The Trinity
Four Studies on God’s Revelation of Himself
by David Gooding
Have you ever wondered why we should try to understand the Trinity when the word itself isn’t in the Bible? In this sermon, Dr Gooding argues that if we love the Lord Jesus we’ll want to know the triune God—one God in three persons—each fully God in nature yet distinct, all three involved in our salvation. To study the Trinity is not to try and grasp dry theological principles, but the glorious person of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and this understanding will be our highest occupation throughout unending eternity.
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One God in Three Persons
It is good to be with you once again, and I thank you for your invitation. Let’s begin our meditation this evening by reading two short passages from the New Testament. The first of them is to be found in the Gospel by Matthew chapter 28. It records our Lord’s words to his apostles as he was about to leave them to ascend to the Father’s right hand.
And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ (vv. 18–20)
Another passage, from 2 Corinthians 13, reading the very last verse.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (v. 14)
Tonight and in the coming three Saturday nights, God willing, I propose to do my best to respond to your invitation and discuss with you the blessed and holy Trinity. I am grateful to have been made aware by the chairman that, in inviting me to address this question, you already realize what a profound question you are asking me to investigate. It is, in fact, the most profound question that it is possible for mortal men and women to think about.
Certainly, we shall find that it will go far beyond what we are capable of imagining, let alone thinking about. For the topic you have asked me to address is not so much what God has said—though we shall of course be interested in and taken up with what God has said; nor is it so much what God has done—the topic before us is what God is like in himself. And it is an immense condescension on the part of the Almighty that he invites us poor little human beings to come and reverently peer into what he himself is like, and to think about the relationships of ‘the three persons of the Trinity’, as we have learned to call them.
To come near to God and peer into his very being is not a topic to be undertaken lightly, is it? We do well, like Moses before the burning bush, to take our shoes off our feet, for the ground upon which we stand is holy ground. Above all, the result of our thinking should be profound worship of the God who has thus invited us to think about him. You will need to pray, my brothers and sisters, that as I talk to you of these things I may be kept by God’s Holy Spirit from saying anything unworthy or untrue of almighty God.
We know from our scientists that if we were to take the atom, a tiny little piece of God’s creation, and begin to peer into it to ask what is inside, we should find it to be exceedingly complicated. How could we then expect almighty God, the creator, to be less complicated? So let’s bring our mental capacities and our spiritual powers to the limit of their ability and work hard together as God invites us to think about himself.
Why study the Trinity?
I suspect somebody is bound to say, ‘But why should we trouble ourselves to try to understand the Trinity? Even the word Trinity that you use is not a Bible word. Why then should we even think in terms like ‘Trinity’, when the very word doesn’t occur in Scripture? And why do we need to think about it anyway?’
I remember many years ago in Russia having the opportunity to give a gospel talk to a number of people, most of whom were unbelievers and brought up in atheistic communism. At the end of the talk, a learned physicist was the first to raise a question: ‘Why have I got to believe in the Trinity before I can proceed any further?’. She was brought up in a country where the dominant religious church takes its stand upon the Trinity and judges whether you are a Christian or not according to whether you believe in the Trinity or not. As a physicist, she found this a very difficult concept. ‘Why,’ said she, ‘have I got to start off by believing in the Trinity?’
I took the liberty of saying, ‘You don’t have to start there. You need simply to come and listen to Christ, and when you have listened to what he says, you will eventually be obliged to think about his relationship to God, and that will involve you in thinking about the Trinity.’
And I should like to assure everybody here tonight that you can get to heaven without understanding the Trinity. You surely know that, and had you asked the dying thief upon the cross about the three divine persons of the Trinity I think he would have been hard put to make a reply. Yet he realized who Christ was, put his faith in Christ and was assured that he would be with him in paradise that very day. ‘Well, there you are,’ you say. ‘Why do you bother to come to Carryduff and exercise our poor brains trying to think about the Trinity, when you’ve just told us you don’t need to think about it at all in order to be saved?’
But wait a minute! If God invites us as believers to think about the Godhead, do you suppose it would be good manners to say, ‘Sorry, God, but I’m not interested in that; it’s too complicated’? And anyway, we’re Christians, aren’t we? We love the Lord Jesus and never tire thinking about him. If, therefore, we begin to think seriously about him, we shall eventually find ourselves driven to ask what his relationship is with God, and from there on it will be impossible to escape thinking about the Trinity.
So I’m going to ask you this evening to keep your Bibles open, if you will, and not just sit and listen to me. I’ll be glad if you’re prepared to do some work and actually look at the Scriptures I shall quote to see whether the things that I speak of are so. My thesis is that if we love the Lord Jesus and are prepared to listen to what he says, he will eventually oblige us, even force us, to think about this matter of the blessed and holy Trinity.
The pre-existence of Christ
To start with, as we listen to our Lord in the Gospels, we shall find more than once that he talks about his pre-existence, which is a thing to be pondered at once. His claim is that he didn’t begin to exist when he was born of the Virgin Mary, but he already existed long before that. Let’s look at some of those passages.
John 1:15
This is one of the first testimonies that John the Baptist, that great prophet, gave to Jesus Christ our Lord:
(John bore witness about him, and cried out, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.”’)
We’d better stop to look at that verse in detail. It’s a little bit complicated, isn’t it? John is saying some things about our Lord.
‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me”’. John the Baptist was born into this world before our Lord was born, and before our Lord appeared publicly on the scene he already had a very wide public ministry, calling on the people to repent and be baptized in Jordan. Christ came after John in the course of human history; thus John refers to Christ as having come after him.
Then John says, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me’; meaning, ‘He has been promoted above me. Though he comes after me in time, he has been given a place above me and before me.’ This was because John was but a voice crying in the wilderness (v. 23). The one who came after John was none less than God incarnate, the Lord. ‘And therefore,’ says John, ‘he is now occupying a far more elevated position than I am.’ Why?
Now, here comes the third statement: ‘because he was before me’. ‘He was first, then I’, says John. And here John is pointing to that vast, wonderful thing about Christ: ‘Before he was born into the world, he was before me’. He’s referring to Christ’s pre-existence.
Colossians 1
When we listen to Paul he will tell us not only that he was before all things; he is before all things. Nothing happens in this universe that takes him by surprise because he wasn’t expecting it. He’s before everything that happens, as he ever was before all things. He existed before the universe was created.
Not to be too gloomy, one night you may be getting the supper ready, expecting your husband to arrive any minute. But unknown to you, he’s been involved in an accident and he will be delayed, if not already in the hospital. You don’t know that, do you? Because, you see, you come after the event. Not so with Christ. He comes before all events; he belongs to eternity and therefore he pre-existed.
John 8:58
And then we read that he said to the Pharisees and to those who professed to be his disciples, but weren’t really, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am’. We notice carefully the tenses that he uses. When he says, ‘Before Abraham was [in the past]’, he doesn’t say ‘I was’; he says ‘I am’. He’s using the timeless name of God, ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (Exod 3:14)—the God of eternity. ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ Therefore, he’s referring to his pre-existence.
Christ’s relationship with the Father
Let’s look at some of those passages.
John 17:5, 24
This is our Lord praying to his Father, as he stood on the threshold of Gethsemane and the cross.
And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (v. 5)
Inescapably, therefore, we have to think about the question: how, then, is he related to God, if it is true that before he came into our world he pre-existed in glory with the Father? He repeats it in verse 24,
Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
We begin to see, not only the fact that he was pre-existent before he entered our world, but there was a relationship between him and God the Father: ‘. . . the glory that I had with you before the world existed’, and ‘. . . you loved me before the foundation of the world’. My brothers and sisters, if we love the Lord Jesus we shall not pass by these two statements as though they were of no interest to us; we shall take the cue and think about his pre-existence and the relationship between him and the Father before the world was.
John 6:38; 18:37
We notice also what he actually says about his way of coming into our world and where he came from:
For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. (6:38)
Of course he was born of a virgin (see Matt 1:23), but that isn’t the sum total of the story. Here he is pointing out that he had ‘come down from heaven’. Now, you and I were born into this world, but we never would dream of saying, ‘I have come down from heaven’ (at least I hope we wouldn’t; we’re not Hindus). But he did, and when he stood on trial for his life in front of Pilate, he said to Pilate,
You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice. (John 18:37)
He was born of the Virgin, born of a human mother, as all human beings are, but you’ll notice the two statements: ‘I have come down from heaven’ and ‘I have come into the world’.
John 16:28
He was sent by the Father, and he is going back to the Father:
I came from the Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.
So he came down from heaven. But what does he mean when he says, ‘I came from the Father, and I’m going back to the Father’?
My simple point is this: if we love him we cannot avoid thinking of the implications of what he now says to us. If he existed in heaven before he came down into the world, we must ask what his relationship with the Father was then. And since he has returned, what is that relationship now? We cannot ignore the question of his relationship with the Father, not if we love and believe in the Lord Jesus. And that, in essence, is what we shall be thinking about when we think of the blessed and holy Trinity, just as generations of believers, observing this kind of statement from the lips of our blessed Lord, have sought to understand further what is and was and shall be his relationship with God the Father.
The Holy Spirit’s relationship with Christ and with the Father
Let’s now look at some of those passages.
John 14:16; 15:26
And there’s another reason why we cannot avoid thinking about the topic, and that is because of what Christ said not merely about himself but what he said about the Holy Spirit. When our Lord was preparing his apostles for the fact that he was going away, he said:
And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever. (KJV)
The Holy Spirit is not merely the Comforter, though he is that, of course. The Greek word for ‘Comforter’ is paraklētos. He’s the paraclete, as some call him: the comforter, the counsellor, the advocate who intercedes with God on our behalf (Rom 8:26–27). But notice what our Lord said: the Holy Spirit is not simply the Comforter; he is another Comforter, which implies that he is another like the Lord Jesus is and was. Christ is also our advocate before the Father: ‘But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous’ (1 John 2:1). In sending the Holy Spirit, Christ describes him as another like himself.
But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father . . . (15:26 KJV).
- He is given to us by the Father: ‘The Father . . . shall give you another Comforter’ (14:16 KJV);
- He is sent by the Lord Jesus: ‘whom I will send to you’ (15:26).
So the Holy Spirit came. And just like the Lord Jesus came at his birth in Bethlehem, the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost in Jerusalem.
Now let me just fill that in so that we grasp the point of it. God was always omnipresent, wasn’t he? God is everywhere, and therefore, as we shall come to see, the Son of God was omnipresent because he was one with the Father. And yet there was a sense in which he came to our world, and we believe that he came at the Virgin birth. When he became man, he entered our world in a sense that he had not done so before.
Now he talks about the Holy Spirit, and being God the Holy Spirit is omnipresent. Ah, yes, but there was another sense in which the Holy Spirit came into our world, which he did at Pentecost. So, he’s pre-existent: he was given by the Father and sent by the Son. And now he is present with us and indeed in us.
John 16:8, 13–15
And what is more, as our Lord proceeds to talk about the Holy Spirit in John 16, he indicates that the Holy Spirit is a person.
I shall have to vex you now, and there’s no extra cost for this! You see, in Greek every noun is one of three genders, and so a man is masculine, a woman is feminine, and then other things, like trees, are neuter. But it’s not quite as simple as that, because in Greek a little child can be neuter, and so forth and so on. It is a complicated business. Now, the word for spirit in Greek is a neuter word, pneuma, and therefore, if you’re referring to the spirit, you can use a neuter pronoun—which in English is ‘it’. That’s simply because the noun for spirit is neuter, and the pronouns normally agree in gender with the nouns they refer to. That Greek lesson was a bit painful, wasn’t it? But you’ll soon be over it. Take an aspirin tonight, and that will get rid of it!
And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement . . . When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (see 16:8, 13–14)
As the Lord goes on to elaborate on the coming of the Holy Spirit, he uses the pronoun in the masculine gender because the Holy Spirit is not just a force, or a power like electricity. He is a person, as the Lord Jesus is a person; and God, of course, is a person. Well, we have a problem, don’t we? If the Holy Spirit is a person, and he eternally existed before he came into this world, how exactly would you describe his relationship with the Father?
And now we have two problems! We’ve seen how the Lord Jesus talks of himself as being pre-existent before he came into this world; and then he talks of the Holy Spirit as being pre-existent before he came into this world. If Jesus is a person, as we know he is, and so is the Holy Spirit, how are they related to God?
Christians were confronted with that question right from the very start, and they tried to think it through. It was a difficult problem, and the story of the theologians who thought about these things and then tried to explain them is a long, long story; we shouldn’t despise it. Thank God for men who took our Lord seriously and wanted to know how he is related to the Father, how he is related to the Holy Spirit, and how all three are related together.
So then, my first answer to your question is that if we love the Lord Jesus we shall try to think about the blessed and holy Trinity, and we shall want to know the relationship of what we call ‘the divine persons’.
I must come now to some other technical things. I promise that I won’t be so technical another night. But then you love the Lord, and that makes it important to try to understand these things.
