ROOTS: Scripture and The Trinity
I once saw a rather ludicrous post about the Bible making the rounds on the internet. And yes, I know: ludicrous posts are what you're in for when you wander carelessly around the world wide web, so I should not be surprised when, like the stubborn teenager who goes walking onto a clearly marked minefield, the mine actually goes off. But we are here to talk briefly of the Bible and Trinity, and so I will quote the post as our launching point into this discussion.
“The Word of God speaks to you. The Bible is silent.
The Word of God lives within you. The Bible doesn’t live anywhere.
The Word of God will never leave you. The Bible can be lost.
The Word of God died for you. The Bible isn’t alive.
The Word of God loves you. The Bible does not.
Jesus is the Word of God. The Bible is a book.”
This is one of the tried and tired (and do pay close attention to those words) methods of pitting Jesus against the Bible, as if Jesus had never said things like "Scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35), or as if Scripture itself never claimed to be the Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16), or as if Jesus didn't treat the words of the Bible as the very words of God (cf. Matthew 19:4 and Genesis 2:24, in which Jesus takes the words that Moses wrote and attributes them ultimately to God).
So, according to the above-quoted post, the Bible can introduce us to Jesus, but the rest of it is apparently moot and kaput. But if this is true, then how do we determine which parts of the Scripture are good and which are bad? Which parts are gospel-truth and which parts are heresy-false? And thus, how can the Bible actually be trusted to introduce us to Jesus? I have no idea, and I've not yet heard any compelling answer to these questions -- probably because they don't exist.
Fixed Meaning, Speaking and Acting
But this is, sadly, just the kind of result we ought to have expected after years of asking the question, "What does this passage mean to you?" For in reality, the passage's meaning exists apart from me. It will have the same meaning no matter what I think about it, or whether I interpret it correctly or incorrectly. There may be different applications of a passage, but the meaning is fixed. We should strive to understand whatever God intended to communicate through the human authors, because God spoke through all of them without distinction or exception. The words written for us in Scripture are the words of God. They are wed together. They cannot be divorced.
This also reveals a more fundamental misunderstanding of the very nature of God's words. As has been noted by many astute theologians, for God to speak is for God to act. Thus, to obey the words of God is to obey God; to disobey the words of God is to disobey God. It wasn't for nothing that Christ told the disciples that if the people rejected their words, they were actually rejecting him -- because the words the disciples spoke were the words of Christ, and to reject Christ's words is to reject Christ (Matthew 10:14-15).
So when our statement of faith says, “We believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the inspired word of God, inerrant in the original writings, complete as a revelation of God’s will for salvation, and the supreme and final authority in faith and life,” we mean it. And in saying this, we are affirming what the church has believed for thousands of years.
So, please expunge from your mind the post I shared above, and stick with what our statement of faith says about the Bible.
The Trinity
Now, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man. At the heart of the Bible is God – but not just God in general. It would be more accurate to say that at the heart of the Bible is the Triune God. Our God is a Trinity.
In short, when we say that we believe in the Trinity, we are saying that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God — but the Father is not the Son, nor is the Son the Father, nor is the Spirit the Son, and so on. We are not saying that we have one God and three Gods; we are saying that we have one God, but there are three persons in that one Godhead.
So if your mind is feeling a little bent and broken by this whole doctrine, then you’re in good company – because there is nothing like the Trinity in all of creation. We can’t explain how this mind-boggling fact can be true of God; but we can, in humble faith, believe that it is true of God.
God Is Love
Does it bring you comfort and peace to know that God is love, as the apostle John wrote? If so, then let’s begin by noting that if there is no Trinity, then when John says that God is love, he’s actually lying. Because if God was by himself, alone, before the creation of the world, then he could not know love — because he had no one and nothing to love. He would be a sad, pitiful tyrant who had to make creatures so that they could love him and appease his loneliness. But if in his everlasting, Triune life, the Father from eternity loved the Son and the Son loved the Father in the shared love of the Holy Spirit — then we can truly say that, from eternity, God is love, because each person of the Trinity has everlastingly loved the others.
So this means that God did not create the world or human beings because he was lonely or needed anything. Rather, out of the fullness, happiness, and love of his everlasting life, he created the world and human beings in order to share that glory. He created because he, like a happy and laughing child, simply wanted to. So every happiness that you have ever known can be traced back to him — every joy you have ever felt is just a glimpse, a ray that comes down from the burning sun of the Trinity’s explosive joy. And every sorrow you have ever tasted is a foreshadow of what life apart from the Trinity is like.
And the reason we know this majestic, glorious, wonderful God, is because he has revealed himself to us in the Scriptures. So let us, with grateful hearts, worship God and say with all the love in our hearts:
Glory be to the Father,
And to the Son,
And to the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning,
Is now,
And ever shall be,
World without end.
Amen.
