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“’But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’” — he then said to the paralytic — ‘Rise, pick up your bed and go home.’” (Mt 9:6)

 “So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mk 2:28)

 “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” (Mk 10:45)

 “And the high priest stood up in the midst and asked Jesus, ‘Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?’ But he remained silent and made no answer. Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ And Jesus said, ‘I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.’” (Mk 14:60-62)

 “For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” (Lk 9:26)

 “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (Jn 3:13-16)

Father, I cannot comprehend the glory or the humility of the Son of Man. Be gracious to me and help me see the beauty of Jesus, the Son of Man.

In one sense, Jesus is like you and me. He was a man. The most common title Jesus used to refer to himself was Son of Man, and on the surface, the bare title, without any context, seems to imply nothing more than that Jesus was human. Of course, He certainly was human, and that idea is included in the title, but “Son of Man” is a rich phrase with multiple meanings. It carries with it the idea of glory, authority, suffering, and humility.

When Jesus says “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven,” or when He talks about the Son of Man coming in his glory or descending from heaven, He is referring to a specific context. The prophet Daniel wrote this:

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. (Dan 7:13-14)

When Jesus speaks of the glory of the Son of Man, He is saying that He is the Son of Man Daniel saw in his vision. He is saying that He will come on the clouds of heaven, that He receives authority and a kingdom, that all people shall bow before Him, and that His kingdom shall not end. All these things are tied up in the title “Son of Man,” and none of them deals with mere humanity.

Sometimes the ideas “Son of Man” and “Son of God” are used in the same context to refer to the same person (Mk 14:60-62; Jn 3:13-16). The terms may not mean exactly the same things, but they can at times be used interchangeably.

When Jesus says that “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mt 9:6) or that the Son of Man is lord even over the law that God gave (Mk 2:28), He is claiming an authority beyond that of a normal human. This authority is bound up in the identity of the Son of Man. Jesus has authority over the law, authority to judge the world, and authority to forgive sins because He is the one like a son of man who receives authority and a kingdom that shall never end, before whom all people shall bow. He has this authority because He is the son of man in Daniel 7. Jesus identifies Himself as such.

And yet, the term Son of Man carries another meaning as well. It entails humility and suffering. “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45). Jesus may have the glory and authority of Daniel’s son of man, but for a time, He laid it aside and took up the sufferings of a man. Jesus did not think it robbery to be equal to God. Nonetheless, “he made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Ph 2:7-8). At times, the title “Son of Man” refers to this great act in which Jesus stripped Himself of His glorious prerogatives and became nothing. The glorious son of man in Daniel died on a cross. He did so because He was in a real way a son of man.

Jesus identified with us, for “the Son of Man came eating and drinking” (Mt 11:19), and “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Lk 9:58). The Son of Man is one of us. He became one of us that He might give His life for us. The Son of Man has full right to represent the human race. He has that right because He was a man.

And yet He was so much more.

“All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (Mt 11:27)

“He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said ‘This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.’” (Mt 17:5)

“And the high priest stood up in the midst and asked Jesus, ‘Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?’ But he remained silent and made no answer. Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ And Jesus said, ‘I am…’” (Mk 14:60-62a)

“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High” (Lk 1:31-32a)

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16a)

Father, may we see your Son and see Him clearly, that we may enjoy His beauties and that our lives may be transformed by His.

Christianity is unique, and Jesus is the reason why. He is the center of our faith.  He is the reason why people are Christians, and He is also the reason why others are not.  Everyone does something with Jesus, even if it is to ignore Him.  You will stand before God clean or unclean, according to what you do with Jesus. That is a radical claim, but it is the heart of Christianity.

Jesus claimed for Himself a position and authority that no sane man would ever claim.  Jesus is not like you or me. He is the Son of God. This phrase, “Son of God,” or some equivalent phrase (the Son, Son of the Most High, etc) occurs more than 120 times in the New Testament and always in reference to Jesus. It is one of the most basic proclamations that a follower of Jesus makes. Jesus understood Himself to be the Son of God. He acknowledges that fact in all four gospels.

Now when the Bible calls Jesus “Son of God,” it is not saying that He is like Hercules whose mother was human and whose father was Zeus. God the Father did not come to earth and have sex with Mary. Sometimes Muslims think this is what Christians mean by “Son of God.” They are wrong. That understanding of “Son of God” has no Biblical warrant, even in the Annunciation narrative.

