The Trinity

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Transcript:

It’s good to see all of you here this morning. Turn with me, if you would, in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 3 to start with. And we are going to actually look at several passages today.

I prefer not to do that. I prefer to take one passage and just look at it, but sometimes you just can’t help but skip around some. I mentioned in Sunday school that I’ve been excited about the series of Sunday school lessons that were coming up and that we started today on things we believe.

And it got me kind of inspired to go along the same lines in what we look at here together on Sunday mornings. And I’ve come up with a series of about six to eight weeks that I call non-negotiable to talk about some of the things that are non-negotiable things that we believe. And we all know what non-negotiables are.

We all have them in our lives. There are some things that we absolutely are going to do, some things we absolutely will not do. And it can be big things.

It can be little things. In my life, some of the non-negotiables, unless I’m providentially hindered, which is a good phrase I learned in Arkansas, unless I’m providentially hindered, if it’s Monday, I’m going to eat Chick-fil-A sometime. That is a non-negotiable.

The kids and I have done that for so long that it’s just set in stone. We’re going to do that. Another non-negotiable in my life, I will not drink alcohol.

I never have, never will. I had a physical done Friday, and the nurse asked, do you drink? I said, no, never, no. She said, really?

I said, yeah, why? She said, well, not that you should. She said, I just figured you did because you have kids.

Well, okay, I can understand that, but the answer is still no. Another non-negotiable, not to, hopefully this doesn’t offend anybody, but another non-negotiable in my life is when I’m voting, I do not ever vote for a candidate who is in favor of abortion. That’s just a non-negotiable for me. And so we go from a scale of minor things like eating at Chick-fil-A to abortion.

There are non-negotiables in my life. We all have them. We live in a world where it sounds harsh.

It sounds narrow-minded to say we as a church stand for non-negotiable things. But we all have them. Yours may be different from mine.

We might go pull people down on Main Street and find that theirs are different from ours. But we all have, let’s not kid ourselves, we all have non-negotiables. Now, the things that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks are what I consider non-negotiables for us as Christians.

The things that I would say, this separates Christian churches from cults, from apostate churches. We all know there are churches, I don’t know about in Lindsay, but there are churches I know for a fact in Oklahoma City that I think, why do you even call yourself a church? You don’t even claim that you just teach Christianity.

I don’t make it a habit of coming in and attacking other denominations, but I know people who are part of Unitarian Universalist churches. And I think you say yourself, within your congregation you have Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Quakers, Atheists. How does that work?

I don’t understand that. At that point, I guess there are no non-negotiables. But there are even churches that profess to be Christian that we would look at their doctrine and say, where do you get that from?

How do you even call yourselves Christian? You don’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God. That’s a pretty big one, isn’t it?

I’d say that’s a non-negotiable. I looked in the Sunday school book, looked ahead at some of the lessons we’re going to be going over. There are some things that are non-negotiable for me as a Baptist. I noticed there’s a lesson in there on eternal security.

That is for me a non-negotiable. Now, I have Christian friends who believe they can lose their salvation. They are still trusting in Christ for their salvation, but they believe they can sin to an extent that they will lose it.

Do I believe they’re Christians? Do I believe they’re born again? I do.

Do I believe they’re incorrect? Yes, I do. But that would be a non-negotiable for me.

Just because something is not in the list of messages that we’re going to do over the next few weeks doesn’t mean that it’s not as important as these. I picked six to eight non-negotiables. There are others.

There are other things like eternal security. You know what? I’ve studied it out.

I’ve looked at both sides of the argument. I think we’re right, and it’s not something I’m going to waver on, that I’m not going to back down on. But I wouldn’t consider it a non-negotiable for Christianity, what separates us from the cults and from apostate churches.

The first thing that we’re going to look at this morning is the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity. And I did not realize when, because I had only seen the cover of the Sunday School book, and knew that we were going to be looking at Dr.

Henderson’s studies on what we believe, had not looked inside to see that the first one was on the Trinity. So you get it in Sunday School this morning, you get it in service this morning. They will not always match up.

But we’re going along the same lines, talking about the basis of our beliefs in Sunday School and talking about some non-negotiable Christian doctrines in the worship service. But we’re going to start looking at Matthew chapter 3, and then we’re going to look at 1 John and a few other places today at what I consider one of the non-negotiables of Christianity, and that’s the doctrine of the Trinity. Starting in Matthew chapter 3, verse 13, it says, Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John to be baptized of him.

