Wednesday, April 22, 2015

God # 5

Question: What do you mean by "the Trinity"? How can God be one and three persons at the same time?

God cannot be one and three at the same time and in the same sense, and nowhere does the Bible teach that God is one and three in the same sense. Yet in what sense can He be one and three? A perfectly satisfactory  answer to this question may be impossible from the very nature of the case. First, God is Spirit, and numbers belong primarily to the physical world. Difficulty inevitably arises when we attempt to describe the facts of spiritual being in the forms of physical expression. Second, God is infinite, and we are finite. Our attempts at a philosophical explanation of the Trinity of God is an attempt to put the facts of infinite being into the forms of finite thought. Such an attempt, at the very best, can only be partially successful. The doctrine of the Trinity, which has been accepted doctrine of the church though so many centuries, is the most successful attempt in that direction, but it may be questioned whether it is a full and final statement of the truth.

This much we know, that God is essentially one. We also know that there are three persons who possess the attributes of deity - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - who are called God and who are to be worshiped as God. There is only one God, but this one God makes Himself known to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet the Son and the Spirit are both subordinate to the Father. God the Father is God in the absolute and final sense - God is the source. The Son is God in the outflow. All the perfections of a fountain are in the river that flows forth from the fountain. Similarly, the Father has imparted to the Son all His own perfections, so that it may be said without qualification that "he who has seen [the Son] has seen the Father" (John 14:9). Through all eternity, the Son has existed and has possessed all the perfections of the Father. While He possesses all the perfections of the Father, He is not the Father but is derived from the Father and is eternally subordinate to the Father. This seems to be as far as we can go in our understanding now. How much further we may go in that glad, coming day when we will no longer see "through a glass, darkly; but ... face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12), when we will no longer "know in part" (v. 12) but will know God as perfectly and as thoroughly as He now knows us, none of us can tell.

~R. A. Torrey~

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