We have one good lady in our assembly who was asked to go to a garden party at Buckingham Palace. If you were to ask her what happened there, she’s not likely to start off by saying, ‘I saw Elizabeth’. And what about Charles? Well, she might talk about Charles, but then she might later talk about Her Majesty, and then she might talk about one of the other princes—the Duke of Edinburgh, for instance. Now, how are they all related? Hello! magazine will be full of it—pictures of the Queen, pictures of Diana and Charles and the others. You’re nobody if you don’t keep up with that and know all the ins and outs of who’s who! Can you get through without knowing who’s who in the blessed and holy Trinity? That could be much more worthwhile to think about than the transient members of our royal family. May God bless them indeed and help them and preserve them.
One God in three persons
But now let me say a word or two about this term Trinity. You’ll say, ‘But it’s not in the Bible’, and you’re absolutely right. The word ‘trinity’ simply means a threesome. So, you could talk about a business firm that is run by a trinity: Mr Black, Mr Brown and Mr Green—three fellows working together, not independently, but all working together they run the whole business. They are a trinity, a threesome. But you’ll notice that when it comes to Mr Black, Mr Brown and Mr Green, they are three separate people. Hence, in the context of the divine persons, the word trinity is perhaps not the very best word you could think of. Triunity is better. It sounds a little bit odd in English, but we’ll use it because we’re more used to it when thinking about the triune God—one God in three persons. It is better therefore to talk about the Triunity than about the Trinity because there is only one God though the persons of the Godhead are three.
Let me emphasize that, for it is exceedingly important. If one of these days you come across a Muslim friend in this city, it’s not always the best approach to introduce the subject of the deity of Christ and to say that Jesus is the Son of God. Why not? It’s because a Muslim thinks that when you say ‘Jesus is the Son of God’, you imply that God had sexual relations with the Virgin Mary, and Jesus was the result of it. In a Muslim’s ears, that is absolute blasphemy. They don’t understand, of course, so it’s better not to start off by talking about Jesus being the Son of God, but to tell them some of the lovely stories that he told, and the gracious deeds that he did. For truth to tell, his character and his words are infinitely attractive. But if you do get round to talking about the Trinity, the Muslim will think you are talking about three Gods—one, the Father; two, the Son; and three, the Holy Spirit—and again to him that is blasphemous. So you’ll need to tell him that we Christians do not believe in three Gods; there is only one God.
So let us read a few more passages, just to hammer that home into our hearts in preparation for our coming studies in weeks two, three and four. We’ll start with two representative passages from Isaiah and one from the Gospel of Mark.
Isaiah 43:10–11; 44:6; Mark 12:28–29
‘You are my witnesses,’ declares the LORD, ‘and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the LORD, and besides me there is no saviour.’ (Isa 43:10–11) Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.’ (44:6)
And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, ‘Which commandment is the most important of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The most important is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”’ (Mark 12:28–29)
Christ himself is affirming that there is only one God. First Timothy 2 tells us the way we ought to pray for all men, and in exhorting us Paul says, ‘there is one God’ (v. 5). And now that really presents the problem to us, doesn’t it? If Christ pre-existed in heaven along with the Father, and if the Holy Spirit pre-existed along with the Father before he came into our world, but there is only one God; how do you spell out the relationship between those three—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? The short answer is, of course, that, as far as their nature is concerned, every one of them and each one singly is God. The Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. They are all God in nature, but they are different.
And now I’m hard up for language, so I shall have to trouble you again. But it’s worthwhile in this first study to get our terms clear if we can, because they will come up again and again as we proceed with the topic in the coming weeks. There are, we say, three persons in the Godhead, but then we have to ask ourselves exactly what we mean by the term ‘person’.
If you went home tonight and somebody asked you, ‘How many were there at the meeting?’, you might say, ‘About sixty persons’, or you might say, ‘About sixty people,’ for the terms ‘persons’ and ‘people’ are interchangeable in English. Sixty persons would mean sixty people, each independent of the other.
But please notice that when we talk about the persons of the Godhead, we do not mean people. In the intended sense of the word there are three persons in the Godhead; there are not three people in the Godhead. There is only one God—and in that sense, three persons. What do we mean by ‘person’? Well, in the first place, we mean that within the Godhead there are three centres of relationship. The Godhead is not a monolith; there are relationships within the Godhead.
You say, ‘That’s a difficult concept’.
Well, forgive me. So, let’s change the subject and think about you. Who are you? Are you Phyllis?
‘No,’ you say, ‘not Phyllis; that’s my sister.’
Oh, who are you then?
‘I’m Joan.’
And what is your surname?
‘Smith’.
You’re Joan Smith, and your sister is Phyllis Smith.
‘Yes.’
Now, you’re a human being, aren’t you? You’ve got human nature.
‘Yes.’
What about your sister? Has she got human nature?
You say, ‘What on earth do you think? Of course she’s human.’
Oh, I see, you’re both human. You’ve got the same human nature, but you’ve got different names.
‘Yes.’ That’s how it is down here in our world because we’re separate people. Within the Godhead itself, the three persons of the Trinity all have the same nature. Each is God—the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. They do have different names; but they’re not different people. Shall I expound it a bit more?
What is your name?
‘I’m Aloysius’.
Are you really? That’s a grand name. Now, Aloysius, what are you? Is that leg of yours, you?
‘Who else is it, if it isn’t me?’
You’re a leg then, I suppose?
‘Well, I have two legs, but that’s not enough to describe me.’
There’s something else about you?
‘Oh, yes,’ you say, ‘I have a heart.’
You do? And that’s different from your leg?
‘Yes, but it’s part of me.’
So your body is made up of different parts?
‘But I’m more than that; I have a mind.’
And is that mind different from your leg and different from other parts of you?
‘Well, it’s different from my body,’ you’ll say.
Then, if you’re a Christian, you’ll tell me you’ve got a spirit and a soul.
And I shall say, ‘You’re a complicated thing, Aloysius, aren’t you? Do you expect me to believe all that? I thought you were just one. Now you seem to be saying you’re a very complicated affair—body, soul and spirit, and marvellously made. Yes, you’re made in the image of God, of course.’
And if human beings can be one and yet tripartite inside—made up of three (body, soul and spirit)—it is perhaps not surprising that the Godhead should have three persons, three different centres of relationship and three different functions.
The involvement of the three divine persons in our salvation
As we draw to a close, let us think further of some of statements that we know exceedingly well, which remind us that the three persons of the Godhead is not just a theory for the theologians to try and work out as a puzzle on a wet Thursday afternoon. It is part of our salvation to know that all three persons of the Godhead are involved in our salvation.
1 John 4:14; Luke 19:10; Matthew 1:20; Luke 1:34–35
In the birth of Christ all three persons were involved:
- God took the initiative—the Father has sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world (1 John 4:14).
- The Lord Jesus said about himself—the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10).
- Joseph was told not to fear to take Mary as his wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit (Matt 1:20).
The Father sent the Son and the Son himself deliberately came, but he was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin. He didn’t come without the operation of the Holy Spirit, even in the fact that he was born of Mary. When Mary said, ‘How will this be?’, the angel replied, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you . . .’ (Luke 1:34–35). All three persons of the Trinity were involved in the coming of the Lord Jesus for our salvation.
2 Corinthians 5:21; 1 Peter 2:21–24; Hebrews 9:14
And how about what our Lord did for us at Calvary? That comes near to our hearts, doesn’t it? This is not mere theory.
For our sake he [God the Father] made him [the Son] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor 5:21)
Tomorrow morning, if you’re spared to come to the Lord’s Supper, that will fill your heart and mind, won’t it? How could the Father do that for me? Yes, but it is also said of the Son of God:
Christ also suffered for you . . . He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. (1 Pet 2:21, 24)
The blessed Lord was personally involved. He himself suffered, leaving us an example, so that we might follow in his steps (v. 21).
And listen to how the Holy Spirit was involved:
Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God. (Heb 9:14)
All three persons of the Trinity were involved in the great sacrifice of Christ on our behalf at Calvary.
1 Peter 1:3; John 1:12; 3:5
Have you been born again? Who and what was involved in your being born again?
God has begotten us—the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . has begotten us again to a living hope (1 Pet 1:3 NKJV).
On the other hand, it says of Christ—as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God (John 1:12 NKJV).
But then, as our Lord explained to Nicodemus the Pharisee—unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God (John 3:5).
So all three divine persons were involved in your being born again.
1 John 4:15; Galatians 2:20; Romans 8:9
Then we’re told that all three divine persons dwell in the believer.
- Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him (1 John 4:15).
- I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Gal 2:20).
- You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you (Rom 8:9)
Conclusion
Isn’t that enough to bow our hearts in worship? To think that no less than all three divine persons were and are involved in saving the likes of you and me, to rescue us from hell and perdition and bring us home to heaven. What part do they play, therefore?
Well, you remember that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1). God did it. The New Testament then tells us that all things were made by the Word, that is, the Son of God (John 1:1–3). And at creation, we’re told the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters (Gen 1:2). All three persons of the Trinity were involved.
You say, ‘It’s getting very complicated now’.
Oh, my dear good brother, my dear good sister, prepare yourself for going to heaven, for that’s going to be even more complicated! You’ve got to meet them one of these days, and if they’re in us now, hadn’t we better make them welcome guests and think about them as we would think about any guest staying in our house?
Taking care to be accurate in scriptural terms
So, to ask the question again, ‘Why study the Trinity?’, we must be careful to think this matter through and to spend a good deal of time on it. It’s because, while all three persons are involved in our salvation and all are in us as believers, we have to be careful what we say about them.
It would never be true to say ‘the Father died for us at Calvary’, would it? The Bible never says ‘God died for us’, though it is perfectly true to put it the other way around because if he who died for you wasn’t God you’re not saved anyway.
You say, ‘Isn’t that splitting hairs?’.
No, it’s us trying to think about what God is really like and it’s better to keep to the Bible and the language God uses. It never says that God died for us, but it does say, ‘while we were still sinners, Christ [the Son] died for us’ (Rom 5:8).
It never says ‘the Holy Spirit died for us’, and how could it say that anyway? The Holy Spirit was involved in the sacrifice of Christ, as we’ve just read in Hebrews 9:14, ‘Christ . . . through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God’. But never does it say that the Holy Spirit died for us.
In next week’s session we shall run across some very big practical problems. For example, it is said of God the Father, that he neither slumbers nor sleeps: ‘Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep’ (Ps 121:4). It is absolutely impossible for him to do so. And yet we’re told that our blessed Lord Jesus, after preaching to the crowd, got into a boat with his disciples to cross the lake and he fell asleep. If you believe he’s the Son of God, how can that be? If God doesn’t slumber or sleep, and yet Jesus Christ could slumber and sleep in a boat, how can you say that Jesus Christ is really God? People have their ways of talking about it, don’t they? They say he did some things as God, and then he did other things as a man. We shall find that that’s a very unsatisfactory way of talking about the incarnation. But that’s for another time.
All I’m pressing on you tonight by way of introduction is that, since the divine persons have spoken to us about the Godhead and what God is like in and of himself, and the wonder of the sending of the Son and the sending of the Spirit for the sake of our salvation, then we owe it to them to use all the mental and spiritual powers we have to try and think this thing through with God and seek the gracious power of the Holy Spirit to enlighten our minds. Let’s do it with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and above all in the spirit of worshipping the divine three.
And so as I close, let me just rehearse this delightful prayer in your ears. It was a prayer that Paul prayed for the Corinthian believers, and I take the liberty of praying it tonight for you, my brothers and sisters, and for myself in the days that come ahead:
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit [all three persons of the blessed Trinity] be with you all. (2 Cor 13:14). Amen.
Shall we pray.
Our Father, we thank thee for the compliment thou hast paid us as thy sons and daughters. Thou hast not treated us as slaves, for a slave does not know what his Lord does. We thank thee, Father, that thou hast brought us so near and given us the possibility to begin to think and contemplate thy very essence and the three holy persons of the Godhead. Our response is to worship thee now. We humble ourselves before thee and we pray, Lord, for the grace of thy Holy Spirit that, as the days go by, we may be drawn further into the understanding of the wonder that thou art. So bless our study, we pray, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Deity of Christ
It is a relief, my good brothers and sisters, to see you here again this evening. I was afraid I had worked you so hard last week that I should never see your faces again this side of glory. But my fears were unsubstantial, so welcome back.
Review of our first study
This is our second study in a short series on the blessed and holy Trinity. In our first study we observed that it is the most profound subject in the whole of holy Scripture because we are thinking not merely of what God has done from time to time, but we are invited, rather, to look inside the deity, the divine persons, and to consider what God is in himself. And that is a topic to which we come as Moses before the burning bush, with the shoes off our feet, for the ground upon which we stand is holy ground. Let us pray that as we continue our studies, it may progressively dawn on us that we are not dealing with some dry principles of abstract theology, but with the glorious person of God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and there will never be any higher occupation throughout an unending eternity.
The Trinity, or the Triunity, is a difficult subject; no one pretends it’s going to be simple. The very word and many of the technical terms that the theologians use are not found in Scripture itself. You will search from Genesis to Revelation and not find the word ‘Trinity’. So, in our first study we asked ourselves a simple practical question: Why study the Trinity? Why should we bother to engage in this difficult, hard, tough thinking? Why can’t we just take the Scriptures as they stand? When they talk to us about the Lord Jesus being a man, accept it, believe it and thank God for it. And let us do the same when they talk of him as the Son of God: take it, believe it and understand it without trying to come to grips with what that implies as to his relationship with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.
