Trinity Series - Sermon #12, Our Great God!

This post marks the final offering in a series about the Trinity that began on January 22 and includes both Sunday morning sermons and small group notes. If you have not been following this series and are interested, you may want to go back to the first post and procede. For those of you who have persevered to the end, I do hope it has been profitable! God bless!

All of God:
Exploring the Mystery of the Trinity
Our Great God!
Hebrews 1:1-14

Earlier this morning, our children’s ministry held its annual Promotion Sunday, complete with breakfast – although when Keisha told me they were having muffins and fruit, I thought maybe it was a Senior Citizen promotion of some sort with bran muffins and apple slices. Hey, promotion Sunday is a big day, especially for the 8 to 10 5th graders that will be moving up to the youth group. Now, that’s big time for those guys! A whole new world is opening up to those moving up to the youth group with activities and adventures heretofore unknown, especially since most of the ones moving up come from such boring families. Just kidding!

Along with the new privileges and opportunities that await these young students, there will be a higher level of expectation for their knowledge and behavior. With maturity comes responsibility. That’s the way it always is, is it not? The more we know the more is expected of us.

This morning will be my last message on this series about the wonder of God found in the Trinity. We will be reviewing some of what we have learned and also thinking about the responsibility that accompanies our newly acquired knowledge. The more we know about God, the more we are expected to apply what we know.

Hopefully today’s message will be easier on your ribs than last week’s message was! Our text will be the first chapter of Hebrews, and while I will refer to it, we will not spend a great deal of time here, although we may revisit it in a few weeks because of its connection to the psalms.

Just a heads up, our next series is entitled, Pain, Praise, and Peace: A Summer in the Psalms. Many of us have experienced a great deal of pain this year, and in the psalms we will find God right in the middle of our mess. For this morning, I chose Hebrews 1 for our text as we review what we have learned about the Trinity because it points to the awesomeness of our great God – God the Father and His Son, Jesus. Even though the Holy Spirit is not mentioned here, He led the author to write these words and He is present in the work of salvation that is expressed at the end of the chapter.

As we read together in just a moment, look for the following truths:

Ø The awesomeness of God the Father (His transcendence)
Ø The awesomeness of God the Son (His immanence)
Ø God’s communication to us through His Word (as the prophets were led by God’s Holy Spirit to write – 2 Peter 1:19-21)
Ø God’s communication to us through His Son
Ø The deity of Jesus
Ø Jesus’ present glorification
Ø God’s gracious salvation to those who believe

I have learned so much about our triune God these last four months – and I already knew a pretty good amount! I imagine you have learned more than you think you have. A lot of our knowledge of God builds upon what we already know, and in many case the new truths we learn are actually making our understanding of God more precise. As your understanding of God has grown this spring, I trust that God Himself has also grown in your mind and your heart. Let’s read about our great God in Hebrews 1. Would you please stand for the reading of the Word?

1 Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,
2 but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world.
3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power. After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,
4 having become as much superior to angels as the name He inherited is more excellent than theirs.
5 For to which of the angels did God ever say, “You are My Son, today I have begotten You”? Or again, “I will be to Him a father, and he shall be to me a son”?
6 And again, when He brings the firstborn into the world, He says, “Let all God’s angels worship Him.”
7 Of the angels He says, “He makes His angels winds, and His ministers a flame of fire.”
8 But of the Son He says, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of Your kingdom.
9 You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness beyond Your companions.”
10 And, “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of Your hands;
11 they will perish, but You remain; they will all wear out like a garment,
12 like a robe You will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But You are the same, and Your years will have no end.”
13 And to which of the angels has He ever said, “Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet”?
14 Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?

Have you ever considered your biblical knowledge and understanding of God to be a burden? Of course not! Wait a minute. Have you ever had a discussion with a co-worker or an aunt or a neighbor about God and had your friend or family member say something like, “Well, I just believe God is love and He is not going to send anybody to hell,” or, “I just believe that God helps those that help themselves”? When you try to point out that God is not that way, they are offended. Even if you show them Scripture to refute their claim, they fall back on, “Well, my God isn’t that way.” Hmm.

