JOHN042 - God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity

He always is and always has been and always will be the Alpha and the Omega. And it's hard. Even as I dip my toe into this subject matter here in the first minute or so of this conversation, there are some of you who are sizing up the whole Christian faith thing in the Bible, and you're going, man, this is what's so difficult for me about Christianity is how does the God of Christianity work?

How can you have one God in three co-equal persons, all existing eternally, of the same substance, yet they're distinct from each other? And the Holy Spirit is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father, and the Father is not the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit is God, and the Father is God, and the Son is God. And you have the Son praying to the Father. I mean, how does that work? Is that's God praying to God? It's confusing, it's overwhelming.

And this is, you know, some of you are probably thinking, like, this is one of the things, my big hang-ups here with Christianity, this is a big hurdle to overcome. And to those of you who are maybe feeling that right now, I would say, yeah, fair enough. It's confusing, it is difficult, and there are mysteries involved. And also, God, when we talk about him, as he's revealed himself, he seems very otherly, but other gods that you hear about, they just kind of sound and look like us.

It would make sense that the timeless eternal God of all things, who is perfect in all things, would also be perfect relationally, and that that God who doesn't need anything would not have to look outside himself for relationships, or else that God would have a limitation. Well, I'm lonely, you know, it's just me around here. Well, that was never the case with God, even before creation happened. God has always existed in three persons.

So on the one hand, yeah, I gotta acknowledge God is complex and the nature of God is complex, and it's even hard to find the right language to quickly encapsulate what the prologue of John is spelling out for us here about who the Son is and who the Father is and how God works and how God has always worked. I get it. It's hard. It's hard to find the language, it's hard to sum all of that up and come up with tautologies that cleanly explain all of that.

But also, I mean, you'd expect the God of all things to be pretty complex. And you would expect that even a very smart, finite human would not be able to just casually stroll up to God and be like, hmm, let me size this up for a second. Yep, I think I understand everything about you. We're good to go here. Let me go size some other things up now.

I mean, I mean, it would make sense that the maker and sustainer of all things, the only infinite being in the whole realm of existence, would take a little bit of thought and a little bit of languaging to understand. So if you are a non-Christian sizing it up and you find this to be a little intimidating, a little overwhelming, maybe even a little confusing, well, hey, you're in good company.

If you're a Christian who goes to talk about the Trinity and the nature of God, and from time to time you're like, this is a minefield. There are so many ways that are well intended to try to make sense of the nature of God and the Trinity and how all that works. There's so many ways to try to make sense of that that quickly get you off track. And then you're saying stuff that sounds Christian, but when you really think about it, it has problems and that doesn't work.

Well, if you're in that boat, you're also in good company because all kinds of people for millennia have wrestled to understand the mystery of the nature of God, but also to understand God on the terms that he has revealed about himself. One of the most important passages in figuring out who God is on his own terms is the very passage we've been looking at for what are we at now? 42 maybe episodes? I mean, look, you're smart.

You I mean, you can do the math on how many chapters are in John and where we're at right now. I don't think the pace we're moving at right now will be the pace that we move at throughout all of John, but there's a reason that we have moved very slowly through this prologue because it's dense and it's important. But the book starts off with such deep, eternal theology about the most important thing. I mean, fancy people call this theology proper. The prologue deals with the theology of God.

Who is God? What is he in his essence? So to me, this season, it seemed entirely appropriate to just start with the text. You might remember the first words of this season were not, hey, okay, well, I'm Matt. We're going to study John. Here's who John is. This is about what year was it. No, the first words were in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

There's a reason for that because this prologue, it's bigger than the normal uh locked-in time historical questions that we would ask. This thing is massively timeless, and we'll locate it relative to the book as we go along. So here's this important passage about the nature of God. And at no point does this passage or any passage in the Bible use the term the trinity. Tertullian, which I always thought was a really cool name. He was an African church father.

About, I don't know, somewhere between 115 and 125 years after the book of John and this prologue were written. Tertrulian, we think, is the first guy to use the term the trinity to explain the nature of God, to explain the triune God we are worshiping here. And so some people, you know, will get after Christianity and be like, Trinity's not even in the Bible. Yeah, but the word isn't, but the concept is everywhere. And we see it here in right off the bat in John.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Well, how does that work? Going all the way back to the Old Testament, we see all kinds of hints that God is in relationship with himself, conversation even with himself. We see that in creation. As we get further into the New Testament, what is visible in the Old Testament becomes all the more clear, and that is that the Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit is worshipped as God.

Jesus is worshipped as God. And we never see Jesus decline worship and be like, no, uh, you know, like, you know, Paul sometimes. They go to worship Paul and he's like, What are you doing? No, get up. Even if you have to hit me with rocks a whole bunch because you're upset. I told you not to worship me. Don't. Angels are like, whoa, hold on, don't worship me. You can't do that. No one is to be worshiped except for God in the Bible. And Jesus knows that, but he receives worship.