The answer we gave ourselves last week was simply this: if we love the Lord Jesus, we shall listen to him and not get tired of anything that concerns him. And secondly, as we listen to what he said when he was here on earth, we notice that he frequently spoke of his pre-existence before he was born of the Virgin Mary and entered our world, and he talked about the glory that he had with the Father before the world was (see John 17:5).
His contemporaries were startled when he said that he had come down from heaven. It sounded stupid to them, and their reaction was to say, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph [as it was publicly assumed], whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, “I have come down from heaven”?’ (John 6:41–42). Matthew adds that it was in the synagogue at Nazareth, his home town, and they said, ‘Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?’ (Matt 13:54–56).
How could he say that he had come down from heaven? But he did say it, of course, which raises the immediate question: what was he then, before he came down from heaven? The same thing is said about the Holy Spirit, whose ‘official’ coming was on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1–¬4). Of him too, it is said that he came down from heaven. So, what was he doing before? Who was he, and what was his relationship with God?
Because these things pertain to our blessed Lord and Saviour and to the Godhead, we who love him are surely going to follow this topic of the Trinity as far as we can, as the Holy Spirit expounds these wonderful things in holy Scripture about God the Father, the Son of God and the Spirit of God.
The preincarnate Son of God
Before he came to earth, was our Lord an angel? Is that a possibility? Sometimes in the Old Testament, we read of someone called the angel of the Lord, and as we follow the stories it becomes evident that this was God (see Exod 3:2). Was our blessed Lord Jesus the angel of the Lord, and if so, is he just an angel?
‘Well, to start with,’ you say, ‘what is an angel?’
The word translated as angel (mălâk in Hebrew and angelos in Greek) simply means a messenger. In that sense, our Lord brought a message from God. But let us perceive at once and learn again from holy Scripture that our Lord was not merely an angel. On first hearing the Christian claim that Jesus is the Son of God, a Jew might perhaps have been tempted to think, ‘Ah, well, the angels are called sons of God, are they not?’ Job 1:6: ‘there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD’. The term, ‘sons of God’ (bēn ĕlōhîm in Hebrew) refers to angels. So, when our Lord is called Son of God, does it mean that he is a super-duper angel, perhaps, but simply an angel?
Let’s get that clear in our minds right from the start. You will remember how the first chapter of Hebrews faces this head-on, because it is written to Jews who might be in danger of confusing the title ‘Son of God’ with ‘sons of God’, referring to angels. Tonight I shall make you work, and it will be easier for me if you’re working alongside me. Anyway, you’ll want to check whether what I’m saying is right. It’s also a method of keeping awake, and sometimes on an occasion like this any help to do that is a very good and welcome thing!
So, let’s look at the passage:
having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’? Or again, ‘I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son’? (Heb 1:4–5)
This tells us that our Lord is different from the angels in his relationship with the Father. It’s not ‘. . . today I have created you’, but ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you’. Similarly in verse 7: ‘Of the angels he says, “He makes his angels winds, and his ministers a flame of fire”’—they are powerful, but transient and insubstantial. Then in verse 8: ‘But of the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever, the sceptre of uprightness is the sceptre of your kingdom”’. Notice who is talking. This is a quotation from Psalm 45, and it is God, whom we call God the Father, speaking. He is addressing our blessed Lord and says, ‘Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever’ (v. 6). These words are never spoken by the Father to any angel whatsoever.
To conclude the argument along that line, Hebrews 1:13 says, ‘And to which of the angels has he ever said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet”?’. Name any particular angel you can think of in any chapter of Scripture, and the challenge remains: to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’? The very position expresses equality with God.
So, then, to clear up that suggestion, in his preincarnation our blessed Lord was not merely an angel in the normal sense of the word ‘angel’.
God willing, a fortnight from now, we shall have to study how Scripture also affirms his true manhood: how that can be and how we can then rightly talk of him. That will be a matter for serious discussion. You see, Christians normally believe that Jesus is both God and man. And then, when they’re confronted with certain passages in the New Testament, they are a little bit hard put to explain.
We mentioned it in our last study, but let’s mention it again. The Old Testament says of God, ‘Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep’ (Ps 121:4); yet it is said of Christ that he fell asleep in a boat at the end of a long tiring day (Mark 4:38). If God neither slumbers nor sleeps, how can Christ be God if he fell asleep? Similarly, Isaiah tells us that the Lord ‘does not faint or grow weary’ (Isa 40:28); yet John tells us that, after a long morning’s walk through the hot sun, our Lord came to Samaria, and being tired out from his journey he sat on a well (see John 4:6). If God never gets weary and you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, how will you explain to your inquisitive non-Christian friend how Jesus could be tired, but nevertheless regarded as God?
A convenient way of explaining this, which has appealed to many Christians, is to say, ‘Well, sometimes Jesus acted as God, and sometimes he acted as a man’. We shall find in a later study that that isn’t the best way of talking about our blessed Lord, for he wasn’t half God and half man; he was both God and man. But that is a study for another week.
Scriptures which declare the Lord Jesus to be God
I want now to take us through a number of Scriptures therefore, which declare him to be God, continuing with references to our blessed Lord before his incarnation. I’d like to follow that with a succession of time events. These are all individually well known to you, but let us read about them again as a collection of verses that cover our Lord from his preincarnation through to his second coming, and see how the New Testament consistently addresses him as God.
John 1:1
We shall begin by collecting the facts given to us in holy Scripture about our Lord, and start with very well-known words in John’s Gospel. We shall not need to spend a long time on them; we know them very, very well and have heard them from many preachers. ‘In the beginning,’ says John, ‘was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
Three great statements about our preincarnate Lord
1. In the beginning was the Word
We are told by those who know these things to notice the verb in particular, ‘In the beginning was’, as distinct from later on where it says of the Word that at one stage he ‘became flesh’ (v. 14). The Word became flesh, for he never was flesh before. But as distinct from that, in the first verse it doesn’t say the Word became anything. It doesn’t say, ‘In the beginning he began’; nor does it say, ‘In the beginning he was created’. Indeed not. In the beginning the Word was—that is, already was. Here the verb points us to his eternality. He had no beginning: he is God, without beginning of life or end of days.
2. The Word was with God
Notice two things about that phrase. It tells us that the Word can, logically at any rate, be distinguished from God. If the Word was with God, then you have two things, don’t you? You have the Word and God; and the Word was with God. So we rightly make a distinction between the Word and God—here being God the Father. But notice again what the experts in Greek tell us. They point out that here, when it says ‘with God’, the language is such that is used normally in Greek idiom of a person-to-person relationship: a relationship between people. Therefore, it is appropriate here because, when it says that ‘the Word was with God’, it points to a fellowship between persons, a personal fellowship.
If you push the light switch on your wall and the light comes on, you can say that the light is ‘with us’. But it’s no good talking to the electricity: ‘Hello, electricity. How have you enjoyed the day?’ You’ll get no answer, for electricity is a mere force, a power. But this Word is talked of in personal terms as being with the Father. And it is one of those things that makes our hearts rejoice.
You see, that phrase ‘with the Father’ reoccurs for instance in 1 John 1, where John tells us about this blessed one, our Lord. He says,
the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. (v. 2)
He is writing about his experience of the Word, and he asks us to think as best we can of those uncharted eternities of divine fellowship within the Godhead: the Word with the Father.
And then John adds,
that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us [the apostles]. (v. 3)
They had seen him and touched him when he became incarnate (v. 1). It must have been an extraordinary experience for them to suddenly get the idea that the man sailing in the boat with them was more than human. This was ‘the Son of the Father’, or in our terms ‘God incarnate’. Those terms hadn’t been invented then, but what an experience it was, and John hurries his pen across the page to tell us about it, so that we too may have fellowship with them in the wonders of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Do you know what eternal life is? You’ve got it, haven’t you? I think you profess to have it, most of you. What is eternal life now that you’ve got it?
You say, ‘I’m going to last forever; that’s what it means’.
Oh, good. Anything more? This eternal life that you have, my brother, my sister, is ‘that eternal life, which was with the Father’, in that indescribably blessed and profound fellowship of the divine persons. They never needed us to complete the fellowship. God was never lonely, you know. God is a triunity; God is love; and if God is love he must have someone or something to love. How can you be love if there is no one around to love? But then, you see, the Triunity is not monolithic; it is a fellowship of persons. Would you like to try and imagine just now what that fellowship was like within the Godhead? It’s not a waste of time, for that is the life you have—the life you have been invited to share. Our fellowship is with the Father and his Son—that is what it means to have eternal life.
3. The Word was God
This is the third thing that John says in this verse. Now, if ever you have to read that in public, do be careful where you put the emphasis. Some people read it as ‘The Word was God’, and that sounds a little bit as if you are implying he was God in time past, but he isn’t now. But that’s not what the Greek is saying. If you want to put any emphasis there at all, you should put it on the last word: ‘The Word was God’. So, while you can say that there is a distinction between the Word and the Father, yet the Word is God, just as the Father is God.
You say, ‘How can that be?’.
Well, that is a thing we shall have to consider, God willing, in a later study. Tonight, we’re just collecting the facts—the statements that are made about our Lord and his Godhood.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses who come troubling us at our doors will tell us all sorts of marvellous things. They used to translate Colossians 1:16 as, ‘For by him all the other things were created’, thereby saying that he was one of the things, and then he made the other things. But of course there’s no word in the Greek that Paul wrote for ‘other’; so their new translation has now omitted the term. Congratulations to them for being honest with the text and omitting the term ‘the other’, so that it now reads correctly, ‘For by him all things were created’.
However, in John 1:1, where we are told ‘the Word was God’, they want to say that the Greek word there for God, theos, is being used as an adjective. I won’t worry you about the technicalities behind it, but it is possible for nouns in Greek to be used as adjectives. We do it in English, don’t we? For instance, the word ‘dog’ in English is a noun, yet you can use it as an adjective, and say, ‘This rose is a dog rose,’ in which case the word ‘dog’ is now an adjective to describe the species of this particular wild rose (rosa canina). And so the Jehovah’s Witnesses want to say that the phrase in John 1 should not be translated as ‘the Word was God’, but ‘the Word was God-like, divine, or of divine quality’. That is not true. There is a word in Greek that means divine, of divine quality, like God or of the nature of God. That word is theias. But that is not the word John uses here, and he doesn’t use it because he didn’t intend to use it. He uses the straight word for God, theos, not theias, and he tells us ‘the Word was God’—God over all. As the hymn puts it, ‘God ever bless’d! we bow the knee, | and hold all fullness dwells in Thee.’1
Colossians 1:15–17
We have thought of what our Lord was in his preincarnate days, but remember what is said about him at the creation of our universe: ‘He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For [in] him all things were created . . .’ (vv. 15–16).
Three great statements about our Lord at creation
*1. He is the image of the invisible God *
‘No one has seen God at any time’ (see 1 John 4:12). Nor indeed can he be seen; but our blessed Lord is the image, the full and complete expression, of God. And because he is, it follows that he must be God. How could he be the full expression of God if he were not God? So, in relation to God, he is the full expression of the invisible God.
*2. He is the firstborn of all creation *
In relation to the universe around us, he is the firstborn. Now in English, our word ‘firstborn’ would seem to indicate priority in time. The firstborn in the family is the first child to be born, and Mum and Dad can say, ‘This is our firstborn,’ meaning, the first child—one among many.
But in the Old Testament the word is used in a metaphorical sense and therefore it loses the time element. So God tells Moses he’s got to go and tell Pharaoh in the name of the Lord that Israel is his firstborn son. Imagine Moses having to walk up to His Majesty Pharaoh one morning and telling him, ‘God says that Israel—your slaves there in the brick kilns—is his firstborn’ (see Exod 4:22). Israel wasn’t the first nation that ever existed. It was a latecomer among the nations, but in God’s eyes Israel was number one in supreme or unique significance. ‘Firstborn’, therefore, is an honorific term, meaning, if you like, ‘prince’, ‘ruler’, ‘commander’.
3. For in him all things were created
You’ll see why our Lord is referred to as the ‘firstborn of all creation’ (Col 1:15). And now I shall have to be insistent on a literal translation of verse 16. It’s not simply, ‘For by him all things were created’, but ‘For by him the all things were created’—the all things as a group.
We are inclined to use the word ‘universe’ for all that there is; and if there are some other universes outside ours, it includes them as well. The whole of creation, everything created, was made by him. But he’s not in ‘the all things’; he’s not even the best of that group. He wasn’t created and he certainly didn’t create himself. Take the whole of creation on the one side, Christ stands on the other and through him the all things were created. Verse 17 tells us, ‘He is before all things, and in him all things hold together’.
When I was in Kyiv last year I was introduced to an elderly Jewish gentleman who not long before had come to faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Messiah. It was delightful to talk to him. Professionally he was a physicist, and so in the little time we had together he told me about his particular interest in ‘dark matter’, or dark energy as the astronomers call it. I don’t know if you’re interested in dark matter or dark energy; if you’re not, well, go to sleep. It’ll take me about a minute and a half, and then I’ll wake you up again. But dark energy is one of the new areas of research among astronomers in these last ten or twenty years. They’ve been trying to find it, and they’re not exactly sure where to look in the whole universe, because being dark you can’t see it. That’s a disadvantage!