This is a good place to start our review. Our God is three, yet He is one. Not only does Deuteronomy 6:4 tell us so, but so does Romans 3:29-30. It would have been much easier for the apostles and early church fathers to declare that we serve three gods – after all, they lived in a polytheistic age where most people worshiped multiple gods. But, the early Christians understood that not only was Jesus sent by God, but He was, as He claimed, God Himself! Jesus also made it quite clear, as did the apostles in Acts 5, that the Holy Spirit is God. Thus, three Persons, one substance, one nature. When someone asks if we all worship the same God as other religions, our response should be, “Only if they worship the triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: three in one.”

Three, yet one. This was difficult to swallow for a number of people in the early church who thought deeply about God. You will recall that it was not until the fourth century that the church agreed on an orthodox position about God, about the Trinity. Why did it take so long? Essentially because there was no need for orthodox doctrine until a heresy about God gained enough traction to require a response. Heresies developed because theologians wrestled with the difficulty of explaining three in one. Rather than accepting the teaching of Scripture by faith, these theologians sought ways to explain how “God works.” They ended up with a theology that was based more on “I just think such and such about God,” rather than one based on what God said about Himself in His word. There were two primary heresies in the early church.

The first heresy was modalism. This was the idea that God exists in all three Persons – but since even the NT is clear that He is one God, He can only be Father, Son, or Spirit at one time – it is not possible to be all three at once. This heresy was dismissed fairly early because of Jesus praying to His Father and the presence of all three Persons at Jesus’ baptism and a host of other texts that render this heresy untenable. Amazingly, there are modalists today. In fact, I received a nasty response from a pastor in Mississippi on my blog when I preached and wrote about modalism earlier this year.

A far more dangerous heresy in the early church was a belief that came to be known as Arianism, named after Arius, a 3rd and 4th century North African priest who could not accept the notion that Jesus was co-eternal and equal in nature with God the Father. He believed that Jesus was created by the Father, and thus was only able to remain sinless by the Father’s power. Arius ended up not being the primary spokesperson for his heresy, but his ideas gained a fair amount of support and had to be addressed. God raised up a theologian named Athanasius who fought Arianism through much of the first half of the fourth century. Later in the century, there were three other men known as the Three Cappadocians who helped to bring us to the place of understanding of the Trinity that we accept today and, frankly, tend to take for granted. I hope this study has raised your level of appreciation for those who have fought for truth through the centuries, particularly those in the fourth century.

If you are here today for the first or second time, you may be lost. I hope this short review on the Trinity will whet your appetite to go our website and either listen to the sermons from this series or click on the link to my blog where you can find the written transcripts of the messages to this series. The title of the series has been All of God: Exploring the Mystery of the Trinity. Indeed, the idea of the Trinity can seem mysterious when you recognize that God is three Persons, one nature. But the use of the word “mystery” in the title does not refer to that which is mysterious or unknowable.

There is a difference, theologically, between a secret and a mystery. A secret is something we cannot know because God has not revealed it to us. There is much about God we do not know because He has chosen not to reveal Himself fully to us. Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” But, a mystery in the NT is different than a secret. A mystery is something that was previously hidden but has now been revealed to us by God. Romans 16 25-27 helps us understand this theological principle: “Now to Him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages, but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith – to the only wise God be glory forevermore through Jesus Christ! Amen.” And, Amen indeed! God has told us much more about Himself than He did before Christ. That is what the author of Hebrews was telling us in our text.

So, can we know God or not? Yes – and no. God is both transcendent and immanent. He is transcendent, or far above His creation. God doesn’t need us to be fulfilled, or for anything else. He is self-sufficient. Furthermore, if God did not choose to reveal Himself to us, we could not know anything about Him. But He did choose to reveal Himself to us. In addition to being transcendent, God is also immanent, or, close at hand. He remains in and interacts with His creation. He has done so in two ways, as we were told in Hebrews 1 – through his Word and through Jesus.

For the first 1800 or so years of the church, God’s transcendence was emphasized. Oh, there was a great deal of talk about Jesus, but people had a respect for God that kept Him high above us. The problem was that sometimes people were led to believe that God was so distant that He set the world in motion and has little to do with it because He can’t be bothered with unimportant matters, really. Some of our founding fathers believed that, even though they talked about God.