In addition, when the Bible calls Jesus “Son of God,” it does not mean that Jesus is merely a son of God, as you or I might call ourselves children of God. Jesus calls Himself something different. He is the Son of God. He is the only one, the only begotten. In other words, He is unique.

Finally, when the Bible calls Jesus “Son of God,” it does not mean that Jesus had a beginning and that the Father existed before the Son. This is what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. Instead, the Bible is using a human picture to describe a divine reality. The picture of father and son is a reference to a shared nature and inheritance. As a son has the same nature as his father, so does Jesus have the same nature as His Father, and as a son owns His Father’s inheritance, so does Jesus own everything that God owns. In addition, the picture is also a reference to how the two beings relate. The love and intimacy between Jesus and the Father is something like what you might see in a good father/son relationship. The voluntary submission of Jesus to the will of the Father is something like the voluntary submission of a good son to his father. Fathers and sons have the same nature but different roles. That is the picture of the Son of God. He is the same as His Father in terms of His nature, but He differs from His Father in terms of His role.

This means that Jesus is no ordinary man. He has the power of God. He commands demons to flee, sickness to be gone, and death to die. His death on the Cross saves all peoples in all times because He is the infinite, eternal Son of God. The love He demonstrates through the Cross is the inexhaustible love of God. His righteousness is God’s righteousness; His mercy is God’s mercy; His authority God’s authority.

Jesus does not have these things imputed to Him as gifts from God. He has them on His own by virtue of His nature. He is God. He is the glory of God on earth, the exact imprint of God’s nature (Heb 1:3).   He is the Creator (Jn 1:3; Col 1:15; Heb 1:3). He is wondrous. As wondrous as God Himself.

He has an intimacy with the Father that we can never have on our own. The Father is his Abba, his Daddy, in an original sense. We can taste that intimacy through the Son of God, but we can never experience it apart from Him (Mt 11:27).

He knows God and the ways of God because He is God. He knows heaven because He has come from heaven. He does not know these things by virtue of someone teaching Him. He knows them as an insider. Heaven is His turf.

No other person in history is like Jesus. Get to know Him, and you will find yourself discovering depths you never dreamed of — the marvels of the Son of God.

He is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15)

Father,  Help us see you by showing us Jesus.

God wants you to know Him. That is a radical thought. It is something like saying that you want this grub worm to know you … only the gap between us and God is greater. Yet it is true. God wants you to know Him. For us to know God, however, He must reveal Himself to us, for if God does no revealing, we shall have no knowledge. God’s revelation comes in at least three forms.

The first form is that of nature. The heavens declare the glory of God (Ps 19:1), and we can learn something of God’s “invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature” (Rom 1:20), by looking at creation. This should not surprise us, for we can infer things about Monet by looking at Water Lilies or Michelangelo by viewing the Sistine Chapel. In fact, the revelation we receive from nature is so plain, that, to God, people who reject Him are without excuse.  But the information nature can give us about God is limited; therefore, we need more.

The second form of God’s revelation is the Bible. Nature can tell us of God’s power, creativity and glory, but it doesn’t get specific.  The Bible puts God’s communication into words. The advantage of words is that God can go into more detail. He can give specifics about what He likes and does not like, about how He works and does not work. Nature cannot do this just as Water Lilies cannot tell us how Monet treated his wife.

The third form of God’s revelation is that He came to earth. That is what Jesus is about. He is Emmanuel, that is, God with us. Jesus is God’s most specific and clearest revelation of all. It is as if, in the Bible, God sent a personal letter, but in Jesus, He paid a personal visit. The life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus on earth is the centerpiece of God’s revelation. Jesus brings God into focus. He is the image of the invisible God, and in Him the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form (Col 1:15; 2:9). When you look on Jesus, you are getting a glimpse into the heart of God. Therefore, if you want to know God, it is important to look at Jesus. So for the next several months, we’ll take a look at who Jesus is.

Sometimes we judge importance by length. We shouldn’t. I have written many blogs discussing the depths, mysteries and intricacies of God, but I am going to take only one blog to talk about His simplicity. You see, we need to see God as simple. God, vast and deep as He is, is simple enough for a child to understand, and any honest treatment of the nature of God must do justice to this fact.

But first, let me illustrate something about God by using math. Consider the following equation:

∜[a_0+∑_(n=1)^∞ (a_n  cos⁡ nπx/L + b_n  sin⁡ nπx/L ) ] = 1.

