Musings on the Trinity

I will begin with a confession:  I have some hangups concerning the doctrine of the Trinity.

When I was a little child, I learned that Jesus is God.  I accepted this, and when I was a child, it was not any problem or leap of logic for me.

When I got a bit older, I encountered the idea of the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  My understanding was that God is the Father, Jesus is the Son, and (forgive me) The Holy Spirit doesn't matter very much because we don't believe in speaking in tongues.

Five to seven years ago, the Lord reached out to me (I have no better way to describe it) and invited me to search in the Bible for whatever I could learn about the Holy Spirit.  It began when I was going through an extended crisis, rife with devastation and panic.  I often found myself on the floor of my closet, in tears, praying.  Often I prayed Romans 15:13 (which I had stumbled across on my own, although recently I seem to hear it quoted often).  I noticed that when I prayed Romans 15:13, a blanket of peace would descend on me and cover me, calming and comforting me.  As I experienced this peace, I thought about the words of scripture I was praying, how they ended with, "...through the power of the Holy Spirit."   Through the power of the Holy Spirit.  This palpable blanket of peace was coming from the Holy Spirit.  Mystified, I prayed, "Who are you?  I know God.  I know Jesus.  But who are you?"  

I began to seek answers.  First I searched on my own, using commentaries to dig through the Bible from beginning to end, drinking up every mention of the Holy Spirit.  Eventually the Lord, in His unfathomable mercy, gave me the opportunity to teach a Bible study about the Holy Spirit.  I always learn best when I need to prepare to explain something to somebody else, and when I can talk things through with other people.  God allowed me to learn about His Holy Spirit in that context, and I am so very thankful.

This is not the appropriate place to try to record everything God showed me.  I will suffice to say that my conclusion has been that the Holy Spirit is God as He interacts with us in our present age, our Immanuel, to draw from Matthew 1:22-23.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus (Romans 8:9, Galatians 4:6), who abides with us always.  This is not an exhaustive explanation, but it is the most applicable part of what I am able to understand.  I have come to treasure Luke 11:13, where the Lord Jesus himself promises that God the Father will give the Holy Spirit generously to those who ask Him.

In pondering the Holy Spirit, I began to recoil from theology that seems to separate the parts of the triune  Godhead into three distinct personalities.  Now, many professing Christians believe that God the Father is the Old Testament God, and He is mean-spirited, vengeful, bent on harsh judgment.  They believe that Jesus the Son is the New Testament's enlightened next-generation deity, kind, gentle and full of grace, turning His Father's unquenchable wrath away from us, rescinding the Old Testament and consigning righteousness to irrelevance in the age of grace.  I was aware of this, and convinced by what I read in scripture that it is grossly inaccurate.  Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and that the law will not disappear until heaven and earth do (Matthew 5:18).  Jesus told us our righteousness will need to surpass the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees if we hope to enter the kingdom of heaven.  I believed this, but did not quite understand it until I began to learn about the Holy Spirit and how He lives in us and purifies us, changing us, transforming us into the very image of Christ, through a gradual but certain process.  We can become righteous because the Spirit of Christ abides in us, and we in Him, and this union produces authentic righteousness, unattainable by any other means.

The Holy Spirit transforms us into the image of Christ because He is Christ, living in us (Colossians 1:27).  Pondering this led me to think about how the Holy Spirit is the Lord Jesus Christ, in Spirit.  And the Lord Jesus is God (John 10:30, John 14:9-11).  I understand the Trinity as God the Father, first, and then God the Son, who came among us, and finally God the Spirit, who actually enters into us.  Of course, this triune God has existed in entirety throughout eternity past and will continue to exist into future eternity. The fluctuating part of the equation is us, as we experience Him.  When we finally get to heaven and receive our full glorification, we will experience the Lord in all His fullness, in His kingdom.

Again, I do not claim to have perfect or complete understanding.  Yet, what I do understand makes me shudder when I hear the members of the Trinity discussed as if they are three separate people with distinct personalities.  I believe that the unity of the Trinity is much more significant than the distinctions therein.  The Trinity is not a term found in the Bible.  It is a compiled teaching from classic historical church doctrine.  Wise, learned and God-fearing men wrestled with scripture and labored together intensely to assemble an interpretation and explanation of how we might comprehend the various references to Father, Son and Holy Spirit found throughout the Bible.