You say, ‘How do they know it’s there?’.
Well, mathematics shows that there must be some colossal force that’s acting on the elements in the present universe. The very big question over these last fifty to seventy years has been, is the universe expanding or is it collapsing? If it collapses, that’s the end of everything. If it expands, then eventually our little planet will die of cold. These are big, practical questions. I know, of course, that they involve aeons of time, but the question remains, is the universe expanding or contracting? Is there this dark force—energy, matter, whatever it is—that is having an effect on all the other things in the universe regarding either expansion or contraction?
Being one of this world’s innocents, I asked the physicist, ‘So, what have you got to do, sir? If you don’t know what it is, how do you go about finding it?’ And he said that it was up to the mathematicians. So, perhaps, when they get this colossal great cyclotron and find out all kinds of new things about tiny particles of matter, they might come up with the secret to this dark energy.
How does this vast universe hang together? Scripture says that he holds it together. It was made in him; he’s the planner. It was made through him; he’s the agent. And it was made for him. I’ve often wondered whether Mary and Martha quite realized that, as they put on a dinner for him in their home. When they discover the full reality of who he is and see his glory, how they will worship him that deigned to come and eat at their table.
John 1:14
Three great statements about our Lord in his incarnation
*1. And the Word became flesh *
Notice exactly what it says, as that will serve us in good stead in later studies. It doesn’t say that the Word became a man; it says, ‘the Word became flesh’; that is, the Word became human. One of our tasks in subsequent studies will be to put that together. We’ve just been told in verse 1 that the Word was God, and then in verse 14 that the Word, who was God, became human. Who was it that became human?
You say, ‘The Word became human’.
Yes, Amen. Does it say anywhere that the Word ceased to be the Word, or something? No, indeed, not.
2. and dwelt among us
John uses a lovely phrase, evoking the Old Testament. It is literally, ‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tabernacle among us’. It’s a lovely illustration because the tabernacle in the Old Testament (Greek, the skene) was a building (a moveable tent), and at its completion the glory of God came down and filled that tabernacle. So, the Word became flesh without ceasing to be the Word.
3. and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth
‘But,’ says somebody, ‘isn’t there a Scripture somewhere that says that when the Word became flesh, he emptied himself of his divine powers?’
No, of course there isn’t. There is a Scripture that might sound like it, if you weren’t paying close attention. Perhaps we had better turn to it.
He Emptied Himself
Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the cross. (Phil 2:5¬–8 RV)
The crucial point to decide is, what does that phrase ‘emptied himself’ mean? The Greek word is the verb kenoō. It means ‘to empty’, and therefore there arose what was called the kenotic theory, particularly at the beginning of the last century and before. According to that theory, when the Word became human in the person of our Lord Jesus, he put aside the glories of his Godhead and the nature of the Godhead and lived simply as a man. In other words, he emptied himself of his divine attributes.
But no, he didn’t. That is not what the verse is saying. It doesn’t begin to say that he emptied himself of his deity or his divine powers. It says, being in the form of God, he counted it not a prize to be on equal terms with God.
Now consider this, my brothers and sisters. I don’t know if you have a holiday occupation of going around viewing stately homes. Now and again, I do, to see that their owners are behaving properly as they should, making the best of what they’ve inherited, and whether they’re keeping the home up well. But sometimes you’ll meet a young gentleman at the gate, far off the stately home itself, collecting your entrance money. When he says, ‘Good morning’, it’s in such a voice that you think, ‘Who is this? He isn’t an ordinary farm labourer.’ It’s the young son of the lord himself. Sitting there in that little keeper’s lodge with his sandwich, you can immediately see that he’s not on the same terms as his father. His father is in the Cadillac, or whatever, or in his beautiful stately home. This lad’s in something that’s not much better than a dog kennel, collecting fares from people. He may be acting as a servant but that hasn’t changed the fact that he’s the son of a duke. He remains that, but he has taken on the form of a servant.
The first evidence of our Lord emptying himself is not that he became human. You’ll notice that, won’t you? The first thing that’s said is not ‘he was in the form of God and became human’. No, no, no. The first step down was that he became a servant (v. 7). From being God the creator, whom everything in the universe is meant to serve, he became a servant. There are lots of men who are not servants; but he not only became a man, he became first a servant. You know the rest of the wonderful story: ‘he . . . [became] obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross’ (v. 8).
What does it mean, therefore, that he emptied himself? I suggest it means what the Hebrew word means in Isaiah 53:12, ‘He poured out his soul to death’. That is, he poured out his very self, without ceasing to be God. He poured himself out in service, even washing the feet of his unworthy disciples, and in the end dying for us. He poured himself out for you and for me. Would that be so wonderful, if by then he had been bereft of his deity? But he remained God incarnate, who took on the form of a servant and poured himself out to death, even death on the cross.
Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess
. . . who hath declared it of old? have not I the Lord? and there is no God else beside me; a just God and a saviour; there is none beside me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else. By myself have I sworn, the word is gone forth from my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, that unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. (Isa 45:21–23 RV)
Jehovah has sworn by himself that to him every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that there is no salvation beside him and that he alone is the Saviour.
Now listen to what Philippians 2 is saying.
Wherefore also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the name which is above every name; that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:9–11 RV)
God has decreed ‘that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, . . . and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord’—not merely that God is Jehovah [he is Lord], but Jesus is Lord. His is the name ‘which is above every name’ (v. 9), and ‘God has made him both Lord and Christ’ (Acts 2:36).
John 1:32–33; Matthew 3:17
Affirming the deity of our Lord at his baptism
The Gospel writers tell us that, as John the Baptist baptized our Lord, he saw the Holy Spirit coming like a dove, and it ‘abode upon him’ (John 1:32 KJV). It was remarkable because it was in the middle of much splashing of water and multitudes of people all around, yet the dove remained on him. It was a sign from God to John of the one who should baptize in the Holy Spirit (v. 33). Matthew tells us that a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’ (3:17). At the baptism of our Lord, Father, Son and Holy Spirit affirmed his deity.
Mark 2:3–7; John 5:22; 8:24
Declaring him to be God in his ministry
Mark tells us that he shocked his contemporaries when he said to the paralytic, ‘your sins are forgiven’ (2:5). The Pharisees in particular picked it up, and said, ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ And that is exactly so—who can forgive sins except God? But our Lord did because he is God incarnate.
John tells us, ‘The Father judges no one, but has given all judgement to the Son’ (5:22). The Son will be the final judge; and because he is God incarnate, forgiveness is in the hands of Christ.
In Isaiah, God constantly reaffirms to Israel and to the nations:
‘You are my witnesses,’ declares the LORD, ‘and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the LORD, and besides me there is no saviour.’ (Isa 43:10–11)
He says, ‘Look, I am God. There is no one else. Is there any other god? I don’t know of any. I am God; there is not a second. From everlasting to everlasting, I am he.’
And that’s the best our English translations can do with the Hebrew phrase I am he. It’s a statement in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah, of God’s uniqueness. He is the one true God; there’s no other God but he. When they translated that phrase ‘I am he’ into Greek (before Christ was born), they translated it by two Greek words, egō eimi, which our English Bibles translate as ‘I am’. It’s interesting, therefore, when we find our Lord talking to the crowds and saying to them, ‘You know, if you don’t believe that I am he, you will die in your sins’ (see John 8:24).
They said, ‘What do you mean? You are who?’
‘No, no,’ says Christ, ‘it’s not a question of ‘you are who?’; unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.’
This is a repetition of the word in Isaiah. He’s claiming to be the I AM. ‘When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he’ (John 8:28). Then he added, ‘before Abraham was, I am’ (v. 58), thereby claiming to be God in the very terms that the Old Testament had used.
Mark 14:61–64
Claiming to be God at his trial
He also made this claim at his trial. I need only to remind you of it. When the high priest said to him, ‘Are you the Christ?’, he said, ‘I am, and you will see [me] seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven’ (v. 62). If you read the book of Daniel, ‘coming with the clouds of heaven’ is a thing that God Almighty does (see Dan 7:13). And when our Lord made that reply, the high priest said, ‘You have heard his blasphemy,’ and they all condemned him to death for it, because they understood his claim (see Mark 14:64).
John 20:26–29
Accepting worship after his resurrection
John’s Gospel begins by saying that the Word was God, and as it comes to its end John repeats that glorious claim; this time in the mouth of one of the apostles—hitherto ‘doubting Thomas’. He was faced with the risen Lord saying to him, ‘Thomas, put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe’ (see v. 27). ‘You asked for evidence, didn’t you? If you can’t believe without evidence, here’s the evidence.’ Thomas was so overcome that he knelt before the Lord and said, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (v. 28). And Jesus didn’t rebuke him.
That is significant. When John in Revelation was given visions of heaven, at one stage he had a vision of an angel. He was not used to seeing angels, and it was so bright and overpowering that he fell down at his feet to worship him. But the angel said to him, ‘You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God’ (Rev 22:8–9).
But when Thomas knelt at the feet of Christ and said, ‘My Lord and my God,’ Christ did not rebuke him, did he? He was Thomas’s Lord and God.
Acts 2:22–36
Pouring out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost
It is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles that on the day of Pentecost it wasn’t just simply that the Holy Spirit came some days after Jesus ascended; Peter makes it very clear what happened. Being ascended, Christ received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, and, says Peter, ‘It is Jesus of Nazareth whom you crucified, who has poured out the Spirit’.
I must ask you to ponder who you think the Spirit is. He’s not just a force like electricity or something, is he? The Holy Spirit, as you will find in another study, is likewise God. If Jesus Christ can pour out the Holy Spirit, then who is Jesus? The conclusion that Peter bids them come to is this: ‘God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified’ (v. 36). In the highest sense of that term, he is Lord.
I give you briefly three more Scriptures for your possible consideration. The first two tell us of his present position at God’s right hand, and the third of the prospect of his second coming.
Romans 9:4–5
The first of them comes from the Apostle Paul in Romans 9. Paul is wrestling with the problem of why so few of Israel are saved. At the beginning of the chapter, he rehearses their appointment by God and the glorious and unique service that he gave to them in Old Testament times.
They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed for ever. Amen. (Rom 9:4–5)
This is the apostle who once did his best to eliminate the name of Jesus from the earth because he thought Jesus’ claim to be God incarnate was blasphemy. Paul got converted on the Damascus Road through a vision of the shekinah glory of God. When he asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’, the Lord who spoke to him said, ‘I am Jesus’ (Acts 9:5). Jesus is Lord; and now Paul writes in Romans, ‘[he] is the Christ who is God over all, blessed for ever. Amen.’
Colossians 2:9
For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.
Titus 2:11–13
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ. (Titus 2:11–13)
Notice that it says, ‘the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ’. If you have an Authorized Version, you will find it’s a little bit different, in that it says, ‘. . . and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ’. But as I judge it, that is not the right translation based on the true reading of the Greek. We don’t normally speak of the appearing of God or the appearing of the Father. In the New Testament, it’s always the appearing or the coming of Christ. That’s what we’re looking for—our blessed hope is the appearing of our Lord in power and great glory (see also Luke 21:27). Notice how that appearing is described in Titus: it’s the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
What a motivation! One day we shall meet him, our great God and Saviour. But let us remember that he gave himself for us, so that we might be ‘His own special people, zealous for good works’ (Titus 2:14 NKJV). It will be in such splendour as we can only begin in a little way to imagine. We shall see the marks in his hands and side, and wonder for all eternity how our great God could even conceive of becoming our Saviour. When we consider the cost of it, how can we not serve him and work our fingers to the bone in the process?
Shall we pray.
And so, Father, we have read thy word and tried to think about it this evening as it touches thy dear Son. We thank thee for thy word, concepts going far beyond us into eternity and into infinity; and yet may this same Jesus, who gave himself for us, come now by thy Holy Spirit, we pray. And in the rest of our days of journey home to thee draw near by thy Spirit to show us his glory, that our hearts may fall in love with him again, and again, and again; our minds and emotions be brought under his control, and our hands and feet be found ever ready to run his errands and to do his works. Bless us now, we pray, as we depart. For his name’s sake. Amen.
The Deity of the Holy Spirit
Now, this is the third of the occasions when, at your request, we have been thinking about the blessed and holy Trinity. It seems to me to have been quite a long while since we embarked upon this study, so let me just recap what exactly we are trying to do and how we propose to go about it.
Why study the Trinity?
We began on our first occasion by seriously asking the question, why should we trouble to think about the complexities of the blessed and holy Trinity? Why should we not rather just believe what Scripture tells us about our blessed Lord and the Holy Spirit, and not enquire further as to how this can all be fitted together into a theological doctrine of the Godhead? Could we not rightly make an excuse for ourselves, that a study of the Godhead itself would soon go far beyond our powers of understanding? Why should we not just be content, because, when all is said and done, the very word ‘Trinity’ is not a biblical word? You will not find it in holy Scripture, and certainly you will not find those other theological and philosophical terms that the theologians sometimes use to talk about these things, such as, for instance, the hypostatic union2 in Jesus Christ our Lord.
