abraham was a Trinitarian, or that David was a Trinitarian, or Moses, but I do believe they were saved.

And I'm not even sure whether some of the duller apostles were Trinitarian in the sense of being able to explain this doctrine. Remember, Peter said there's a lot of things Paul wrote that he found, Peter personally found hard to understand, and Paul never even talked about the Trinity doctrine outright. Imagine how hard that Peter would find that to understand.

But did Peter have to know the doctrine? Apparently not. It never was necessary to formulate a doctrine on this until the fourth century. The Church got along fine without such formulations.

Maybe it didn't get along fine. I take that back. I shouldn't say that.

Because the Church did have heresies like Arianism that did not affirm the deity of Jesus for the simple reason that they didn't know what to do with the oneness of God. But I'm sure the Trinitarian Council was a tremendous advance in defining some problems in a way to eliminate certain heresies. But that doesn't mean that its formulations are sacrosanct in such a way that God puts his stamp on the Nicene Council as this is it.

Everyone who believes what the Nicene Council says is now saved. Because there's been a lot of people before the Nicene Council who probably wouldn't have stated the doctrine quite in those terms and were perfectly saved. And one of those people might well have been Jesus himself.

We don't know how he would have stated it if he had endeavored to do so. The fact that he did not is fairly strong evidence that a correct way of stating it is not necessary for salvation or else he should have said so. Now I will say this then.

I have said that belief in the deity of Christ, I believe to be an essential doctrine. Jesus said to his opponents, if you do not believe that I am he, then you will die in your sins. And Jesus also said that men ought always to honor the Son even as they honor the Father.

In other words, not less nor more, but even as. Jesus should be honored as equal with the Father. This cannot be done with an Arian theology or Jehovah's Witness theology and therefore I think that the Jehovah's Witness theology falls short of having the essential elements necessary for a true perception of God.

But even if a person accepts the deity of Christ, they might have various ways of understanding this relationship. In fact, I don't really object to using the term persons. The Father is a person, the Son is a person, the Holy Spirit is a person.

Three persons. I don't object to this, but I will say the Bible doesn't use this term. And there may be some aspects of using it that get confusing because if we think of God existing in three persons, it's almost impossible to banish from our mind the picture of a committee of three guys sitting around talking things over.

And that's essentially the picture that most Christians who have the Trinitarian formulation in their heads, which by the way the formulation is not in the Bible, but if we think of God as a person, or I should say Jesus as a person, and the Father is a person, the Holy Spirit is a person, and there are reasons to do this because all three have personality. But when we think of persons, we think of people. When we think of three persons, we think of them as three people.

And when you've got three people in one room, you know, on one project, that's a committee, but that's not one person. And it's hard to see that as a unified body. Now, let me say this.

It may be that the view of God is a committee of three. You know, when the truth is known, when we go to heaven and see what God's really like, we might say, well, that was a perfectly good analogy, a committee of three. But many Christians have a very serious problem with that.

It makes the personhood of the three members of the Trinity to be too human-like. And most Christian orthodoxy teaches that the oneness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is such that a picture of three people sitting around is not quite unified enough for the biblical truth to be represented. But it's hard to avoid when we use the word persons.

It is possible that the idea of a human being being body, soul, and spirit in some extended way is a better analogy because we know that the body and the soul and the spirit, in one sense, they have minds of their own. My body has a mind of its own. It has a will of its own, you know, different than my mind.

Paul said so. There's a war between the will of my mind and the will of my flesh. My body wants certain things and my mind wants something else.

And we could actually, yeah, I'm not two people. I'm one complex being made up of three elements. Now, I'm very cautious to suggest the use of the word element in place of the word persons in talking about God existing in three elements because just as the word persons conveys certain mental images of people to us, so the word elements has to our mind the idea of chemicals, you know, minerals or something, something non-personal.

And therefore, it is my theory, and that's all I can put forth is a theory, that when we speak of the Father and the Word and the Holy Spirit and their threeness as opposed to their oneness, there's something of the element of the word person and something of the word element that neither one of them is quite without difficulty, but if you combine the notions of personal element, then which maybe we don't have any, we might not have any analogy for that in nature. There might not be such a thing in nature. Well, then we might be closer, and maybe that's why the Bible doesn't explain it because there's no analogies in nature for us.

I mean, many of the spiritual truths that God teaches are through the analogy of nature and parables, but there may be no analogy for this that really works. But if we think of it that way, see, if we think of God as three people and Jesus came to earth and it's like one person left the committee, and then there were two left and there's one on earth doing his thing, and yet the Bible doesn't say that Jesus was one third of God, God being a committee of three, but rather that Jesus was the fullness of the Godhead bodily. Well, not if they were all of one mind.