The last 200 years have seen a shift to an emphasis on God’s immanence, or His nearness. We saw that this morning as we sang worship songs and some of you, I imagine, raised your hands in praise to a God who is near and who loves you deeply and who is concerned about the intimate details of your life. Is that wrong? NO! Unless we lose our awe of a holy and majestic God. It is best to acknowledge and approach God with both His holiness and His accessibility fully in our hearts.

There is danger in emphasizing either extreme. Since the church is currently riding the pendulum on the side of God’s immanence, we need to be aware of potential theological errors about God on that side of center. When God’s immanence is emphasized, there is a tendency to focus on experience. Now, once again, referring back to Hebrews 1, we are told that God has revealed Himself through His word and through Jesus. But, since we were not alive when Jesus was on earth, we must depend on God’s word to tell us about Jesus, who told us specific information about God, the three in one, the triune God. When people begin to rely on personal experience or personal thoughts about God rather than on the truth revealed in Scripture, it is easy to get off course. And though an error about the nature of God may seem small, if it is pursued to its logical end, it can be quite troubling theologically. Is this making sense?

All this leads us to take a few minutes to think about the popular book by William Young, The Shack. Although it is a work of fiction, Young very much wants to teach us about the Trinity. The main character in the book is a man named Mackenzie Phillips whose daughter, Missy, was abducted on a family camping trip while Mack was rescuing one of his other children from a canoe accident. When Missy’s bloodstained dress was found in an abandoned shack in the Oregon Mountains, it was assumed that she had been murdered. As you can imagine, Mack, who is a Christian, struggles emotionally and doubts God’s love and goodness. Three years after his daughter was abducted, Mack receives a note in the mail saying he should come back to the shack for a talk. The note is from Papa, which is the name that Mack’s wife calls God the Father. When he arrives at the shack, Mack is met by an African-American woman who represents God the Father. She calls herself Papa. A Jewish carpenter, naturally, represents Jesus. A mysterious Asian woman, who wisps in and out, represents the Holy Spirit.

Before Mack ever gets to the shack, William Young lets us know that God reveals Himself to us in new ways and He does not limit Himself to the pages of Scripture, especially to the interpreters of Scripture like Athanasius, the Three Cappadocians, and theologically trained pastors around the world today. Of course, Mack has been to seminary so he is qualified to make the following statement as he muses about God:

“In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any covert communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen and follow sacred Scriptures, properly interpreted, of course. God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerners’ access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in leather with gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?”

This stops just short of expressing contempt for biblical teaching by trained pastor/teachers – or, does it stop short? The result is a fictional book about God that has very much the feel of, “Well, I just think this about the Trinity.” Oh, Young uses Scripture and theological terms in the book, but ultimately he has come to specific conclusions about God based on what he wants God to be. It is the classic error of man making God in man’s image.

To be sure, some of the things Young says about God are extremely well said. As someone whose heart has been broken in recent days, I understand why it is so appealing. When Mack first gets to the cabin and sees Papa, before he can turn around and run, she has enveloped him in her arms, saying, “Mackenzie Allen Phillips!” She then pulls back and grabs him by the shoulders and says, “Mack, look at you! Here you are, and so grown up. I have really been looking forward to seeing you face to face. It is so wonderful to have you here with us. My, my, my, how I do love you!”

I understand how that appeals to a broken heart. But, at the same time, there are problems galore, and the ideas taught about God in this book are especially dangerous because when people get emotionally attached to something said about God, it is very easy for truth to take a back seat to emotions. First of all, I have a problem with God the Father being represented by a woman of any kind – or a man like Morgan Freeman, for that matter, but especially by a woman since God is always represented as a male in Scripture. God is said to have characteristics of a loving, compassionate mother, but He is always presented to us in masculine terms.

Second, as appealing as this scene is, it speaks only to God’s immanence and says nothing of His transcendence. Remember how we have studied in this series that God the Father is never clearly seen? He is seen in visions in Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4, but both Ezekiel and the Apostle John had trouble describing Him and their visions indicated a great distance between God the Father and man. Thank goodness for Jesus!