The deity of the Son
When we asked ourselves that question, we came to the observation that, in reading the Gospels, we are almost inevitably drawn into thinking about the Trinity because we find the Lord Jesus himself telling us that he existed before he came into this world. More than once, our Lord tells us of his pre-existence. If he existed before he became human, what was he then, and how was he related to God?
In our second study we found that we are not allowed to think of him simply as an angel in the time of his pre-existence, so we are obliged to think about how exactly he was related to God. As we pursued that, we found Scripture declaring that our blessed Lord was not only with God; in those uncharted eternities before the creation of the world he was God.
Moreover, when he became flesh, he became man. We are told that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word, who was God, became flesh, that is, human, without ceasing to be God. Therefore, that raises an obvious question: if he is fully God, how does he relate to the Father, who is God?
We noticed that, after his resurrection, Thomas declared him as, ‘My Lord and my God!’, and Christ did not rebuke him but accepted the tribute. And then we noticed how he is described when we are exhorted to look forward to the glorious hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ. So he was God, he never ceased to be God, and never shall cease to be God.
If God spares us, next week that will oblige us to begin to put these things together and see how we can worship the Father as God and the Son as God without worshipping two Gods, for the Bible declares that there is only one God (1 Tim 2:5).
Tonight we hope to study the deity of the Holy Spirit, for, likewise, when we turn to the Gospels we find that the Holy Spirit did not begin to exist when he was sent to be with us by the Father and by the Son as another Comforter (see John 14:16 KJV). The Holy Spirit is not just a power or a force that the Father exerts; the Holy Spirit is a person, and Scripture declares his full deity. He is as much God as the Father is God and as the Son is God.
Scriptures which declare the Holy Spirit to be God
He existed eternally, and I want to trace with you some definite Scriptures that declare the full deity of the Holy Spirit as well as his personhood.
Exodus 34:29–35
So, to take our first Scripture, this is the story of how Moses came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony. On the first occasion the tablets were broken. But on this second occasion, when he took other tablets up and they were written on, they were not broken.
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them, and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with them. Afterwards all the people of Israel came near, and he commanded them all that the LORD had spoken with him in Mount Sinai. And when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face. Whenever Moses went in before the LORD to speak with him, he would remove the veil, until he came out. And when he came out and told the people of Israel what he was commanded, the people of Israel would see the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face was shining. And Moses would put the veil over his face again, until he went in to speak with him. (Exod 34:29–35)
Our special interest at the present moment is in verses 34–35. When Moses came out from the presence of the Lord, the people noticed that his face shone, for the simple reason that he had been speaking with God and some of the very glory of God brightened Moses’ face. When the people saw it, at first they were afraid. But he called them to come near to him and they saw the glory of God in the face of Moses. When he’d finished speaking with them he put a veil on his face, and in the New Testament Paul tells us why. He did it to stop the Israelites from seeing that the glory with which his face shone would gradually disappear or fade out, and he didn’t want them to see the end of it (2 Cor 3:13).
You say, ‘Why did the glory fade like that, and why didn’t he want them to see the end of it?’.
Moses stood for the law and the old covenant, and that old covenant was not permanent. Its tabernacle, sacrifices and priesthood, given by God with all the authority of God, were to last for centuries, but they were not to last forever. Glorious as they were, the glory was to fade from them completely and be overtaken by a different glory altogether.
But that’s a little bit beside the point. Let me call your attention to Exodus 34:34–35. When Moses came out, the people would see that the skin of his face was shining, and he put a veil over his face. But when Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him again, he took the veil off until he came out, and once more the glory of God enlightened his face.
And now a little Hebrew, so pluck up your courage. (It’s very bitter, I know, but like good medicine, if you swallow it quickly it won’t do you any harm!) In that phrase, ‘Whenever Moses went in before the LORD’, the word LORD in Hebrew is the personal name of God. It is ‘Jehovah’, or, as we pronounce it in modern times, ‘Yahweh’. Moses went in before Jehovah—‘God of very God’.2
If you get hold of that, then let me tell you something else, and this is a bit of Greek. (Two bitter pills to swallow one after the other!) When the Jews came to translate that part of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, and they came across Jehovah, the personal name of God, they didn’t want to translate it. And even to this very present day they will not pronounce the word Jehovah or Yahweh. Whenever they come across it in their Bible, they will not say it out loud or to themselves, but instead they will say ‘Adonai’, which means ‘my Lord’.
Why don’t they say Jehovah? Well, they have a fear lest they should take the name of the Lord in vain. The third commandment tells us not to take the name of the Lord in vain (Exod 20:7), so they are afraid of doing it, and to make sure they never come anywhere near, they won’t even pronounce the name Jehovah, the name of the thrice-holy God. So, as I say, instead of pronouncing Jehovah, they say Adonai—my Lord. And when they came to translate the phrase, ‘Whenever Moses went in before Jehovah’ into Greek, they translated the word Jehovah by the Greek term Kyrios, meaning ‘Lord’: ‘Whenever Moses went in before the LORD’.
2 Corinthians 3
When we turn to where the passage in Exodus 34 is quoted in the New Testament, we are told who this Lord is. Who is this Jehovah that Moses turned to? Turn, if you will, to 2 Corinthians 3, and we’ll take up the story in verse 12:
Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not gaze at the outcome of what was being brought to an end. But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. But when [the nation] turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit . . . (2 Cor 3:12–17)
Did you get the story? When Moses talked to them, they saw that his face shone; and then, when he’d finished talking, he’d put the veil on so they shouldn’t see the glory fading. But when Moses went in before the Lord again, he took the veil off. Then Paul says, ‘But when [the nation] shall turn to the Lord, the veil is removed’.
Look at verse 17: ‘Now the Lord is the Spirit . . .’. This is the New Testament telling us that the Jehovah mentioned in Exodus 34, to whom Moses went in, is the Spirit. This is a straight, simple and direct affirmation of the full deity of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is not, then, just a power but a person, a divine person; he is as much Jehovah as the Father is Jehovah and as the Son is Jehovah.
The role and authority of the Holy Spirit
1. To regenerate and sanctify
So we may establish the New Testament testimony to the full deity of the Holy Spirit. But while we’re at it, let’s do a little bit more than that, because these things are not only to be learned but also to be enjoyed. In the context, Paul is talking to the Corinthians about the vast superiority of the new covenant through Christ to the old covenant given through Moses, and in this chapter he calls attention to the various ways in which it is superior. ‘Take what happened at your conversion,’ he says to them.
And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Cor 3:3)
Using metaphors, Paul says that Christ used him as one might use a pen to write upon their hearts, and what corresponds to the ink within the pen was indeed the Holy Spirit. Christ wrote upon their hearts, and not on tablets of stone, as with Moses. Says Paul, ‘Christ used me to write his gracious laws on your hearts with the Spirit of the living God’ (see vv. 1–3).
Now, let’s think about that for a moment and see its superiority. God had the law written on two tablets of stone, and of course it was abundantly clear: ‘You shall do this, you shall not do that, you shall do the other’. It made it clear what we had to do and what we were not to do. But the law written on those tablets of stone couldn’t give anybody the power to do what it commanded; nor could it give anybody the power not to do the things that it prohibited. That was its weakness: the law could tell you what to do, but it couldn’t give you the power to do it.
See the wonder of the new covenant brought to us by our blessed Lord Jesus. It was written not on stone with a chisel, not with ink, but with the Holy Spirit of God on the fleshy tablets of human hearts. That is the wonder of conversion, isn’t it? That is what is meant by being born again. It is not our own efforts to keep God’s law, but through faith in Christ and the vivifying work of the Holy Spirit.
Paul then adds other contrasts. He says, ‘You know, the mere letter of the law kills’ (see v. 6). And so it does, doesn’t it? When all is said and done and we do our best to keep the law, we may think we have kept it eighty per cent or maybe ninety-five per cent, but if we come short the law curses us and demands its penalty, which is death (v. 7). In the end, the letter—the mere statement of God’s law on those tablets of stone—condemns and kills us.
Thank God for the marvellous message brought to us by the Holy Spirit, who was sent down from heaven by the Father and the Son. The Spirit makes us alive: the offer of the gospel is a gift of life. And not merely extended life so that we carry on living in heaven, but a spiritual life is born in us now by God’s Holy Spirit with its different powers, different laws, different habits and different desires. It is real life given to us through the Holy Spirit when we put our faith in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Paul asks us to consider how much more glorious this new covenant is (see vv. 7–11). The old covenant was glorious, and there is no denying that—just imagine God coming down on Mount Sinai with all the thunder and the flame and the fire and the smoke until the very mountain shook. The law was glorious, but it was a ‘ministry of condemnation’ (v. 9). It said, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them’ (Gal 3:10). God’s holy law is glorious, you know: the unfading glory of heaven depends upon God honouring that law. The gems and pearls and precious stones of heaven are genuine because of the holiness of God, who has decreed that nothing that defiles shall enter there (Rev 21:27).
His law, though it is a law of condemnation, is exceedingly glorious; but not so glorious as the ministry of the new covenant, for it is a ministry of righteousness that can give us the ‘free gift of righteousness’ (Rom 5:17). Christ is made to us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption (see 1 Cor 1:30). He can give us a righteous standing before God, which the Holy Spirit does within our hearts, working regeneration, writing the law of God on our hearts and giving us to enjoy the righteousness that Christ gives us. More evidence, then, of the full deity of the Holy Spirit.
•2. To give us freedom to enter the presence of God*
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Cor 3:17–18)
Paul brings the matter to its future conclusion: ‘Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’ (v. 17). That is, when we turn to the Holy Spirit—for ‘the Lord’ in this context is the Holy Spirit—he gives us freedom to enter the very holiest of all, to come right near to God and behold ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor 4:6).
Listen to what Paul says in Ephesians: ‘For through him we both [Jew and Gentile believers] have access in one Spirit to the Father’ (2:18). Marvellous, isn’t it? At the leading and guiding of the Holy Spirit we can come boldly with unveiled face right into the presence of God, and there behold the glory of the Lord.
•3. To make us more like Christ*
And as we contemplate that glory, our faces, and our characters too, are beginning to be transformed and transfigured through that same Holy Spirit. When Moses came out from the presence of the Lord his face shone; but after a while he put on a veil because he didn’t want the people to see that the glory had dimmed. We don’t need to put on any veil.
You might decide, very correctly, that my character doesn’t shine all that brightly. Perhaps not as much as it did, if you had known me in times past. But it shines a little bit anyway. That’s not to my credit; it’s the reflection of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. I’ll tell you what: that glory will never fade away; it shall increase. And here is the wonder and the guarantee of it, says the Holy Spirit, ‘when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).
You’d be a little bit impatient now to get to heaven on those terms, wouldn’t you? We’re going to be like the Saviour. But already we are being transformed into that same image, as we turn to the Holy Spirit to make the things of God real and to show us the glory of God in the face of Christ.
Concerning 2 Corinthians 3:18, the translators of the Greek don’t really know which way to put it. It could be, ‘beholding [as in a glass] the glory of the Lord’, and that is true. As we search Scripture, pray about it and seek the Lord in it, the Holy Spirit begins to illuminate us and we behold the glory of the Lord and the wonder of his salvation. But then, you could equally translate it as ‘reflecting [as in a glass] the glory of the Lord’, and that’s true likewise, isn’t it? We behold the Lord’s glory, and it has an effect on us so that, whether we realize it or not, we start to reflect the glory of the risen Lord to those around us.
And that is a thing to be remembered. We don’t become like Christ by being over occupied with ourselves and our own feelings. The more you think about yourself—your feelings and your shortcomings—the more like yourself you’ll become. So that isn’t always the best thing to do. When you occupy yourself with Christ, you’ll see how far short you come; but you’ll be full of admiration for him and his wonderful glory and the perfections of his behaviour and character. By being occupied with him, before you know where you are, you’ll begin to become like him.
3. To reveal the deep things of God
There is another passage of Scripture that likewise tells us of the ministry of the Holy Spirit and who the Holy Spirit is:
1 Corinthians 2:7–13
But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him’—these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
So now, let’s try to digest this magnificent passage, which once more is about the Holy Spirit’s role and function. God has spoken, and Jesus Christ our Lord is the full revelation of God. Christ is the last word: ‘God, who spoke in times past to our fathers through the prophets, has in these last of times spoken to us [in] his Son’ (see Heb 1:1–2). Our blessed Lord is the full revelation of the Father: ‘No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has told him out to the absolute full’ (see John 1:18). We shall never learn anything about God beyond what we learn in Christ; ‘he is the express image of the invisible God’ (see Col 1:15). Christ is God’s self-revelation.
You say, ‘What do I need, then, more than the Saviour himself, who is the great revealer of God?’.
Well, what I need is the ability to take it in! For, if God has revealed himself in Christ, this is such a profound and wonderful and glorious and immeasurable revelation of God, how shall I even begin to understand it? If ever I’m going to understand the things of God and the revelation of God through Jesus Christ, I shall need the gracious teaching of the Holy Spirit of God, as Paul says in this passage. Isn’t God wonderful? He’s thought of everything, you know. How shall I know the unseen God? Well, he’s shown himself to us in Jesus Christ.