In attempting to solve the equation, we are prone to think the left side more important and will spend more time on it. Yet the equal sign is just that. It means that the two sides are the same. One side may be complex and one side simple, but neither side is more important. They are equal to one another. We spend more time on the left because it is more complicated, not because it is more important.

God is like the equation above, for God is both simple and complex, and all of his complexity equals His simplicity. God is, on the one hand, the most involved mathematical expression you ever saw. In fact, He is unsolvable. On the other hand, He is as simple as the number one. And both those aspects are equal to one another.

So let’s talk a bit about God being simple. I do not mean, of course, that he is fully comprehensible, for some things are so simple they are profound. Nor do I mean that he is simplistic, for his simplicity is both natural and mature. What I mean is that God may be full of mystery, but He is also the sort of being a child can understand.

God is a whole, and a whole is simple. Children understand this. They may not comprehend the atonement or the Trinity or the intellectual depths of predestination (for that matter, I suppose I don’t either); but they know that God is good, that He loves them, that He cares about a right life, that He is just and strong, and that He is all these things in one. In other words, children know that God is God. They are willing to take God as God and not divide him up into a million seemingly contradictory parts and then conclude that He must not be because the parts don’t make sense.   In the end, their “childish” approach is more sensible than we think. It is the common approach everyone takes toward most of life. No one ever divides his mother into a thousand different emotions, motives, and habits (many of which seem quite irreconcilable) and then concludes that Mom must be a figment of his imagination because he cannot make sense of her. No. Rather, we take Mom to be Mom, and we relate to her as a whole person. When we eat pizza, we do not analyze the chemistry of the dough or the physics involved in lifting the slice to our mouth. The notion that the subatomic particles in our pizza are behaving randomly does not trouble us. We never say, “The traits of the particles which are the foundation of my pepperoni are irrational. I just can’t see how this pizza can be what it is.”   No. We just eat it. The same can be said for throwing a ball, smelling a rose, or taking a nap. Most people take the childlike approach to most things in life. And when we do so, we have the great advantage of seeing things as wholes. A rose becomes a rose and a sausage a sausage. It is this approach, and this approach only, which sees God as God.  There may be different persons in the Godhead, and we may describe different aspects of God’s character; but God himself is a single whole just like any other being, and his character is indivisible. This fact is part of what simple means.

God is pure, and purity is a simple thing. Pure water bubbling up from a mountain spring is far simpler than the waters of Lake Erie. Purity means that there are no mixtures. God is purely God. His love is pure love; his patience pure patience; his wrath pure wrath, and so on. He never has mixed motives for what he does. He may have multiple reasons for doing something, but His reasons are never in conflict. There is no taint to God as there is to us. We muddy simplicity with our mud, but God lacks the mud and exists in his own purity. And because He is pure He is simple.

God is perfect, and perfection is simple. Distortions, imperfections, and weaknesses complicate things. A perfect sphere is simpler than a crushed one. Perfect love is simpler than tarnished love. Wherever we look, perfection is simpler than imperfection, and God is perfect. His character is never distorted or skewed. His anger never gets in the way of his patience; his courage never diminishes his wisdom. His affection is never maudlin; his justice never cold. He does not grow; he does not learn; he does not change. He is steady. He is what he always has been.  Simple.

God is humble, and humility is simple. Indeed, God is the most humble being of all. I realize that some people say God is arrogant because He demands unequivocal allegiance, glory and worship, but such people forget who they are talking about. They want to think about God the same way they think about men. If you or I were to demand what God does, we would be devils indeed, for reality would not back us up. We would be a rat demanding the lions to bow before him or a janitor claiming that the kings of the earth owed him their allegiance. But God can demand such things. He is God. He can desire glory for the plain reason that it is right. In us self-centeredness is sin because in truth we are not the center of everything. But in God things look different. If there is any self-centeredness in God, it is because God, properly speaking, is the center of everything. God can demand glory, worship and allegiance without being arrogant. On a smaller scale, we understand this principle. A mother can demand that her children show her respect. An admiral can demand that a seaman show him honor. An employer expects his employee to follow instructions. The mother, admiral and employer do not have to be arrogant to demand such things. They may merely be right. And so it is with God.

God is humble, and his greatness highlights his humility. He is not showy, though, of all beings, he alone has the right to be. He has a respect for our choices and will let us drink the potion we choose, though, of all beings, He alone could disallow all choices save His. He has every right to the most extravagant glories imaginable, yet He willingly entered the world in a stable, submitted Himself to the authority of a carpenter, owned nothing except a single tunic, and took upon his back the filth and guilt of the entire human race. He bled and died like a dog, yet He has more glory than the galaxies. Scripture describes it this way: “being in very nature God, (he) did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross” (Ph2:6-8). That is what humility is. That is God. And He is simple.  He is a pure, humble, perfect whole.