They could conceive, but then you might wonder, are they really different persons at all? But let me put it this way. Jesus and his father had separate wills because Jesus in the Garden of Eden said, Not my will, but your will be done. Now, you don't say that unless I've got one will and you've got another will.

Okay, I'll defer to your will. My preference, if possible, is that this cup would pass from me. But if that's not your will, then let's do it your way.

I mean, that's what he said. He and his father didn't even have a merged will. He just simply deferred his will to the Father.

He submitted his will to the Father, as we also are required to do. There's great mystery here, and I don't endeavor to solve it, but let me just say this. The idea that the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Jesus bodily to my mind kind of militates against the picture of a committee of three, and one of them leaves and comes to earth.

The other two are sitting around in heaven waiting for him to come back. That image is what we almost all have in our minds throughout. But how could that one have all the fullness of the whole God in him? Another illustration that I have sometimes used, but I don't like it because it uses that of non-personal elements.

But as I said, we don't have an illustration in nature that has both personal and the elemental aspects. So the truth may lie somewhere between these two illustrations, and there may be no illustration that really fits. I think sometimes of a liquid mixture.

Now, I say this, or let me make this disclaimer. I'm not saying God is a liquid mixture. I'm not saying that God is a non-personal stuff.

I'm just saying think of these categories for a moment. Think of lemonade. What is lemonade? Well, it's water, and it's lemon juice, and it's sugar, right? To be very mundane.

We've got three elements there. They all make up one thing. We call it lemonade.

Now, if you think about it, when you taste lemonade, you can taste the lemon juice. You say, well, yeah, I can taste the tartness there, but you can also taste the sugar. And you can also, of course, feel the wetness of the water.

And you know that you've got three elements there if you think about it, but you're not thinking about it. You've got one substance that's made up of the three. And if you took a portion of that and scooped it out or poured it out of a pitcher into a cup, then the whole three would be in that one cup.

It wouldn't be that you take the lemon juice out and put it in a cup or the sugar out or the water out, and you've got the other two still over here. It's that you've got one mixture made up of three, and a sampling of that mixture is taken over here into a vessel, into a body, a human body, and represented here, and you've got the fullness of it here. I sometimes illustrate it as the ocean.

The ocean water is different in chemical composition than spring water, for example. But if you took a cup and scooped up some of the ocean off the shore and took it inland and had someone analyze it in a laboratory, they would find all the elements of the ocean were in it. Now, if they concluded that this little cup of it was all there was, they'd be greatly mistaken because out there there's a great vast ocean that this was just sampled from.

But it had all the elements of the ocean. You don't have a third of the ocean here. You've just got a sampling of it.

And I personally think that when we think of Jesus as God, it is more accurate probably to think of Him not as one member of a committee of three who left the other two, but as a sample embodied, a sample of the whole Godhead. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were all in Him. Therefore, it says in Isaiah 9.6, His name shall be called, what, among other things, Everlasting Father.

His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father. What? Why didn't you say the Everlasting Son? We're talking about Jesus here, after all. Why does He say His name should be called the Everlasting Father? That's a strange thing to say about Him.

And yet it's there. Jesus said, I and my Father are one. If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

What about the Holy Spirit? Jesus said, I'm going to send the Spirit of truth to you. I will come to you. The Holy Spirit is called by Peter and by Paul in various places, the Spirit of Christ.

In fact, Paul in Romans 8 uses the term, if the Spirit of Christ is in you, as an equivalent of, if Christ is in you. Jesus and the Spirit are one. There is mystery here I do not propose to eliminate.

I cannot because I'm not smart enough to and I don't know enough. I don't know if anyone can. But I'm saying that when we think of the Trinity, perhaps the concept of a committee has its inadequacies.

Certainly a picture of ocean or lemonade has its inadequacies also because neither of those things are alive or personal. None of the elements are alive. Somewhere between the idea of elements of a mixture and personhood, each of these elements having real personality, real will, real intelligence, is in my mind, and I guess this is just an educated guess, in my mind the true analogy of the God has got to be somewhere in between those two.

God is personal, but he's not three guys, as near as I can tell. Now, you are certainly at liberty to have an entirely different conclusion on this subject. Well, not too far removed, but I mean not all options are equally open, but there are certainly other options open besides my theory.

And therefore I'll leave you with that data to sort out and reach your own conclusions.