Is that enough? No, not quite, because now the question is, how can I come to understand Christ fully? And God hasn’t left us to our own devices. Here is the glory of the gospel: he gives us the Spirit to dwell with us. He is no less than God; the Spirit is as much God as God the Father is. And that one who searches everything, even the depths of God (1 Cor 2:10), comes and dwells in our hearts and in the midst of the church, so that he who is the Spirit of God Jehovah becomes the one who helps us now to begin to take in, understand and enjoy the things of God revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord.
It’s not merely a matter of being very clever or good at languages or something. Did you notice the homely illustration that Paul uses? He says, ‘For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him?’ (v. 11). Let’s work that one out, shall we?
I was in a house just recently, and on the wall in the entrance hall were samplers. Does anybody know what samplers are? Our younger folks may not. They’re decorative pieces of needlework with the alphabet, Bible scenes and so forth stitched on to them. I stopped to admire them because I sensed who had done them. And yes, it was my hostess, and what expressions of her art and craft they were, now framed and hanging on the wall.
Now suppose my hostess had taken the finished sampler and shown it to her dog, ‘Hey, Fido, look at this!’, I don’t think it would be of much use. You see, there are certain things that dogs understand about us. Because we have stomachs and dogs have stomachs, if a dog sees you eating a beefsteak he’ll come and wag his tail and nudge you, and if you’re not careful he’ll grab it. He knows what’s going on inside you because it happens to him. That’s what we share with animals, or some animals anyway. But art? No. You can send your dog to art school or make it come in every afternoon and study the principles of art, but it will be of no use, for art is a peculiarly human thing, and the dog, who doesn’t have a human spirit, will never understand it. The only way it could ever understand your samplers would be if somehow you could give the dog your human spirit; then it would understand.
Don’t let that simple illustration detract from the huge thing that this Scripture is saying. The deep things of God, God’s marvellous treasures, lie in his heart. Who can possibly know them except one who is the Spirit of God? We human beings hadn’t a hope of getting to know the deep things of God—‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him . . .’ (1 Cor 2:9). We could never have comprehended them except God had done this magnificent thing. He has not merely given us teachers in the church or Sunday school teachers, but he’s given each believer someone who is God; who knows the things of God, searches all the things of God and is able to communicate them to us (v. 10). It’s astonishing, isn’t it?
In my extreme youth, I was trying to learn some Greek and Latin, and the classics master used to read Plato’s philosophy and other such things with me. Knowing that I was a Christian, he would pull my Christian leg now and again. Once he said to me, ‘Plato I can understand, but Paul? I take my hat off to Paul; I can’t make head nor tail of it.’ No, of course he couldn’t; he hadn’t got the Spirit of God.
We should never forget this. God be thanked for every teacher in the church, every good shepherd and every good evangelist. We need them; these are the gifts of the Spirit of God to the church. But if we were to depend on them and our expectations should ultimately be from them, it could lead to impoverishment.
It had happened in Corinth. Some of them liked the preaching style of Apollos. They’d go anywhere to hear him. He was such a good preacher—marvellous language, brilliant metaphors and good oratory. But those folks didn’t think much of Peter. They thought he was a good old chap, warm-hearted, but his grammar wasn’t so good and he used all sorts of that Aramaic stuff. And then there was Paul. He was a logical man, and they weren’t sure they liked him either. They liked Apollos. But others did like Paul, and they said, ‘It’s not his oratory, but the real theology of it that we get from Paul. Marvellous!’ There were others, and they said, ‘We don’t like those two much, but we like Peter. He’s so practical.’ And so they made cliques around these different men—the ones they liked (1 Cor 1:12; 3:4–5).
When they came together, what they were in sore danger of doing was, instead of waiting on God they were waiting on men. If we do that, ultimately the men will let us down, because it is the task of the Holy Spirit within the believer and within the church—the Holy Spirit who is God—to expound the things of God and give us that illumination by which we can understand.
Let me not talk as if I were laying down hard rules and regulations. How stupid it would be of me if I did that, when I’m talking about God’s superb generosity. Just imagine, as I sit in my chair and start to study this or that passage of Scripture, it is no less than one who is God Jehovah within me—for the Lord [Jehovah] is the Spirit. And I can say, as Samuel did, ‘Speak [Lord], for your servant hears’ (1 Sam 3:10).
We see then the full deity of the Holy Spirit in helping us to understand the deep things of God that have been revealed to us in Jesus Christ our Lord.
4. To intercede for us
Let’s look then at another passage of Scripture, which confirms that the Holy Spirit is not only God, he is a person. We’ve looked at it before, but let’s reflect on these famous verses again and see what role of the Spirit is involved.
Romans 8:26–27
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
Oh, what an encouragement it is, and how marvellously generous of God to think of everything. Here’s me, and the Holy Spirit is teaching me the things of God. He comes to dwell in me right from my conversion onwards; he teaches me the things of God and I begin to realize I ought to start praying. But what should I pray for? Not only for the benefits of my salvation and the salvation of others, but what about my own character? What do I need to pray for, for myself for instance? Would you happen to know? What could I pray for that would really help me now in my next stage of the Christian life? Should I pray for a time of calm enjoyment with gentle summer breezes, everything happy and whatnot? Would that help me? Well, it might indeed. Sometimes I think I could do with a thing like that! Or would you say to me, ‘No, old chap, not you. What you need are some desperately difficult circumstances that might bring you down and set both of your feet on earth in all realism and practicality; that’s what you need.’
Do we know what to pray for regarding the next step in life, the way ahead, and how to make progress in the things of God towards that great goal of being conformed to the image of God’s Son? As Paul says, the fact is that we don’t know how we ought to pray. But thank God we’re not left to ourselves to chart the road home to glory. The Holy Spirit himself makes intercession for us—notice his person—and he does it even without being asked.
Whereas our Lord is in glory making intercession for us, the gracious Holy Spirit is within us making intercession for us, interpreting our feeble prayers in the ears of God, who searches my heart and your heart and knows the mind of the Spirit who is within us, interceding for us and guiding us along the road home to glory, if we’re willing to be guided. Is it not magnificent?
As with many other preachers, when I think of this, I think of that lovely story in the Old Testament of how Abraham’s servant was sent to get a bride for Isaac (Gen 24). You know how it happened. He got to the right place under God’s good direction and put the proposition to the young lady and to her mother and father and her brother, and then she was asked to make her decision about eventually becoming the wife of his master’s son: ‘And they called Rebekah and said to her, “Will you go with this man?” She said, “I will go”’ (Gen 24:58).
And then notice what happened. He didn’t say, ‘Well, I’m delighted to hear your decision. Here is my master’s visiting card; his address is on it, and if you should manage to get across the country to where he lives, don’t be afraid to come and knock on the tent door, and you’ll be given a good welcome.’ Of course not! It is absurd to talk in those terms. When she said, ‘Yes, I will go,’ then the servant took her, put her on one of the camels, and walked with her every step of the way, for he knew the way, until he presented her to his master’s son.
Oh, praise God in your hearts! We are born of God’s Spirit, we have a new life within and the assurance that we shall never come into condemnation but have passed from death to life (see John 5:24). Praise him for the ministry of justification by the Holy Spirit within, and for his ministry to unfold the deep things of God and enable us to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Gradually, as we behold the glory of Christ and reflect it, we shall be transformed from glory to glory until the moment when we see the Saviour and shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. The Holy Spirit is with us all the way through to teach us, beginning with the elementary things of God. When we grow tired and weary because life gets very perplexing and we don’t know what to pray for as we ought, nevertheless the Holy Spirit within regularly and incessantly makes intercession for us so that the purposes of God may be fulfilled in our lives and bring the desired result.
Perhaps we shall never understand it this side of glory as we should and ought; it will always go beyond us. But thank God for the Trinity, and thank God for that ‘third person of the Trinity’, the blessed Holy Spirit, who is fully God, and God within us.
•5. To bear witness to Christ*
John 16:7–14
And finally, our Lord said that when he left, he would send the Holy Spirit, ‘the Comforter’ (v. 7 KJV). The Holy Spirit would not come until Christ had gone, for there could not be two divine persons here on earth at once. The Holy Spirit had been active in the world ever since creation, just as our blessed Lord, who is the angel of the Lord, had appeared from time to time in his preincarnate times. And just as he came to Bethlehem in a special way and then went back to heaven, so at Pentecost the Holy Spirit came in a way he’d never come before.
Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgement, because the ruler of this world is judged. . . . When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
‘He will glorify me,’ said our Lord, ‘and because of that, the chief responsibility for bearing witness about me in the world shall rest upon the Holy Spirit. He shall bear witness; and then you will be able to witness as well, because you have been with me from the beginning’ (see John 15:26–27). I like it put that way round, don’t you? I’m glad the worldwide witness of the gospel doesn’t depend on my feeble efforts: it was going on for centuries before I was born, and of course it will go on after I die. But what does that matter? The one in charge is the Holy Spirit of God. It is he who takes the initiative; it is he who is in charge. We have to be willing vessels for him to use, do we not?
6. To commission us for the work we are called to do
Acts 13:1–4
Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off. So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus.
Luke records that Paul and Barnabas and the elders of the church at Antioch waited on God with prayer and fasting, and the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and [Paul]’. That’s the Holy Spirit talking in the church and telling the prophets and teachers to separate Paul and Barnabas and send them off for the work that he had called them to. I quote it simply to show that the Holy Spirit is not just a sort of feeling we get; he is a divine person who carries divine authority and has a right to command what is done in the church.
So may the Lord bless our study and make us all ever more aware of the reality of the blessed Holy Spirit, of his authority as fully God, and of his graciousness as the one who stands ready to reveal to us the glories of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And with that, may we have the wisdom to submit ourselves to the Holy Spirit’s direction and his commanding guidance in the prosecution of the witness of the church to the name of Christ in the world.
Shall we pray.
Our Father, we thank thee now and bow ourselves in worship, and humble our hearts before the thrice holy God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We find it staggering, almost beyond belief, that thou hast called us: not merely forgiven us, but called us into the fellowship of the divine persons. Open our eyes ever more, we pray, to the reality of thy Holy Spirit. Grant us to be conscious of our dependence upon him and available to his guidance, we pray. And may we find him true to his promise, that as we seek the Saviour in his word, thy Holy Spirit may illumine our minds and cause us to see the glory of the Lord, that we might be transfigured into that same glory. Bless our study, then, we pray, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Humanity of Christ
Welcome to this, the last of the present short series in which I am trying to answer the question put to me by you, and particularly by the young people: how should we understand the blessed and holy Trinity?
To summarize our studies so far:
In our first study, we introduced ourselves to the topic by asking the question: Why study the Trinity? Why should we trouble to try and formalize our understanding of the three persons of the Trinity? Why can’t we merely accept the New Testament when it says that Jesus is the Son of God and proclaims his deity, and, likewise, when it indicates that he was fully human? Why must we try and think through how those two things are related? And, similarly, when it comes to the Holy Spirit, why can we not believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, and just leave it there?
On that first occasion, however, we noticed that if we give attention to what our Lord Jesus says about himself, as we who love the Lord would want to do, we shall see that time and again he refers to the fact that he existed before he came into this world, even before he became a man. And we shall also notice that the New Testament says the same thing about the Holy Spirit: he existed as a person before he came on the day of Pentecost to abide with us in this world. Therefore, if they pre-existed along with God the Father, we cannot but proceed to ask how they were related to him.
We briefly raised the question of whether our Lord could have been an angel. And, of course, we found the explicit answer in the New Testament: No, indeed not; our Lord was infinitely superior to angels (Heb 1:4). So, to help us come at last to some understanding of the relations between the three persons of the Trinity, we began the second session by considering the full deity of our Lord Jesus Christ: before the incarnation; no less at his incarnation and through his life on earth; then affirmed after his resurrection, and again at his ascension. And when the New Testament talks of his second coming, it talks again of his deity—‘We wait for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour’ (see Titus 2:13). And who might that be? It’s none other than Jesus Christ our Lord.
In our third study, we examined various Scriptures in the New Testament that similarly affirmed to us the full deity and personhood of the Holy Spirit. The fact that he is a person and not just a force or a power, like some divine electricity or something, is clearly indicated in the New Testament. In one typical passage, for instance, it is said that the Holy Spirit himself intercedes for us (Rom 8:26). He is a person who can be grieved and hurt, and so forth and so on. So, we considered the full deity of the Holy Spirit.
Of course, that lays upon us the necessity to try and understand what the Bible means when it still affirms in the New Testament that there is one God. As Christians, we do not believe in three Gods but in one God. The Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God; and they are persons. How then can we believe in just one God? And yet the New Testament itself requires us to do so.
Nor is it a private matter for us Christians, is it? Because you won’t be long talking to our Muslim friends before they will accuse you of being polytheists, believing in three gods instead of one. You will protest that you don’t, of course; but then you might be asked to explain how it is that you believe that the Father is God, and Jesus the Son of God is God. So this is also a practical matter relating to our Christian testimony.
The mystery of godliness
Now we have merely one session left in this series, so tonight we must briefly attempt to do two things. We have talked about the deity of our Lord Jesus, but now we must talk about the mystery and the glory of his incarnation, because the New Testament affirms not only his deity but his real and genuine humanity (see 1 Tim 3:16). He was truly human, though divine, and we are to see at the beginning how his humanity is equally as necessary to our salvation as his deity is.