Our job is to view Him as such. Only when we begin to do this will we begin to see Him. Those who lose His simplicity lose God. If you think God so complex that you can know nothing of Him, then you shall know nothing of Him.

Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? (Ex 15:11)

 Father, You are incomprehensible. No other god, no other person can compare. You surpass the nations, and You exceed the boundaries of our knowledge. Truly, You are worthy.

Over the past months, this blog has discussed many attributes of God — love, justice, wrath, mercy, omniscience, omnipotence, Trinity, and more.   After reading these descriptions, two things ought to strike us. First, God has revealed a great deal about Himself. Second, God has not revealed everything. He is far bigger and greater than what He has revealed. The past blogs briefly touch only a smattering of things God has revealed, but the hidden attributes of God may far exceed the revealed ones, and the infinite nature of the revealed ones makes them fathomless. There is much more to God than even the angels can tell.

Now, after reading about these attributes of God, you may be tempted to separate them in your mind and possibly even make them fight each other. You know, how can a loving God send someone to hell? How can God forgive and show justice? How can God be all-knowing and almighty and allow evil? These sorts of questions tend to compartmentalize God’s character, as if God’s justice and mercy were somehow separate entities. This kind of thinking is a mistake. God is not the sum of His attributes. Let me try to illustrate.

In basketball sometimes a team of five good players can beat a team of five “superstars.” The good players play well together as a team while the “superstars” all wish to remain superstars. When put together, the good players add up to more than the superstars. Coaches call this chemistry. The attributes of God have a kind of chemistry, but it is of a different sort. It is certainly true that God is greater than the sum of His attributes. But to be correct, we would have to say that there can be no such thing as the sum of His attributes, for the attributes are not, properly speaking, parts of God which can be put together. They are more like a whole that radiates from God. Of course, we cannot be perfectly precise by using natural examples, but if you think of the relationship between God and His attributes more like that of the sun and its attributes, you will be closer to the truth. The attributes of God are the spiritual characteristics that flow from God. He is not what they add up to be. Rather, they are what He is. They are simply God radiating. They are God being Himself just as light, heat and energy are nothing more than the sun being itself. And when the sun is being itself, the light, heat and energy come as a package. Scientists may talk about light, heat, and energy separately to help us understand something about them and about the sun, but in real life, they are a whole. Something like that is true of God. His attributes exist as a unity. His omnipotence is holy, His justice omnipresent, His love infinite and His infinity loving. His forgiveness never contradicts His justice; His wrath never works against His love. When God acts, He never sets aside one aspect of His character in favor of another. Each of His actions is purely God being God in a specific circumstance. All His deeds are holy, gracious, just and loving all in one. Sometimes circumstances may highlight one aspect just as summer in Alaska highlights the light above the heat of the sun, but the other attributes are still present.

Secondly, God’s attributes are not high-octane versions of ours. God is not a human taken to infinity. He is certainly quantitatively superior to us, but He is also qualitatively superior to us. God is a different sort of Being from us. Even in heaven, when we are at our best, there shall be only one God. We shall then be perfect humans, but the canyon between a perfect human and God is a colossal leap indeed. This qualitative difference does not deny that we are created in His image. We can still be like Him in limited ways. Though His love is of a different sort from ours, our love can give a faint picture of His. It is like His in some ways, yet never completely. He is still qualitatively superior and will forever be different from us. That is what holy means.

Think of it this way. The anatomy of a fruit fly and that of a human may be alike in certain respects, yet who would deny that there is a vast qualitative difference between the two. We are not bigger and better fruit flies. And yet we might actually learn something about humans by studying fruit flies. So it is with God. We might learn something about God by looking at human love or human morality, but God is not just a bigger version of us.

We are, thus, faced with a God who astounds us, a God more overwhelming than a million suns, yet with depths deeper than those in our own impenetrable hearts. We cannot probe Him. He is God. One test for knowing whether our thoughts of God may be off target is to look at whether God ever stumps us. If we allow for no mysteries because we cannot understand them, if we demand that everything about God fit into our brains, if we never allow God to surprise us, we have the wrong ideas about God. Of course, being surprised and stumped is no guarantee of truth, but if we have God in a box, we have something more like Zeus than God.

