The Forgotten Trinity (22 page)

However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed
the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the
Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. (Romans 8:9)

This powerful, life-giving person, the Spirit of God, is the one who
brings spiritual life to God's people. He is the one who regenerates and
causes us to be born again:

"That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born
of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6).

He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in
righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit. (Titus 3:5)

That is why the early Christians could place the Spirit with the Father and the Son in their worship and their praise, and could pronounce as a doxology the following words:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and
the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. (2 Corinthians
13:14)

Grace is a divine gift and comes from a divine person, Jesus Christ.
The love of God is divine and full and comes from the Father. And
fellowship, likewise, is a rich term, full of meaning. We have been called
into the "fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord" (1 Corinthians
1:9). Paul spoke of "fellowship with His sufferings" (Philippians 3:10). Believers have fellowship with the Father and the Son (1 John 1:3). The
fact that the Spirit indwells all believers, and provides the ground of
our supernatural unity, results in true Christian fellowship-a sharing
that knows no bounds. It is a divine fellowship, brought about by a
divine person, the Holy Spirit of God, the eternal third person of the
blessed Trinity.

As stated earlier, many Christians, without knowing it, hold a false
view of the Trinity simply due to their inability to articulate the difference between believing in one Being of God and three persons sharing that one Being. As a result, even orthodox Christian believers slip
into an ancient heresy known by many names: modalism, Sabellianism, Patripassionism. Today this same error is called Oneness or the
"Jesus Only" position. Whatever its name might be, it is a denial of
the Trinity based upon a denial of the distinction between the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. It accepts the truth that there is only one true
God, and that the Father, Son, and Spirit are fully God, but it denies
that the Bible differentiates between the persons. Instead, advocates of
this position either believe that the Father is the Son, and the Son is
the Spirit, and the Spirit is the Father (the old actor on the stage example, wearing different masks to "play" different parts, but always
being the same person), or they make the Son merely the "human nature" of Christ (hence denying His eternal nature). Jesus then becomes two "persons," the Father and the Son, the Father being the
deity, the Son the human nature.

Most other groups who deny the Trinity do so thinking that orthodox Christian believers actually embrace some form of modalism.
That is, many times Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses will attack the
Trinity on grounds that are really only relevant to the Oneness or modalistic position. They will point to the baptism of Jesus and say, "Well,
was Jesus a ventriloquist or something?" The Oneness position is, in
fact, liable to all sorts of refutation on the basis of Scripture, so it is
easy to see why many who wish to deny the Trinity prefer to attack this
perversion of it rather than the real thing. Christians who love the
Trinity must be very quick to correct those who think that orthodox
believers embrace a form of modalism-one what, three whos. That is
the issue.

Scripture leaves no room for confusing the Father, Son, and Spirit.
A brief survey of some of the more blatant ways in which this is confirmed will suffice for our purposes here. But do not think the brevity
of the review indicates the issue is unimportant. As John taught,

Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father; the one who
confesses the Son has the Father also. (1 John 2:23)

Such a passage not only clearly differentiates between the Father
and the Son, but it warns us how important God considers the truth
about His nature.

FATHER, SON, AND SPIRIT

The scriptural truth that the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the
Spirit, is rather easily demonstrated. We begin with the fact that the
Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father-actions incomprehensible outside of recognizing that the Father is a separate divine
person from the Son:

"The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His
hand" (John 3:35).

"For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that
He Himself is doing; and greater works than these will He show
Him, so that you will marvel" (John 5:20).

Just as the Father loves the Son, so the Son loves His disciples. The
disciples are separate persons from the Son; hence, the Father is a separate person from the Son as well:

"Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide
in My love" (John 15:9).

"I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity,
so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them,
even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom
You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see
My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the
foundation of the world" (John 17:23-24).

Certainly the best known example of the existence of three persons
is the baptism of Jesus recorded in Matthew 3:16-17:

After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the
water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit
of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, and behold, a
voice out of the heavens said, "This is My beloved Son, in whom
I am well-pleased."

Here the Father speaks from heaven, the Son is being baptized (and is
again described as being the object of the Father's love, paralleling the
passages just cited from John), and the Spirit is descending as a dove.
Jesus is not speaking to himself but is spoken to by the Father. There
is no confusing of the persons at the baptism of the Lord Jesus.