The last problem I have with this portrayal is that Papa is entirely too familiar for the role of the God the Father. As much as you want the word “Abba” to mean “Papa,” it doesn’t. It is the Aramaic term for Father, and if anything it is a tad on the formal side, not the other way around. It is a term of respect. Don’t ask me how it got so confused. Within the past year or two, I was going to emphasize the intimacy we can have with the Father and use the term “Abba” in a sermon, but something told me I had better check it out before I used it. I looked at several sources and every one said the same thing – it is a term of respect for one’s father. That is not the sense one gets in the Shack.

So, if you have been using the term “Papa” for God the Father, He has probably been standing with arms folded saying, “Don’t use that term for Me,” right? Of course not! God looks at your heart! BUT – when you have the knowledge, you are responsible to act accordingly. It is like a baby in a family – he or she is quite comfortable coming up to Dad or Mom at anytime with a request. As the child grows, though, respect is learned and he or she approaches with more caution – not out of fear, but out of respect.

Well, in order to keep from going all day, I will just give two more examples of concerns in the book and then we will close, though there is much more about the book and about the Trinity that I want to say. At the shack, Mack notices that Papa has scars on her wrist. He says, “I thought Jesus died on the cross” and she says, “When one of us suffers, we all suffer – I was there.” “But,” Mack protests, “What about when Jesus said, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” Papa answers, “I didn’t forsake Him, just like I didn’t forsake you when Missy was taken. I was at the cross”

This is a problem. As we discussed last week, each Person of the Trinity has a specific role, and these roles include authority-submission relationships. These authority-submission roles are intentionally blurred in the book where mutual submission is the order of the day, even to the point that God is said to submit to us in love. Bizarre. At one point, Mack is having breakfast with all three Persons of the Trinity and the Holy Spirit says to him, “Mackenzie, we have no concept of final authority among us, only unity. We are a circle of relationship, not a chain of command.” That is just blatantly wrong. Past sermons give ample Scripture to contest the idea of no authority-submission roles within the Trinity.

As for the Father bearing the scars of the cross, think about it. What happened on the cross? Jesus took our sin upon Himself as our substitute to absorb the wrath of God against sin. He bore the equivalent of an eternity in hell for us while He was on the cross. For that time, He was separated in every way from God’s favor. God’s wrath was fully poured out on sin and Jesus was bearing our sin, so the Father’s wrath was poured out on Jesus, and that included turning His back on the Son. Jesus will bear the scars of the cross for eternity, which will serve as a reminder to us of God’s great love for us, but I can assure you that there will be no scars on the wrists of God the Father. In fact, there is no indication in Scripture that we will ever see the Father in a form that allows us to discern where His wrists are.

One last problem with the book, and there are many more that I do not have time to mention. William Young admits that he has nothing to do with the institutionalized church because he has been hurt by the church. In an exchange between Jesus and Mack, Jesus says, “I don’t create institutions; that’s an occupation for those who want to play God. So, no, I’m not too big on religion . . . and not very fond of politics and economics either. And why should I be? They are the man-made trinity of terrors that ravage the earth and deceive those I care about.”

So, Young takes a shot at the organized church by saying that Jesus is against it. Doesn’t add up with Scripture, though. In Matthew 16:17, Jesus said, “I will build My church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” As we read last week in Ephesians 5:23, “For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, His body, and is Himself its Savior.” Every time that the church is addressed in the NT epistles, a local church – or, an institutional church, Young would say – is being addressed. Jesus loves the church! He loves this church - Grace Community Church!

Well, I have to stop, and it seems a strange place for me to conclude several months about the Trinity. Our God is an awesome God – but a lot of people do not want Him to be as awesome as He is. When we make God in our own image, it really works for us for a time, but since we are imperfect, when we succeed in making God in our image, the end is always bad. The only way we will ever know the full blessing of this awesome triune God is to know as much as we can about Him and to interact with Him on His terms.

God the Father, the ultimate authority in the universe and the grand architect of the plan of salvation. Jesus, God’s Son, our Redeemer, the perfect substitute, dying in our place and taking all the righteous wrath of God upon Himself for those who believe. The Holy Spirit of God, author of God’s word and servant to the Father and the Son and the primary agent of God at work in the world today. Praise the Father and the Son. Praise the Spirit, three in one. Let’s pray.