The Trinity: Knowing God Truly

This evening we focus on the Trinity. Remember a couple of weeks back we looked at Jesus’s ascension, which led to last week and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the birthday of the church, and now that the Third and final Person of the Trinity has been revealed at Pentecost, we focus this week on the Trinity. There are so many ways to get the doctrine of the Trinity wrong. The most common way I’ve run into in recent years is to simply say it’s a mystery and throw our hands up in the air. We know 3 and 1 go into God and there’s no way to know how, so we’ll affirm the truth without trying to understand it. But this causes all kinds of problems. When you affirm things you don’t understand, that is generally not very good for your soul. So while mystery is one element of the doctrine of the Trinity, if we’re not just going to leave it there, we need to move beyond the mystery to something else. So what can we say? 

I’d like to start with why it’s important, before getting into the details. Have you ever asked yourself why the Trinity is important? Well, I think we get this wrong a lot. When we try to understand something from Scripture, we ask it the wrong question. We want to figure out HOW something works to understand it. We see this in the doctrine of creation, right? The question we bring to the doctrine of creation is usually “How?”. How did the timeline unfold? How did the molecules react with each other to make water, or did they just appear? Those are the kinds of questions we humans like to bring to the Bible and theology. But while there are good answers to the How of creation and the How of the Trinity, the better question for both, the question the Bible asks and answers of both is not “How?”, but “Who?”. The Bible has science in it, but it’s not a science book. It has philosophy in it, but it’s not a philosophy book. The Bible is a book about a personal God and his relationship with humans. The Bible is a book of Who. And so why is it important to know something about the Trinity? Because the Trinity is God. It answers the question “how?” about God.  It answers how do the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit relate to each other. But it does that to answer “Who?” And we see a picture of that in our readings today. 

We see the throne room of God from Isaiah’s perspective. And we see it from John’s perspective in Revelation. And we see the greatness of God in both places. We see a large, vaulted room, where there are these grand angelic servants of God. In Revelation, specifically, we see more detail. We see this otherworldly scene of a figure seated on a throne, and the person looks like precious stones. There’s a rainbow around the throne that looked like an emerald. There are 24 elders around the throne, seated on 24 smaller thrones, wearing white, with gold crowns. The throne itself had thunder and lightning coming out from it and there are 7 torches in front of the throne. The torches are the seven spirits of God, or the fullness of the spirit of God. Seven is shorthand for fullness and completion in Revelation. Then there are creatures looking like different animals, one with the face of a man, with eyes all over them flying around the throne of God. And they never stop saying the words: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!” We hear something like this at the end of our psalms, don’t we? “Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” As we read through the psalter, throughout the week we’re taking on praise like what is heard in the throneroom of God in heaven.” And when the elders hear this they bow down. And they cast their crowns before the throne of God and say, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” 

This picture of the throne room of God is both concrete and abstract. It brings up all kinds of questions. How does time function in the throne room of God? Do the elders cast their crowns and then pick them up again? But again, these are HOW questions. And while there might be some answers to how questions in this text, it’s not primarily a how text. It’s a WHO text. The point is about Who God is, that He is wholly other. His throne room is an overwhelming place for humans to be. Until God makes himself relatable, he isn’t relatable. This is not a God who wants to give you the 4 ways to live your best life now, or what have you. God is the source of all power in the universe, all wisdom, all love, all beauty, all righteousness, all truth. And when you are in the presence of that God, in his throne room, it is an incomprehensible moment. The senses are overwhelmed. The HOW of the moment is overwhelmed by the WHO of the moment. 

That doesn’t mean the HOW is absent, but the HOW of that moment only contributes to our understanding of the WHO. God is wholly other, incomprehensible, overwhelming, but we see in Scripture that he has revealed himself as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. The Father is not the Son or the Spirit. The Son is not the Father or the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father or the Son. They are Three Persons, One God. They all are unified but distinct. They aren’t jumbled together. They don’t exist as Father one moment, Son another moment, and Spirit another moment. These and many more true statements about the Trinity matter. They matter because they tell us in what sense the Father is God and in what sense the Son is God and in what sense the Holy Spirit is God. The Son and the Spirit aren’t undergods to God the Father. These details matter. 

When you sing a song to Jesus, it matters if you think you are singing a song to someone who is fully God, or to a created undergod. Right? It matters if you think the Holy Spirit is a person or just a force like in Star Wars. And the doctrine of the Trinity helps us get our understanding right, and stay away from wandering into thinking Jesus was a created undergod. It helps us keep our imaginations on track. It helps us get the WHO of God right. Our worship of God is worthship: the act of ascribing worth to God. If worship is more about God than about us exercising our worship reflexes, than it is important to get it right. Right worship of God starts with having the right object of worship. And that effects the songs we sing and the way we rend our hearts. And so now, with the Third Person of the Trinity revealed at Pentecost, we the church have a true, and in one sense, a complete picture of God, a finally accurate picture of the God we worship. He is one God in three Persons. We have the right object of worship. We can worship the true God. 

That is something worth celebrating for a number of reasons. When we have a true picture of God, we can actually have a chance of rightly forming our worship to point to the one true God. When we rightly know our object of worship, when we rightly know God, it changes us. If you are made in the image of God, having a truer understanding of the God in whose image you were made is going to give you a more accurate sense of your own identity. It’s one thing to say I am made in the image of God. But if someone asks you who or what is the God whose image you are made in, and you answer, he is a cute baby bunny, that says something about your identity. If you were made in the image of God and God is a cute baby bunny your identity is going to be different than if you are made in the image of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the image of the God who John and Isaiah saw in his throne room. And if we were made in the image of that God, what does that tell you about yourself? I wouldn’t want to narrow down this question too much, and maybe its something you can spend some time pondering throughout your week. I think we can at least say that before the image of God was damaged at the fall and in some sense is being repaired through the work of Jesus, we can say that humans were made to be capable of creating, by God’s grace we are capable of striving for integrity, we actually value truth, we actually care about community. When Moses wrote down the words of Genesis, he knew that humans were made in the image of God, but he didn’t have as clear a picture of the God in whose image we were made like we do. Moses didn’t seem to have a picture of the God who is never alone and never lonely. He didn’t have a concept of God taking on flesh and dying in our place. He didn’t have a concept of God himself dwelling in our hearts, moving us to ask and accept forgiveness and grace and to live in righteousness and peace.

The message of the gospel is the message of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit not needing anything from us, but deciding from eternity to past to create the universe, and reveal themselves in love in the fullness of time. Because of sin, that revelation ended up being the message of salvation and reconciliation. And now we might not know him completely in an absolute sense, but we do know him truly. And we will have eternity to know and experience the love behind our salvation and reconciliation more and more. So happy Trinity Sunday Vigil to you today. Let us rejoice and give thanks for the revelation of our one God in Three Persons and respond in wonder, awe, and praise.