God is love. (I Jn 4:8)

 ‘Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. (Mk 10:7-8)

 Paul, an apostle — not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead … (Gal 1:1)

God, I praise you not just because you are beyond my understanding but because your mystery helps me understand other mysteries.

We’ve been talking about the Trinity — the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. All three are unique persons, and all three are one God. I have tried to give some help understanding the Trinity, but today I want to talk about how the Trinity helps us understand other aspects of Christian theology.  The Trinity may be a mystery, but it is a mystery that has explanatory power.

Let’s begin with love.  Scripture says that God is love (I Jn 4:7-8), but love requires more than one person. I can love my wife and kids. I can love my friends. I can even love my enemies. But I cannot love a void. One person living alone cannot be love. In order to love, he needs someone to love. But God is love from eternity. He did not just begin loving when He created the human race. God does not need the creation in order to love. Rather, His love for you and me is rooted in His very nature. The Father loves the Son from eternity, and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit the same. Love is the nature of a Trinitarian God in a way that it cannot be with Allah.

Similarly, the Trinity explains why God is relational, for He is so by nature. Relationship is grounded in His Trinitarian character. God has never been lonely. He never sat in the sky moping for the right person to come along. He did not create people because He needed relationship. He had perfect relationship from eternity. He did not need us, but He did want us. In addition, our human desire for relationship finds its source in the nature of God. The Trinity provides the foundation for the human hunger for meaningful relationships. We enjoy relationship because God does, and He made us in His image.

The Trinity models the Biblical concept of equality with submission. Jesus considered Himself equal with God (Jn 10:30; 14:9). Yet Jesus delighted to do the will of His Father (Jn 4:34; 6:38; Heb 10:5-9). Normally, we think that equality and submission cannot coexist, but Biblically, they are sometimes friends. On Earth, Jesus willingly submitted to His Father, yet His submission was not a statement of inequality but an expression of His love, and a picture of His role. His submission does not deny His equality with the Father. This fact sheds much light on what God says about marriage, for Scripture clearly says that men and women are equal in God’s sight (Gen 1:27; Gal 3:28), yet Scripture also calls wives to submit to the leadership of their husbands (Eph 5:22-4; Col 3:18; I Pet 4:1-6). If you are not a Christian, then the comparison of the Trinity to a marriage may make no sense to you. You may say that they both are bunk. But if you are a Christian, then you accept the equality of the Father and the Son, and you also accept the submission of the Son to the Father. And you know that the submission and the equality stand together. Submission does not nullify equality.  You accept this. Well. If you can accept this with the Trinity, why can’t you accept the same thing within marriage? Submission within marriage is not what most Western people think it is.

The Trinity models Biblical marriage. When a man and woman marry, are they two or are they one? Of course, when you count heads, you see two, but to God they are one flesh (Gen 2:24). How can this be? Is “one flesh” just a metaphor for sex? Sex is part of it, but it is so much more. Paul says that when a man loves his wife, he loves his own body (Eph 5:28-31), and this body-love is more than just sex. It is that a husband and wife are one in a sense in which Scripture can say that she is part of his own body. When a man loves his wife, he actually loves himself. The Trinity helps illustrate this, for just as God is three distinct persons in one God, so is a marriage two distinct persons in one flesh.

Finally, the Trinity helps explain how God can die for our sins and yet remain alive. When Jesus died on the Cross, God died. Consequently, His death becomes a punishment that pays infinitely. Yet the Father did not die, so in that sense, God did not die. The Father raised Jesus from the dead (Gal 1:1; Eph 1:17, 20). The Trinity helps explain the Resurrection of Jesus.

We could perhaps go on, but what I want you to see is that Biblical theology is interconnected. Your view of God affects your view of many other things like marriage, relationships, and the Resurrection.

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.’ (Is 44:6)

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. (Jn 1:1; 14)

 Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (I Cor 3:16)

 Father, Lord Jesus, and Spirit: I don’t understand, but I praise who you are.

Imagine a world where temperatures don’t exist, where yesterday and today are at the same time, where light needs no source, and where creatures never die. You would not be imagining this universe. But no problem. Stephen Hawking and many other physicists today posit the idea of multiple universes. They speculate that at least one and perhaps many other universes reside outside our own, and one of the central aspects of their theories is that these universes do not operate under the same laws of physics as our universe. In other words, a thousand years may be like a day, light may have no physical source, and, for all we know, creatures may live forever. I find such physics ironic because, in one sense, it says what Christians have been saying for thousands of years. There is another world out there, a different type of world from what we see and touch, but just as real nonetheless. Now I am not here to talk about alternate universes, but I bring them up because I think they may help us with a bit of theology about God.

