21 Feb 2023

True and sound wisdom consists of two things – the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves (drawn from the teachings of Augustine and Calvin). And the knowledge of ourselves becomes clearer in the face of our encounter with God in His Word as we see ourselves as God sees us.
But the knowledge of God must have at its focus the understanding and appreciation of the Trinity. The trinitarian God is an inwardly communing and communicating God, and God teaches out from within His threefold communion to communicate beyond Himself. God does this by speaking His word in creation, by sending His Word in redemption, by expressing His word in the Scriptures and having the word expounded in the assembly of His people, the church.

Four statements summarise the contents of the trinitarian understanding of God:
God is one.
God is three.
God is a diversity.
God is a unity

Christians are monotheists, not polytheists. We confess that the God whom we know through Christ is the one God whom the Old Testament called “Yahweh.” Indeed there is no other God.

Yet the one God is three persons – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each of the three is divine, for they share together in the one divine nature or essence.
The one God is eternally three persons. Just as God is characterised by oneness, therefore, threeness also belongs to the way God actually is.

“Three-in-oneness” also indicates the way God acts in the world. The three persons together comprise the one God throughout all eternity; in the same manner Father, Son, and Spirit are at work – and work together – in the divine program for creation. The one God is a diversity-within-unity. The Father, Son, and Spirit are eternally different from each other and they carry out different tasks in the one divine program for creation as well. However, the three persons comprise a unity – all are involved in every area of God’s activity in the world.
In essence, the Father acts through the Son by the agency of the Spirit.

We are familiar with the following verse, 2 Corinthians 13:14, often quoted in the Benediction at the end of the worship service:
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
In our fellowship with God we must do justice to the part that each person of the Trinity plays in saving us from sin, restoring our ruined humanness, and bringing us finally to glory.
Consider the consequences if we neglect each person of the trinitariann God:

If we neglect the Father, we lose the focus on the tasks He sets and the disciplines He imposes. The Father fulfils the primary role in the act of creation. He is the direct creator of all that exists (1 Cor. 7:6). His will forms the foundation for the existence of all things (Rev. 4:11). Hence all creation owes its existence to the Father (Acts 17:28). In addition, the Father’s glory is the goal of all things; the purpose of every creature is to praise Him.

If we understand this deeply, we will not behave like spoiled children of God, becoming lazy, self-absorbed, erratic, egoistic, thinking that the world revolves around us and we are the centre of the world, forgetting that just as God creates us with His Word, one world from Him is enough to ‘eradicate’ us. He is the Creator; we are the created. Job, after many complaints against God regarding his intense sufferings (and Job had very much more pain and suffering than we can ever have, in some sense), declared, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes”. Job acknowledged who God is, and he recognised deeply who he was, before the transcendent almighty Creator and ruler of the universe.

Do we make heavy weather of the troubles and setbacks that come our way, complaining incessantly why God the Father allows such and such to beseech us and to inflict us? Is this consistent with the prayer, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name….thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven..? Have we forgotten that not only is He the Creator, but He is also the provider, the giver, the protector and the almighty King?? To Him belongs all glory, all honour and all worship!
If we neglect Him, we tend to take Him for granted, and fail to give Him the reverence, worship, adoration, and glory in our daily outworking, and even in our times of worship among God’s people – ‘There is no fear of God’ in our lives’.

If we neglect the Son, we lose our focus on the Son’s mediation, blood atonement, risen life, royal glory, and heavenly intercession – we slip back to the treadmill religion of works, and the Son and the cross no longer remain the centre of the gospel in our lives. This is what we have been focusing on as we study the book of Galatians and noted the significance of preaching and keeping the true gospel, giving no room for a false gospel, whether it be gospel-plus. gospel-minus, cults or heresies.

Should we neglect the Holy Spirit, losing our fellowship with Christ that He creates, the renewing of nature that He effects, the assurance and joy that He evokes, and the enabling for service that He bestows, we shall slip back into formalism, a religion of mechanical observances, low expectations, deep ruts of routine, and grooves that quickly turn into graves.

True Trinitarianism in the head and in the heart can take us beyond these pitfalls, but anything less virtually guarantees a spiritual development that is one way or another stunted and deformed.