The transfiguration of Jesus in Matthew 17:1-9 again demonstrates
the separate personhood of the Father and the Son:

While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them,
and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, "This is My beloved Son,
with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!" (Matthew 17:5).

The Son's true preexistent glory is unveiled for an instant in the
presence of the Father in the cloud. Communication again takes place,
marked with the familiar love of the Father for the Son. Both the deity
and the separate personhood of the Son are clearly presented in this
passage. The Father spoke to the Son at another time, recorded in John
12:28:

"Father, glorify Your name." There came then a voice out of
heaven: "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again" (John
12:28).

Again, the distinction of the person of the Father and of the Son
is clearly maintained. This is a conversation, not a monologue.

Some of the most obvious passages relevant to the Father and the
Son are found in the prayers of Jesus Christ. These are not mock
prayers-Jesus is not speaking to himself (nor, as the Oneness writer
would put it, is Jesus' humanity speaking to His deity)-He is clearly
communicating with another person, that being the person of the Father. Transcendent heights are reached in the lengthiest prayer we have,
that of John 17. No one can miss the fact of the communication of one
person (the Son) with another (the Father) presented in this prayer.
Note just a few examples of how the Son refers to the Father as a separate person:

Jesus spoke these things; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He
said, "Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son
may glorify You, even as You gave Him authority over all flesh,
that to all whom You have given Him, He may give eternal life.
This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom You have sent" (John 17:1-3).

The usage of personal pronouns and direct address puts the very
language squarely on the side of maintaining the separate personhood
of Father and Son. This is not to say that their unity is something that
is a mere unity of purpose; indeed, given the background of the Old
Testament, the very statements of the Son regarding His relationship with the Father are among the strongest assertions of His deity in the
Bible.

Striking is the example of Matthew 27:46, where Jesus, quoting
from Psalm 22:1, cries out, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" That the Father is the immediate person addressed is clear
from Luke's account, where the next statement from Jesus in his narrative is "Father, into your hands I commit My spirit" (Luke 23:46).'
That this is the Son addressing the Father is crystal clear, and the ensuing personhood of both is inarguable.

Jesus' words in Matthew 11:27 almost seem to be more at home in
the gospel of John than in Matthew:

"All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no
one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the
Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal
Him" (Matthew 11:27).

Here the reciprocal relationship between the Father and Son is put
forth with exactness, while at the same time dictating the absolute deity
of both. Only God has the authority to "hand over all things," and no
mere creature could ever be the recipient of the control of "all things"
either. Jesus "reveals" the Father to those He wills to do so. Obviously,
two divine persons are in view here.

It is just as clear that the Lord Jesus Christ is never identified as
the Father by the apostle Paul but is shown to be another person besides the Father. A large class of examples of this would be the greetings
in the epistles of Paul. In Romans 1:7 we read, "Grace to you and peace
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." The same greeting is
found in 1 Corinthians 1:3; 2 Corinthians 1:2; Galatians 1:3; Ephesians
1:2; and Philippians 1:2.

A COUPLE OF MISUSED PASSAGES

There are only a few passages that can be appealed to in the attempt
to confuse the persons of the Father and the Son. Most are found in
the gospel of John where the full deity of Christ is so strongly emphasized. Yet that Gospel is tremendously clear in its witness to the exis tence of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. One of the
most often cited passages is from Jesus' words in John 14:

Jesus said to him, "Have I been so long with you, and yet you
have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen
the Father; how can you say, `Show us the Father'? Do you not
believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words
that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the
Father abiding in Me does His works" (John 14:9-10).

Some insist that when Jesus says, "He who has seen Me has seen
the Father," this is the same as saying, "I am the Father." But this ignores the very words that follow, where the Lord distinguishes himself
from the Father by saying the Father abides in Him and does His (the
Father's) works through Him. The truth that Jesus teaches here, however, does support the full deity of Christ, for no mere creature could
ever say, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father." Jesus' words here
do not make Him the Father, but they do tell us that the unity that
exists between Father and Son is far more than a mere unity of purpose
or intention. The Son reveals the Father, or to use the words of John
himself, "He has explained' Him" (John 1:18).