Sometimes, when we talk about God, we want Him to fit inside the universe we live in. This desire is understandable, for this universe is the experience we know, so we may, thus, struggle with ideas like God being three persons but one God. In fact, Christians often avoid discussing the Trinity altogether because they can’t exactly explain it. They’re sort of embarrassed. “Um … Well … you see … three people make up one God … and …” The fact of the matter is that the Trinity, on the surface at least, doesn’t seem to fit the known laws of physics on Earth. But this is precisely where Stephen Hawking might be of some help. You see, God isn’t from this universe, and if Hawking is correct, then God is not bound by the same laws of physics that bind you and me. Indeed, in a spiritual world, perhaps personalities can fit together differently than they do here. In that world, perhaps one being can be three persons. In that world, perhaps the concept of a Trinity is not so hard to understand. In fact, it might be the norm. If we were to go to that world, we might find that we would retain our unique individuality and yet also be swallowed up in the glory of God.  At the same time.

We must understand that God is bigger than we are and that He is not from here. In our current experience we live in four observable dimensions. The first three are length, width, and height — what we call space. The fourth is time. Virtually everything we see can be measured in those four dimensions, and as long as something fits neatly within those dimensions, we are OK with it. We can see it. But what if we encountered a being of twenty dimensions, a hundred dimensions, or infinite dimensions. We would then be out of our league. We would be like a three-year-old girl trying to understand calculus. The Trinity is this sort of thing. It involves dimensions beyond our normal experience. It is spiritual calculus, but we are spiritual infants. The reason we have difficulty grasping the Trinity is that we are dealing with God. The Trinity is God. And when you fit God inside your brain, you no longer have God.

When God revealed Himself as a Trinity, He did not mean us to analyze and discuss it. He meant us to marvel in it and enjoy Him. So enjoy the Father. Enjoy the Son. And Enjoy the Spirit … three in one.

There is…one Spirit…one Lord…one God and Father of all. (Eph 4:4-6)

 … baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit … (Mt 28:19)

 I am God, and there is no other; I am God and there is none like me. (Is 46:9)

 I and the Father are one. (Jn 10:30)

 Now the Lord is the Spirit (II Cor 3:17)

 …which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (II Cor 3:18)

Lord Jesus and Precious Holy Spirit, we rightly give you praise and worship. We offer you the same allegiance due the Father, knowing that our worship of you and prayers to you are simultaneously given to the Father, for in your triune nature there is no competition. Praise be to your holy name.

I recall talking to some Chinese Christians about Christmas. They told me that people in China today celebrate Christmas. They shop, give presents, enjoy lights, and know all about Santa Claus.

“What about Jesus?” I remember asking.

“No. Most people don’t know that part of Christmas.”

Suffice it to say that few people in China know about Christmas, for if you talk about Christmas but never talk about Jesus, you have missed Christmas. In Christian theology, something like this is true of God, for we can talk about many attributes of God, but if we never get to the Trinity, we miss God. Today we will talk about the Trinity.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity takes us on a highway that ascends into the clouds. It gives us revealed facts that, when put together, do not seem to fit our limited understanding. To someone with faith, this is not insurmountable, for the doctrine is not irrational. But to someone without faith, the cloud is evidence that the road is false. To this person no amount of clarity would bring faith. If the cloud could be removed, the faithless would remain faithless and the faithful faithful. No one’s eternal destiny would improve if only God were a bit clearer. Thus, we must take God as He has revealed Himself; and if the highway goes into the clouds, we must fight all efforts to detour it into the valley.

The doctrine of the Trinity consists of several truths of Scripture put together much as our view of the solar system comprises many observed facts put together. The first truth about God is that He is One.  “I am God and there is no other; I am God and there is none like me,” Isaiah said.  The Bible is clear. There are not two or three or a hundred or thirty million gods. There is only one, and He has no equal. Religions that speak of multiple gods are, thus, by definition, idolatrous. Some may think it harsh for me to say that, but the idea is not mine. It is God’s. The Scriptures constantly decry the worship of other gods. In fact, God continually describes it as spiritual adultery. Just as a married woman has only one husband, so did God make us for only one God — Himself.  To chase after another is unthinkable. There is only one God.

