What's In a Name?
Trinity.
The word doesn't exist in the Bible. But if we misunderstand it, we can run into some serious problems.
So, what does it mean to say that God is Trinity? Thankfully, we don't need to spend centuries re-inventing the wheel. The Nicene Creed succinctly describes the Trinity as three persons with one essence.
It took the Church over 400 years to reach this formulation and in the end no one was really any closer to comprehending God, they had simply worked out a description that avoided saying anything untrue about God, and which outlined the Bible's teaching more clearly.
What does it mean that God is three Persons? Most of us know their names: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You may even know some special roles each uniquely fulfills. The Son, for example, is eternally begotten of the Father. He is identical with the Father and so he perfectly reveals the Father. The Father is the ultimate source of creation, which he has created through the Son. The Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son and reveals them to us subjectively. And these are just a few of the distinct roles revealed to us in the Bible
What does it mean that God is one Essence? This means that even though the persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have different roles, they are the same in every way that makes them God. All three share the exact same essential characteristics to the point that they are truly one being with one will. And yet they are distinctly three persons.
Getting confused yet?
When you start thinking about the Trinity you might feel a tension building in your brain begging the question: "Which is it? Is God one or three?"
This tension is good. It means our minds are reaching the limits of their understanding.
Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the greatest early contributors to our doctrine of the Trinity said “I cannot think of the one, but I am immediately surrounded with the splendor of the three; nor can I clearly discover the three but I am suddenly carried back to the one.” That inability to nail down a definition of God as either one or three bothers a lot of people.
It might even bother you. After all, how can we believe in a God that we can't fully understand? If Christianity is supposed to be true, then how can this seeming contradiction exist?
Questions like these can drive us from our faith, but more often, we resolve the tension and move on. We take this paradox, make working sense of it, and then go about our day. Some of us choose to think of God, pray to and worship him, as one. Meanwhile, others of us spend so much time emphasizing the distinct persons in the Trinity that we forget that our God is one. We do it because it's easy. We're tired. We don't need brain teasers today. We just want some good Bible principles to help us deal with a difficult boss, a frustrating child, or a selfish spouse. Let the theologians deal with the arbitrary particulars, we reason, because we have "real" issues to deal with.
So much the worse for us.
Hebrews 8 and Jeremiah 31 teach us that God's purpose for us in his plan of redemption is that we may truly know him. In John 17:2-3 Jesus defines “life eternal” as knowing the Father and the Son. Though total knowledge of the infinite God will never fit into our finite minds, God's goal is that we should come to a very real knowledge of him and respond in worship. We were created for that purpose.
The greatest lesson of the doctrine of the Trinity then, is that our God is ultimately incomprehensible to us. He is greater than our minds can fathom. But instead of throwing up our hands and walking away from the depth of his incomprehensibility, God encourages us to jump in as far as we can. He reveals himself to us through Scripture and gives us the Holy Spirit to illuminate our minds and hearts.
Proverbs 9:10 tells us that knowledge of the Holy One is understanding and the fear (or awe) of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.
Do you need to deal with “real” issues? Could you use more wisdom to understand and deal with life's myriad frustrations, heartbreaks, and disappointments? Start by worshiping the God that you can't understand, and see how this transforms the way you think and feel about everything.