My initial foray into these matters sprang from an experience I had with the Holy Spirit, who called my attention to His existence.  In retrospect, I think it may have been related to a prayer I prayed when I was in deep distress, begging for comfort, expressing that I wished Jesus were tangibly with me, in a way I could process with my senses, my flesh-and-bone God.  Jesus demonstrated that He is with me, truly with me, not figuratively or metaphorically, but really (in the literal sense of the word really--for real).  Jesus demonstrated that His Spirit, the Spirit of Christ in me and with me eternally--my foretaste and guarantee of an eternal future in the unveiled fullness of God--is, just as He promised, better than having a flesh-and-bone person ready to hop over from the next room to help me (John 16:7).  But just as I began to grasp some understanding about who the Holy Spirit is, and how He completes God's promises in me, I began to wonder about Jesus.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  As I child, I knew Him as the baby in the manger, the kind Healer, the crucified Savior, the risen Lord.  My Sunday school teachers told me, "Jesus is God," and I never doubted them.  When I grew to be an adult, I noticed that the Bible mentions Jesus having been around a long time before He was born in Bethlehem.  The Spirit of Christ was in the Old Testament prophets who foretold Him (1 Peter 1:11--I had never been exactly sure what this meant).  Through Jesus, all things were created (Colossians 1:16); this was an amazing realization for me.  Jesus had been designated to be our Savior even before creation (1 Peter 1:20).  These ideas surprised me when I first discovered them, but they made sense; they fit into my framework of understanding.  Jesus is God.  God is eternal.  Therefore Jesus is eternal.

But then came the problem of Jesus' body.  This is a problem because Jesus is God, and God is immutable, which means that God does not change.  Consequently, Jesus does not change.  Indeed, Hebrews 13:8 tells us that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.  Yet, Jesus did not have a body in eternity past, but then He entered our time-continuum and took on a body.  For a number of years, I simply assumed that Jesus Christ's physical body was an aberration, something that happened for a short period of time before Jesus reverted to His unembodied form in heaven with the Father.  But Jesus rose in His body; in other words, His body was resurrected.  He ascended to heaven in His body, and He will return for us in this same body (Acts 1:11).  His body, with the marks of His crucifixion, sits on the throne of heaven with the Father (Revelation 5:6).  His body has been raised as we also will be raised, to eternal glory.  He is the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8:29).  When we see Him, we will be like Him (1 John 3:2).

How does this work?  How can it be that Jesus Christ--who is the same yesterday, today and forever--could exist in oneness with God the Father and the Spirit throughout eternity past, but then could take on a body that He will carry into eternity future?  How can this be?  Isn't changing from spirit to flesh the very definition of mutability?

For a long time I mostly dealt with this by not thinking about it.  Then we ran splat into it while studying the Westminster Catechism in Sunday school yesterday, and all my questions and uncertainties came bubbling back up.  Some kind people took my perplexity seriously and pondered with me.  I asked, "Does it just mean that the essence of God is immutable? And that Jesus could change, as long as in essence He did not change?"  I did not like the feel of that explanation.

In the process of deliberation, we considered a question raised by someone wiser than I: "Who and what is Jesus Christ the Son of God, fundamentally?" This question unlocked something in my mind, and it dawned on me that Jesus was the Promised One, all the way since Genesis 3:15, and even before.  Jesus was the Promise, since eternity past, since before the foundations of the world.  In ages past, He was the Promise to come.  Then He came, and He fulfilled the Promise.  2 Corinthians 1:20 tells us that no matter how many promises God has made, they are all yes in Christ Jesus: the Promise given, the Promise fulfilled, the Word of God kept.  Jesus did not change. He is as immutable as every other aspect of God. He is the physical representation of the faithfulness of God's promises.  What God says never changes.  The Word of God never changes. Jesus never changes.

The grass withers, the the flowers fall, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Isaiah 40:8 ESV

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, 

and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, 

full of grace and truth.

John 1:14 ESV

I love it when I gain some understanding that really gets into me, leading me to reprocess all kinds of things in a deeper and more meaningful way.  Thank you, Jesus.