But the oneness of God means something else as well. It means that God is one. He is a unity. He is undivided. We can never have a part of God as we can have a part of our sandwich, for God cannot be partitioned. The entirety of God is always present everywhere. This oneness of God does not seem to cause people difficulties. But the next teachings do.

The Scriptures plainly deal with the identity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit and treat both as equal to the Father.   Jesus commands us to baptize in the name of all three. Scripture refers to all three as Lord. It is perfectly appropriate for us to pray to and worship all three as God.[1] They are all divine, but the Scriptures never intend the divinity of Christ and the Spirit to mean that there are three gods. All three — Father, Son and Spirit — are simultaneously and completely God. They are not parts of God. They are not phases of God. They are not aspects of God. They are fully and completely … God. The one and only God, by definition, consists of three distinct persons. If I could describe it as a math equation (crazy right?), it might be something like this:  1God = 3persons.  Yet those persons are so united that we cannot divide God into three parts. These persons are distinct but one. Nothing on earth is fully analogous to their relationship. For on earth, when things are put together they either form a part of the whole (like a yolk, a white, and a shell) or they lose their identity when integrated into the whole (like adding cream and sugar to coffee). We know nothing that remains uniquely distinct AND completely whole when combined.

At this point we are in the clouds and are invited not to analyze but to worship. God’s complexity towers over us. We are like computers unable to process data for which we have no known program. Our software cannot handle a task this sophisticated. Here lies the difference between the Christian and nonChristian views of the Trinity. The unbeliever sees the doctrine as contradiction; the believer sees it as mystery, which we do not now have the capacity to fully understand. The one requires the data to fit the software; the other allows the data to outstrip the software. The Christian expects God to be perplexing, and, in that sense, the Trinity does not surprise us. But, of course, in another sense it shocks us. The Trinity is not at all the sort of God anyone would ever invent. Invented gods are far more simplistic. The Trinity is God pulling back the curtain just a wee bit and giving us a slight view of something we cannot fully grasp now. But the important thing is not to explain the Trinity but to bow before the Unexplainable. Be still and contemplate the Triune One. Worship Him as Father, worship Him as Son, worship Him as Spirit.

[1] I will give more details in future blogs when I discuss Jesus and the Spirit more fully.

You received the Spirit of sonship, and by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” (Rm 8:15)

You are my Father, my Daddy, my Papa. You love me and care for me.  You make yourself known and call me to commune with you. Grant to me a continual and abiding intimacy with you. Deepen our relationship and let it be said in heaven and on earth that here is one who knows God.

Can you know a computer? How about a factory? Or a theory? Or a process? Of course, the answer is yes. We can know all sorts of things, but knowledge does come in different varieties. It is one thing to know a tree and quite another to know a woman. Personhood adds a dimension to knowledge. When I speak of knowing my daughter Charissa, I am saying something quite different than when I speak of knowing engineering. My knowledge of Charissa has a personal element to it that engineering will never have. That’s because Charissa is a person, and we can know people in a deeper, richer way than we can know curried rice or the World Cup. Personality enriches knowledge. Having said that, I do not mean that we know all people the same. I do not know my cousins the same way I know Charissa, and I do not know the chancellor of Germany the same way I know my cousins. I do not have the same level of intimacy with all people. But because people are people, if the president of Indonesia were in my family, I could know him as well as I know my daughter. In fact, I have no doubt that some people know him that way now.

When we discuss the attributes of God, it is sometimes easy to get philosophical, but God is not a philosophy. He is a person. God is not the Watchmaker or the Grand Idea or the Great-Spirit-in-the-Sky. He is not a detached force, He is not nature, and He is not the unfeeling ground of all being. He is a distinct person who thinks, feels and wills. His nature is personal just as your dad’s nature is personal. He, thus, desires personal relationship, and He has taken great steps to make Himself known. He loves us and desires our love in return. If it were possible to add wonder to infinity, this truth would do so. The unchanging, infinite, sovereign creator of the universe wants you to know and love Him. He came to the garden and walked with the first pair; He likened Himself to a husband (Hos), a father (Mt 6:9), a friend (Jn 15:15). If we truly understand what prayer is all about, we know that it requires a personal God. God wants us to communicate with Him, not because He needs to know something but because He wants relationship. The Incarnation was a relational move. God became man because God wanted to reconcile the world to Himself (II Cor 5:18-19). God became man because God wanted a face to face. God became man because God wanted to restore communion. God is our Abba, our Father, our Daddy. He wants us to be family, not just observers or workers.