The Holy Spirit is worthy of worship. The whole Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, they're on screen at the same time, several times in the Bible. In other words, like all three of them are there. There you are, there you are, there you are. All three of them are there at once. And then, you know, most famously at the end of Matthew, we hear all three of them listed together as one, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

That's how Jesus commissions his disciples to baptize right at the end of Matthew 28. Why am I turning to Matthew 28 subconsciously? I mean, I just told you what the thing says. The Trinity is infinitely evident from Scripture. Scripture does not contradict the nature of God, the triune nature of God. And the few places where there's ambiguity in that regard, well, the old adage, interpret the less clear in the Bible in light of the more clear, comes into play.

There's so much stuff that clearly and unequivocally affirms God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit as a triune God existing eternally in three persons as one God. There's so much of that that even the couple of places where maybe the language, you know, it doesn't come through to English as clearly as we might like, and there's a little bit of ambiguity. When you read it in light of all the rest of the Bible and what it says about the nature of God, it snaps right into focus.

So you'll hear people say, well, the Trinity was an idea that got invented way after the Bible, you know, by Tertullian, and then some people started piggybacking off of that. And then eventually they all just bullied everybody into thinking Trinity stuff at the Council of Nicaea in the early 300s because you know Constantine wanted to conquer the world and he couldn't have this controversy out there about who Jesus is and how it works.

If you don't know what I'm talking about at all, don't worry about it. We'll cover this stuff more in depth later. But that's really not an accurate characterization of what was going on here. It isn't so much that Christian leaders in the first couple centuries after Christ were like, we just have no idea what to make of Jesus. Let's throw some crap at the wall. What if this? And then people were like, no, not that. Okay, well, what if this? No, that wasn't good enough either. What if this?

Okay, I kind of like that. No, instead, they're not trying to invent God in the first few centuries of Christianity. Rather, they're trying to find clear, concise, understandable, accurate human language that rightly describes a phenomenon for which there is no analogue in the physical world. God is different from the world he made. He is distinct from the world he made. Creation is not God. God has made himself known. We see that all over John 1.

But also God is uh other, and there really isn't neatly anything in our experience that we can compare him to. So whereas most abstract problems we can just solve with a neat, tidy analogy, such analogies really are insufficient for describing the glory and the uh otherness and the uniqueness of who God is compared to everything else in the world.

So, what's going on in the first few centuries of Christianity is sincere people who trust the scriptures and who believe in God are trying to find language to explain the faith that has been handed down to them, the God of the faith that has been handed down to them and what they see throughout the scriptures. Unsurprisingly, it clunks at times. And people come up with language that seems pretty good, kind of has a couple analogies. It's like, I think it's like this.

But then upon closer consideration, other leaders came in and were like, no, here's why that nope that doesn't work. That's insufficient. Now, sometimes church leaders who said it insufficiently were like, ah, yeah, you're right. Okay, uh, well, let's what if we if we say it like this? Oh, no, you're right, that doesn't quite work either. Other times, certain church leaders dug in and were like, no, that is the way. Most notably, there was a guy named Arius who said, Jesus isn't God.

Jesus was created. There was a time when the sun did not exist. He's great, he's super and everything, but he's not God. And the Council of Nicaea is where such inaccurate teaching and languaging about the nature of the sun and the nature of the Trinity gets resolved. Ultimately, Christians find the right language. It's articulated in the creeds, but even if you're like somebody's like, I don't I don't want to say any of the creeds, well, it's also articulated in the Bible.

So finally, in John 1, we get this neat symmetry in terms of how the prologue breaks down. In the opening verses, the divinity of Christ and a hint at the nature of God is given. In the beginning was the word, the Lagos, Christ, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, he was with God in the beginning. Jesus is God, Jesus is with God, and then we read on and we realize Jesus is also revealing God. Okay, that's a lot.

You know, we I said at the outset, this is a hard concept, but that hardness is a feature, not a bug. But then we get to the end, and the final verse of the prologue reiterates the same divine complexity, but it also assumes we can understand it. We just you know gotta listen closely. No one has ever seen God but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.

So the opening verses say Jesus is God, is with God, and reveals God, and the closing verse says Jesus is God, is with God, and reveals God. The prologue has a tight symmetry, and if you get to the end of it, heck, even if you get to the end of this slightly longer than usual episode and you're like, I still have questions. Cool, that's fine. I don't think John is threatened by that. I don't think the New Testament is threatened by that.

I don't think Christianity is threatened by that, and I certainly don't think God is threatened by that. God understands his divinely infinite complexity. He understands very well our not divinely, not infinitely not complexity, and yet the whole exercise of not just the Bible, but Jesus Himself is to overcome that divide in complexity and capacity to make himself known to finite people.

The prologue of John 1 does not solve every single question about everything, but it sure does frame it all up, throw down the gauntlet, and pave the way for what we're about to get throughout the rest of John. We've received the challenge of the text and the guiding principles of the text in the prologue. And now we're gonna start to get into the story next time around. And this whole story should be interpreted in light of what we just spent, what did I say, 42 episodes working through here.

I didn't want to divide this episode up, so I know it was a little bit longer, but this also marks the conclusion of our time in the prologue. And tomorrow we're gonna turn the page to John 119, but we gotta keep this thing in the back of our brains, and I'll try to help with that as we're cruising along and moving forward. Cool. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.