But that will eventually enlarge our problem, for how can our blessed Lord be simultaneously human as well as divine? So, when we have considered that, if there’s any time left over we must ask briefly how the three persons of the holy Trinity are related among themselves.
Scriptures which declare the necessity of our Lord being human
Hebrews 2:10–18
These familiar verses are calling our attention to two similar but different verbs. I’ll read them both in an old-fashioned English translation just to emphasize the point.
For it became him, for whom are all things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren. (vv. 10–11 RV)
Notice that verb in verse 10: ‘it became him’. And now notice the different verb in verse 17. Speaking of our Lord, it says,
Wherefore it behoved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. (v. 17 RV)
That verb behoved is old English, very old English, for expressing necessity; such that the passage in modern English could read, ‘Wherefore he must [he had to] in all things be made like his brothers’. That is, he must be perfectly and in all respects truly human (apart from sin, of course).
Why was it necessary for Christ to be both human and divine?
1. So that he could bring many sons to glory
Let us dwell just for the moment on the difference between those two verbs. In verse 10, it is speaking of God the Father, and of God the Father’s projected strategy, means and methods for bringing us to glory. The verse begins, ‘For it became him—it was fitting [for him]’ (ESV), and talks to us about the fact that God has chosen the only fitting way to accomplish that great task of getting the likes of you and me home to glory. He is, of course, almighty in power: he is the one ‘for whom and by whom all things exist’, but God had concern for what would be a fitting method of bringing us home to glory.
By way of illustration, suppose that the Queen wished to attend St. Paul’s Cathedral, perhaps to hear a sermon from the archbishop of Canterbury on her great and long reign. Now, what would you say would be a fitting way for the Queen to get from the palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral? Should she travel there as a pillion rider on the back of a motorcycle, perhaps? She’d get there quickly and very efficiently if the traffic wasn’t too heavy.
‘But, no, no, no,’ you say, ‘you can’t have the Queen of England on the back of a motorcycle.’
‘Why not? I’ve been on one.’
‘But you don’t matter. It’s the Queen! The only fitting way to transport her from Buckingham Palace to St. Paul’s Cathedral would be in a stately car, in a motorcade of course.’
God considered what would be a fitting thing to get us, his many sons, to glory, and he said, ‘They’ll need a file leader—somebody to lead them, to go on in front of them and show them what the way is. More than that, seeing the many sufferings that they’ll have to go through, the only fitting way to get them to glory would be to provide them with someone who, through his sufferings, is qualified to help them.’ How would he lead mere human beings like us to glory, if he too didn’t know what it feels like to suffer? God decided it was fitting that our file leader should be qualified through suffering.
2. So that through death he could break the power of death and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery
Since then the children are sharers in flesh and blood, he also himself in like manner partook of the same; that through death he might bring to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver all them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. (vv. 14–15 RV)
Some of his many sons will be brought home to glory without dying—‘O joy! O delight! Should we go without dying!’3 Yes, but the majority will go through death. At issue was not merely the matter of going through death; it was to ‘destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil’ (v. 14 ESV). And the only way our Lord could do it was by dying himself. But how could one who is God die? That is the mystery of the incarnation, isn’t it? He partook of flesh and blood, so that he might die. You’ll never read of angels dying. God, by definition, doesn’t die. He who was God took on our humanity—he became really human so that he might die and deliver us from him who had the power of death, that is, the devil.
That is marvellous in itself, but when we come down to verse 17, we notice something even more marvellous.
3. So that he could be a merciful and faithful high priest
Wherefore it behoved him in all things to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. (v. 17 RV)
Now it’s not talking about what was fitting, but what was absolutely necessary. Let’s be clear: God was under no obligation to save us—nor was the Son of God—but when he put his hand to the project of saving the likes of you and me, there followed an inevitable and unavoidable necessity.
And when we think of that, we begin to see why our blessed Lord had to become fully human. If he were not fully human, he couldn’t be our perfect representative before God when he died for us at Calvary.
Let us continue to look at more Scriptures which declare the necessity of our Lord becoming human.
4. So that through his death we might be made righteous
Romans 5:19
You know, sometimes we speak a little bit carelessly about our blessed Lord. We talk about how he died for us, though he was sinless. And Scripture tells us that he died, ‘the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God’ (1 Pet 3:18 KJV). He was sinless himself, so we preach him as the sinless Saviour—God’s sinless Son, whom God punished on behalf of us sinners.
As far as it goes, it’s correct. But it’s hardly enough, is it? Because, you see, if you put it just like that it opens itself to the criticism of your unbelieving friends.
They’ll say, ‘Are you really telling us that God took an innocent third party and punished him for the sins of the guilty? How would that be just? Even if they did that in the most corrupt of nations, the people would say, “But that isn’t fair, to take an innocent third party and punish him for the sins of the guilty”.’
And your answer is, of course, that he was innocent; but he wasn’t a third party. In the amazing condescension of God, our blessed Lord became human and identified himself with us, which is why it is said of those who believe on him that when Christ died, they died (Gal 2:20). He was truly human but refused to be severed from his brothers, as he calls them (Heb 2:11). And it’s when we are joined with him that his death is accepted as our death. That is an amazing story, isn’t it? The sheer wonder of the incarnation of God!
The Epistle to the Romans reminds us that he couldn’t merely deal with our individual sins, because the fact that we commit individual sins arises from a root cause: ‘For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were [constituted] sinners . . .’ (Rom 5:19). In one sense, the doctrine of the fall is a very kind doctrine, isn’t it? Each of us is guilty of multitudinous sins, and in spite of what some say we’re not responsible for what Adam did. We were born sinners and it’s because we belong to a fallen race that we were constituted sinners, not by what we did ourselves but by what the first man, Adam, did.
The old theologians used to illustrate it by saying, ‘An apple tree is not an apple tree because it bears apples; it’s the other way around. Even if it never bore any apples, it would still be an apple tree. It bears apples because it is an apple tree.’
We sin because we are sinners. In many things it’s our own fault, of course; but basically, we are born sinners and it’s at the very root of humanity. To repeat Romans 5:19: ‘For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were [constituted] sinners . . .’. The glorious gospel is that Christ does not merely forgive our individual sins; as the representative man he goes down, so to speak, to the very root cause of our sinnership; to finish the verse, ‘so by the one man’s obedience the many will be [constituted] righteous’.
Oh, shout ‘hallelujah!’ in your hearts, if you’ve got a hallelujah to spare anywhere at all (maybe in some reserved rarely opened cupboard). Oh, the glory of it! A new human race— not the old one patched up, but a new human race, perfect at its root. Because of our Lord’s obedience unto death, those who are his ‘descendants’, the new human race, are constituted righteous.
5. So that we may have eternal life here and now
1 Corinthians 15:22, 45–47; John 5:24–26
It extends not merely to our consciences, our sins and our forgiveness. This verse in 1 Corinthians reminds us of the glorious fact: ‘For as in Adam all die [physically], so also in Christ shall all be made alive’. That’s marvellously good news, is it not? It’s been going around for two thousand years, but it’s still fresh and good. There’s a new order of human being: ‘The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. . . . The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven’ (vv. 45, 47).
In John 5, we are told of an occasion when our Lord was here on earth. He told his astonished contemporaries, ‘For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself’. And because he has life in himself, the hour is coming when even those who are physically dead and in the grave will hear his voice and come out. The hour is here, he said, when those who are spiritually dead can hear the voice of the Son of God, receive new life, eternal life, and be assured that they shall never come into judgment, but they have [already] passed from death to life (see John 5:24–26). They are a new race of human beings. No angel could have done it for us. To be the beginning of this new human race, Christ had to be truly human, though divine; he had to be both God and man.
6. So that he could display his true humanity
Psalm 121:4; Isaiah 40:28; John 4:4–6; Mark 4:38; John 1:14
If that is so, and our Lord Jesus had to be human, we now have a little bit of a theological problem. How can we reconcile the fact that, on the one side, Scripture tells us that he’s God, God incarnate, and on the other side that he is human? Superficially, there are problems, aren’t there?
The Old Testament says of God: ‘Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep’ (Ps 121:4). Through the prophet, God himself says that he never grows weary (Isa 40:28). And yet, having walked all morning in the hot sun, Jesus came at last to a place called Sychar, where he sat on the well (John 4:4–6). He was wearied from his journey (Greek: worn out). What an amazing Saviour! How did he ever conceive the idea of having a human body that could be worn out? It tells us that he was truly human.
On another occasion, after a day’s preaching, when he got into a boat with his disciples, he was so tired that he fell asleep (Mark 4:38). How can you reconcile the qualities of God with the real experience of true humanity? How could they subsist in one and the same person?
False Explanations
False answers have been given to the problem in the course of the centuries, and I shall not detain you long with them. They are just worth noting because in theological circles you still find their modern representatives, at least at the academic level. There is what goes by the grand name of docetism. It comes from the Greek word dokein and though it sounds very learned, it’s only the Greek for appearing to be something when you’re not. These people suggest that Christ appeared to be human, but he wasn’t really, and that’s how you can account for his miraculous powers. In other words, he wasn’t really human; he only seemed to be. That is quite false. If he only appeared to be human but wasn’t truly so, there is no salvation for us, of course.
Another false explanation is called adoptionism, which says that Christ was born an ordinary human being and lived as such, but he behaved so well, if I might put it crudely, that in the end God ‘adopted’ him and conferred on him the status of deity. So, according to this view, he wasn’t God to start with but became God later on through adoption. That’s absolutely false as well.
There’s another way of talking, which is a convenient shorthand, and strictly speaking we oughtn’t to use it. For instance, we say, ‘When he fell asleep in the boat, he did that as a man; but when he stilled the storm, he was acting as God’. We all know what people mean when they say that, but it’s not the happiest way of talking. It might suggest that our Lord had a split personality. Sometimes as God he acted in one way, and as a human being he acted in other ways. But our blessed Lord is not a split personality; he is one person, not two. It is truer to say that, though he is one person, he has two natures. Unlike us he has a nature that is perfectly human and a nature that is fully divine.
So let us think about what that could mean. And we come back to the great basic statement of John 1:14, ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. The Word, the second person of the Trinity, who in the beginning was with God and was God, became human. If I might put it this way, God became human without ceasing to be God. To emphasize the point according to Scripture, the eternal Son of God, who always existed and was with God and was God, through the incarnation became what he had never been before: fully human without, I stress, ceasing to be God.
You say, ‘Can God do something like that? Is it possible for the eternal God to become human and to live as a human, yet not cease to be God? And why was it necessary?’
Hebrews 5:7–8; Matthew 18:36–46; John 18:1–9
We begin by just accepting what Scripture says: ‘The Word became flesh’ (John 1:14), that is, became human. Listen to what it meant for him:
During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered. (Heb 5:7–8 NIV)
He didn’t learn to obey; he’d always obeyed his Father and had done the will of his Father in perfect harmony with the Father. But now in his humanity he learned what it costs in this fallen sinful world to obey the Father, and because of that obedience to face death. And he prayed, we are told, ‘with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death’ (v. 7). Because he was sinless, it was a hideous thing for him to face death as a consequence of his obedience to God in this fallen world.
‘Yes,’ you say, ‘he was acting as a human being there.’
Now, come, come! Let’s listen, rather, to Scripture. The whole thing begins with the words, ‘Son though he was’ (v. 8). That is the marvel of it: in the days of his flesh, when he was offering up prayers with strong crying and tears (KJV), he was—for he had never ceased to be—the Son of God.
Some English translations have it, ‘Though he was a son’, but that isn’t quite good enough, is it? He wasn’t a son among many. The Greek is better translated as ‘Son though he was’. The everlasting Son of the everlasting Father—God in human form, God become human—learned what obedience costs. It is amazing, isn’t it? I’m going to pause now just to give you time to think about it. Do you believe it? Do you believe that at the moment when he was learning what obedience costs, he was in fact God incarnate? Or did he cease to be God incarnate for the time being?
You say, ‘It’s a great mystery’.
Ah, yes, it is a great mystery; but it’s a fact we are called upon to believe. It goes right down to the root of our salvation. Listen to God incarnate in Gethsemane, as he rose from praying. When the band of soldiers came to arrest him, along with Judas, he asked them, ‘Whom do you seek?’ (see John 18:4–7).
They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.
He said, in the Greek idiom, ‘I am’. It’s Greek for ‘I am he’, of course. But as he pronounced those words, ‘I am’, they went backward and fell to the ground.
This was God incarnate, the I AM not ceasing to be God, who a few minutes earlier had fallen with his face to the ground and prayed, as the stones of Gethsemane had bitten into his knees. Why was it necessary?
8. So that he could die for our sins
2 Corinthians 5:19–21; John 20:26–28
. . . in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. . . . For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor 5:19–21)
You see, the Bible never says that God died for us, does it? So I mustn’t say that; but I can say that if the one who died for you was not God, you’re not saved and there’s no such thing as salvation. How could he bear the punishment due to the sins of the world if he were nothing more than a mere man?