I recall a speaker telling about a time when he had traveled to Israel. He was at the airport and was passing by the place where plane passengers filtered out into the public. Two young children, maybe four and six, recognized their dad returning home. They ran up to him shouting “Abba! Abba!” and jumped into his arms. With God, we are those small children, and He delights to see us run to Him and jump into His arms. Indeed, we, too, find no greater joy than to revel in our God.

We long for a close relationship with our Father. We were made for such a relationship because we were made in the image of that Father. We are relational creatures by creation. It is relationship that gives depth and meaning to life, and it is relationship with God that gives ultimacy to life. People who live for their gardens, their research, the next drink or the next deal are to be pitied. They have sacrificed relationship for something that will never deliver. But people who live for their spouse or children are equally to be pitied, for they have sacrificed the ultimate relationship for something lesser. Human relationships are wonderful. Good ones give us a taste of heaven, but they can give only a taste; they were never meant to be the full meal. It is in God that the soul will truly get to feast, and it is His great pleasure to set the table.

from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. (Ps 90:2)

his understanding has no limit. (Ps 147:5)

I am God Almighty. (Gen 17:1)

God of all, we acknowledge the immensity of our limitations in comprehending the infinity of who you are. Help us to quietly adore and to allow you to be who you are.

In high school I worked a couple summers in the mountains of Colorado. I will never forget those summers and the powerful beauty of the Rockies. One night, the guys in my cabin decided it would be fun to sleep on the roof.  We took our blankets up there and froze, and because it was so cold, I didn’t get any sleep. I, thus, spent the entire night gazing at the heavens. The stars on a clear night at 10,000 feet are a spectacle to behold. Galaxies spread out before your eyes, and the quiet beauty penetrates your soul. Deeply. You feel small in the presence of such an expanse. The heavens really do declare the glory of God (Ps 19:1).

That night on the roof, I got a glimpse of a small portion of the universe.  The universe is immense, but the universe is finite. It may be expanding, but it has an end. In fact, if it has no end, it cannot expand. To God, the universe is like an atom, a little neutron, so small you can hardly see it under a microscope. You must understand. God is infinite.

When people encounter infinity, the proper reaction is something like, “Oh my!” We cannot grasp it. It is beyond us. The human mind may be marvelous and mysterious, but it is limited, and one of the great mistakes people make about God is that they think He is limited too. Too often we put our parameters around God. We somehow think He is like us. This thinking disrobes God of His divinity. A god smaller than our minds is not God. The real God has no boundaries.

This does not mean that God’s love can behave unlovingly or His justice be unjust or His holiness sin. Rather, it means that when God acts in a fashion consistent with His nature, His love and justice and all the rest have no bounds. This aspect of God boggles us, for everything around us has boundaries — including the universe. Truly, we do not understand infinity. We may say we do, and we may have a limited idea of what it is, but our idea is at best a nod of the head or more likely a boast like that of an eight-year-old claiming to understand the mysteries of quantum mechanics. The infinity of God is a statement of His incomprehensibility If God is infinite He cannot be fully understood. But the church has often replaced God with a god it can understand. Tozer puts it well:

“The God of Abraham has withdrawn His conscious presence from us, and another God whom our fathers knew not is making himself at home amongst us. This God we have made and because we have made him we can understand him; because we have created him he can never surprise us, never overwhelm us, nor astonish us, nor transcend us.” (p.43).

Infinity should give birth to humility. No matter how great our intelligence, riches, strength or influence, how deep our love, or how pure our life, when we put these things next to God we are empty. The infinity of God precludes our ever coming before Him as if we are the big man on campus. And yet we can humbly take heart, for the love He has for us never ends, the wisdom ordering the events around us is limitless, the power fighting for our good cannot be overcome, and His faithfulness to His people will never be betrayed. We cannot outsin His mercy or outrun His grace. We cannot thwart His justice or defile His purity. We cannot stump or stop infinity. No power or force or plot or deceit can conquer infinite sovereignty. Every attribute of God is colored by His infinitude. His knowledge is infinite.  His riches are infinite.  His power is infinite.  His love, His purity, His faithfulness, His mercy, His justice.  All of these are infinite.

We can never grow tired of God. The beauties and marvels of the Majestic One are forever inexhaustible. After we have worshipped in heaven for a million milleniums, we will still find new aspects of the infinite God to revel in. Eternity in glory will not exhaust the infinitude of God. Behold your God. But truly you cannot behold Him.