After the resurrection Thomas saw not merely the risen Lord standing in front of him, but the evidence he’d asked for. As the Lord stretched out his hands and asked him to put his finger in the wound marks and his hand in his side, Thomas replied, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:26–28). Perhaps it was doctrinally a little bit excessive for Charles Wesley to write, ‘That thou, my God, should die for me’.5 Scripture never uses the exact phrase, but I repeat that he who died for us was God incarnate, and God incarnate knows what it is to die.
It is an amazing story, and you’ll understand how it tugged at the hearts of those who actually saw the Lord. Saul of Tarsus was converted when he heard a voice that came from ‘the excellent glory’ (see 2 Pet 1:17). Paul sums it up like this: ‘I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20). Notice how he does not say faith in Jesus, but faith in the Son of God.
9. So that the love of the Godhead should be expressed at Calvary
Romans 8:32
Now I must raise a profound matter. As you understand Scripture, when our blessed Lord, God incarnate, suffered at Calvary, did God suffer? A generation of church fathers has taught that it is impossible for God to suffer anything. I’ll come to the reason why they thought so, but may I just remind you of what Scripture says:
[God] . . . did not spare his own Son . . . (Rom 8:32)
Can you not perceive in that remark the moving of a father’s heart, if it must mean the giving of his own dear son? And God didn’t spare him. When Christ was suffering at Calvary and the Father’s face had to be turned away from him, is it possible to imagine that God felt completely impassive and indifferent, as cold as any judge on the bench? Indeed, not! The love of the Father for the Son was tested to its limits; and when Christ suffered, the Father suffered too.
You say, ‘That’s impossible. Is it not true that God can’t suffer at all?’
We’ll come to that in a moment, but I want to point out the implications of Calvary. You see, as the New Testament represents it, the death and sacrifice of Christ is an expression of the unchangeable and eternal love of the whole Godhead. It was not something enacted in the spur of the moment, the Lamb had been known before the foundation of the world (1 Pet 1:19–20). Not only as the Lamb did Christ die for us, but the Father gave the Son (John 3:16), and the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that Christ, the Son, through the eternal Spirit offered himself to God (9:14). All three persons of the Trinity were involved in that astounding event at Calvary. The Father giving the Son, the Son giving himself for us, and the Son offering himself in the power of the eternal Spirit: Calvary was the expression of the heart of all three persons of the blessed and holy Trinity.
And because it is so, we sing in our humble, simple rhyme: ‘Thy precious blood | shall never lose its power, till all the ransomed Church of God | be saved, to sin no more’.6 It’s one way of telling it; but it’s not merely the power of the blood of Christ that is eternal, the significance of Calvary is eternal because all three persons of the eternal Godhead were involved in that event by the deliberate, determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God (see Acts 2:23). And the love of God that initiated it all shall never cease. Shout aloud if you’ve got a spare hallelujah, lest you get to heaven and wish you’d shouted it more times before then!
10. So that God would become what he never was before
Malachi 3:6; Numbers 23:19; Genesis 1:1; Hebrews 13:8
We must come now to a theological and philosophical problem. God has said, ‘For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed’ (Mal 3:6). And Balaam was told to tell Balak, ‘God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfil it?’ (Num 23:19). Of course he will do what he says; he’ll never be false to his word.
You say, ‘How can you say then, Mr Preacher, that God became what he never was before?’.
That is what I’m saying, isn’t it? At one stage in history the eternal Word, who was God, became what he never was before. But if he’s really God, how could he do that?
I can tell you another thing that he did before then. There was a time when God wasn’t Creator, you know. But then Genesis tells us that there came a beginning of our universe: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen 1:1). So this universe had a beginning. There was a time when it didn’t exist. God existed, of course; and when he made our universe in the beginning, he didn’t make it out of already-existent stuff. There wasn’t any already-existent stuff to make it out of anyway. He made it, as some of the theologians say, ex nihilo: not out of pre-existing stuff. He just created it by the word of his power. (I sometimes wish I could have been there!)
It’s true that God is unchangeable—utterly unchangeable. That is, in his moral character. He will never be untrue to himself. He cannot lie, and the reason he cannot lie is that he cannot go counter to his own very nature. God cannot deny himself; that’s why he can’t lie. It is inherent in his very nature, because to lie would be to deny himself. So he doesn’t change. He’s morally the same and in his faithfulness he’s utterly the same. And so is our blessed Lord: ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever’ (Heb 13:8). He cannot change morally.
But then the Greeks and some Christian theologians got the wrong end of that stick. They thought that God could never do anything new, because that would involve God changing. But that was a little bit silly, for, as we’ve just noticed, there was a time when God wasn’t creator and then he did something new. The angels shouted for sheer joy when they saw his greatness (see Job 38:7). He’s not some static iceberg; he is the unchanging God. If you ask, ‘In what is he unchanging?’, he’s unchanging in his very nature. His life, his exuberant life, is always doing new things. Listen to the joy when he announces, ‘For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth’ (Isa 65:17).
So he’s not just stuck with the past and can’t change anything. There was a time when he wasn’t creator, but then he became creator. There was a time when no member of the Godhead, the ‘Trinity’, was human. That is staggering! ‘What raised the wondrous thought, | or who did it suggest, | that blood-bought saints to glory brought | should with the Son be blest?’7 Who suggested that God should become what he never was before, and that the Word who was God should become human? That makes us think a little, doesn’t it? When God made Adam, did God know that one day the blessed Son of God would need to become human?
You say, ‘Yes, you’ve just told us that the Lamb was foreknown before the foundation of the world’.
I wonder did God say to himself, ‘I must be careful how I make this new creature, this human being—I’ll make him so that one day I could become one of them and enter humanity’? God doesn’t necessarily have to have conversations with himself like that; he does his divine will. But isn’t that what it involved? He made man in such a way that he himself could one day become human.
11. So that he could finally defeat Satan
Revelation 12 and 13
What a masterstroke of genius it was! Do you remember in the book of the Revelation, how John saw in a vision the state of this wicked world and the ultimate rebellion that shall occur at the end of this age when, under the inspiration of the very devil, man shall follow his absurd fantasy and try to be God? (See Rev 13)
Of course, that was an idea put into Adam’s head by the serpent in the garden of Eden. Do you remember that bit of the story, how Satan said to the woman and therefore to the man as well, ‘Take that fruit, and you shall be as God’ (see Gen 3:5); thereby no longer needing to depend upon God? They fell for the lie, and in spite of earth’s history it continues to nestle in the human heart. Man still wants to be God—‘Well, I suppose if there’s no God out there, as many believe, somebody ought to start being God’. At the last great rebellion that Satan shall inspire in the heart of the beast, he shall claim divine honours and demand that everybody bows down and worships his image on pain of death (Rev 13:15).
With a skill given to him by the Spirit of God, John paints the scene in Revelation 12. The dragon is standing in front of a woman who is pregnant and about to give birth. It is waiting to gobble up the child as soon as he is born (v. 4). Satan knows that this child is destined to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, and if that child is going to reign he can’t reign, so he must destroy the child if he can. Looking at that dramatic scene, there’s the dragon, about to incite a human being on earth to try and be God, and I see this woman with a child in her womb. Who is that child?
You will probably have your favourite interpretation, but forgive this simple-minded man when I say, ‘Whatever else it means or doesn’t mean, it shows the wonder of God’s strategy against the devil to counter his efforts to get man to deify man’. God says, ‘I tell you what I’ll do; I will descend and become human’. That is the story of God’s victory over the serpent: God becoming man to deal with this fatal notion of man becoming God.
The eternal relationships within the Godhead
You say, ‘You promised you would say something about how the divine persons are related within the Trinity’.
My brothers and sisters, you should pray for me in these next few moments, lest I should do anything comparable to Uzzah, when he put out his hand and touched the ark (2 Sam 6:6). Or that I should begin to think that we could work out all the relationships in the blessed and holy Trinity by human reasoning. By definition, that Trinity goes beyond us.
On the other hand, we do have to listen to Jesus Christ our Lord, the Son of God who became incarnate in our space-time. It is through him that we can begin to know what the Trinity is like. He talked about the state of things before he was incarnate, and his relationship with the Father even when he was incarnate, and by following what he said we can begin to see more clearly why it was necessary for Christ to be both human and divine.
12. So that he could display those eternal relationships within the Godhead
John 10:38; 17:21
I shall content myself with quoting to you what he said at least twice. In John 10:38 he says, ‘. . . the Father is in me and I am in the Father’; and in John 17:21, ‘. . . just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you’. This is a statement not merely of what was happening on earth but of the eternal relationships within the Godhead—the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. It is what the theologians call the co-inherence of the three persons of the Trinity. Each has his own distinctive function and therefore his own distinctive name; and yet they are not thought of as separate persons, as though they were separate individuals—three Gods. No, each has his own particular function and therefore a particular name, yet each one is in the other, and the other is in each one.
You say, ‘I don’t understand that. It’s baffling!’
Let me use an illustration, which might help a little. You’ll need to pluck up all your powers of endurance to do it, but consider me for a moment. You could talk about me—about my mind, my words and my actions. But I’m a mere human, and you wouldn’t say there are three persons here, would you? Gooding’s mind, that’s one; Gooding’s words, that’s two; and Gooding’s actions, that’s three? They’re all Gooding, you know. And if one of my actions were to ram into another car on the road and I said to the police, ‘That wasn’t me, it was my actions’, I would hardly convince them of the profundity of the remark.
‘No, it’s all you’, they’d say.
And yet you can logically distinguish it, can’t you? I’ll tell you something about me and my words. When I’ve said a whole lot of things and can see how puzzled my friends look, I explain to them, ‘But that’s not really what I mean. It’s not really expressing what I was thinking.’ So there’s a difference between my words and me, myself.
John 1:1; Colossians 1:15, 19; Genesis 1:1–2
Not so with God, of course. God is God. The Word of God—that is, the expression of God— is also God: he is the perfect expression of the Father. The Word of God is a person, the perfect expression of the Father’s mind and heart. And God’s creative acts, how did they happen? Well, the world was created through the Word of God; and we’re told in Genesis 1 that, in the beginning when God made the heavens and earth, ‘the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters’ (v. 2).
Conclusion
So, in closing, I’m making two suggestions to you for your reverent and worshipful study.
Firstly, what is called the co-inherence of the divine persons: the Father in Christ and Christ in the Father; the Spirit in Christ and Christ in the Spirit. All three are distinct, and yet all three are involved in what each one does. We’ve seen it in creation: God made the world, but he made it through the person who is the Word of God, and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.
And it was so also in the conception of our blessed Lord in the womb of the virgin: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God’ (Luke 1:35).
At the Lord’s baptism, as John baptized our blessed Lord, he said, ‘I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him’ (John 1:32); ‘and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son . . .”’ (Luke 3:22). The Father, Son and Holy Spirit were all involved simultaneously.
When Christ did his miracles, he did them in the power of God. In talking to his enemies, he said, ‘But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons . . .’ (Luke 11:20). Another Gospel has him phrase it this way: ‘But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, . . .’ (Matt 12:28). So God, the Spirit of God, and Christ were all involved in his ministry.
And this is so also in his dying and in his resurrection: ‘For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. . . . This charge I have received from my Father’ (John 10:17–18). So Christ arose; but other Scriptures tell us that God raised him up from the dead (Acts 2:24; 1 Cor 6:14). Then Romans 1:4 tells us that he was raised from the dead by the Spirit of holiness, so that all three members of the Trinity were involved in that work. But the particular work on each occasion will alert you as to who is ‘the leading member’ of the Trinity doing it.
And when it comes to the church, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are all involved in the gifts within the body of Christ:
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. (1 Cor 12:4–6)
Secondly, and with this I close, the introduction of new things. When God created the world, he did something new; and when our blessed Lord was incarnate, God did something new; and in the resurrection of Christ, God did something new. Now let’s hear the other new thing that God did and praise him for it.
For on the day of Pentecost, something happened that had never happened before. The Holy Spirit himself had visited our world from time to time but hitherto had not come to abide in it, and on the day of Pentecost he did a new thing. He came to reside in and to form what had never been before in history, the new body of Christ (see 1 Cor 12:27).
It’s exciting, isn’t it? What’s it going to be like when you get home, my dear brothers and sisters? Do you think of it often? Perhaps you should think about it a little bit more. ‘What will it be to dwell above, | and with the Lord of glory reign?’8 —to discover through unending ages of eternity all the new things that God will do out of his infinite riches that belong to his very nature.
Forgive the length of this discourse, but it is my last one on this occasion. If I’ve kept you too long, mention it to the elders as you go out and they’ll never invite me again!
May God bless our feeble attempt to enquire into the persons of the blessed and holy Trinity, and in response may he inspire in us suitable worship and devotion of life.
Footnotes
1 Charles Wesley (1707–1788), ‘My heart is full of Christ’ (1743).
2 The Lord Jesus being both fully human and fully divine.
3 A reference to the Nicene Creed, ‘God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God’.
4 A reference to the Nicene Creed, ‘God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God’.
5 Charles Wesley (1707–1788), ‘And can it be that I should gain?’ (1738).
6 William Cowper (1731–1800), ‘There is a fountain filled with blood’ (1772).
7 George V. Wigram (1805–1879), ‘What raised the wondrous thought?’
8 Joseph Swain (1761–1796), ‘What will it be to dwell above?’