But John forbade him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me. So in this scene, for lack of a better word, Jesus comes out to the Jordan River where John the Baptist is doing his ministry and comes to find him so that he can be baptized. And John the Baptist says, hold up here.

He says, you should be baptizing me. Because John recognized that Jesus was the Messiah that he’d been preaching about, that He was the anointed one of God that he’d been preparing the people for. He was the one that John had been preaching about and said, You’re the one who was sent by God.

Why on earth would I baptize you? You should be baptizing me. And Jesus says in verse 15, it says, And Jesus answering him said unto him, Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.

And so the first part of that statement is basically a polite way, I think, of saying, do it now. Go ahead and do it anyway. John has stated his objections and Jesus says, despite your objections, do it anyway.

I have a, I have a student that all week, every time I told him to work on your math, work on your language, work on it. What if I don’t want you do it anyway is the answer. I didn’t ask.

This is not a democracy. Do it anyway. Okay.

John the Baptist here says, but, but, but, and Jesus says, do it anyway. And that’s sort of God’s response when he tells us to do something and we have our objections. You know what?

Do it anyway. He says, suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness. That part about it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness is a fancy way of saying, because it’s the right thing to do.

Because it’s the right thing to do. Because it’s the thing to do that is obedient to the Father. Because the baptism they were undergoing was a mark of being set apart unto God just like it is today.

Baptism doesn’t save us. Baptism doesn’t wash away our sins. Baptism is an outward symbol that demonstrates what God has already done.

We’re identifying with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We’re professing our faith in what he’s done for us. And we are to the world setting ourselves apart and saying we belong to him. What they were doing, this baptism of repentance when they came to John, they were setting themselves apart.

They were being baptized because they were coming and repenting and saying, we are setting ourselves aside to God. And so Jesus says, despite your objections, John, go ahead and do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. Then he suffered him.

That word means he did it anyway. He gave in to his expectation. Verse 16 says, Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water.

You know, we can learn a lot about baptism, which is a non-negotiable for me as a Baptist, but I know there’s dispute among Christians, but we can learn a lot about baptism too from this passage. You can’t go up out of a sprinkling. If we want to imitate what Jesus did, we come up out of the water when we’re baptized.

And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water, and lo, the heavens were opened unto him. And he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon him, and a voice from heaven saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Now you may be thinking here, what does this have to do with the Trinity?

Well, it’s a good starting place for us because this is one of the passages where we sort of see the Trinity in action all at once. Okay, there are people who will tell us the Trinity, show me a verse that talks about the Trinity. Well, there’s not a verse talks about the Trinity.

We get the idea of the Trinity from taking the whole Bible together and reading the Bible as not just looking at verses here and there piecemeal. You can, as I’ve told you before, you can pull any verse out of the Bible and twist it around and make it say anything you want it to say. But the Bible as a whole teaches things that lead us to the conclusion of the Trinity. And this is a good starting place because the Trinity, as we talked about in Sunday school is the idea is the doctrine that there is one God in three persons.

One God in three persons. That doesn’t mean three gods, but there’s one God and somehow he is father, somehow he is son, and somehow he is Holy Spirit. I say somehow because I don’t understand it.

Do you have to understand the Trinity in order to be saved? No. Please understand what I’m saying in that.

I’m not saying you teach whatever you want about God and it’s okay for your salvation. What I’m saying is none of us completely understand the Trinity. If you have to understand the Trinity in order to be saved, I think God’s going to be the only one in heaven.

I don’t understand it. Brother Shank said you’re right or that’s right or something, amen, something along those lines. I’m guessing after all your years of ministry, you don’t fully comprehend all of it either.

We apprehend that there’s a distinction. Comprehend means I get the whole thing. Apprehend means I get the general idea, but I’m still unclear about some things.

We can apprehend the Trinity. As a child, when I got saved, when I was saved at five years old, I don’t think I really even gave much thought to the Holy Spirit. I’d heard of the Holy Spirit in church, but it had never occurred to me the Holy Spirit is God, the Holy Spirit is something I deal with, and yet I trusted Christ. I’m not saying I denied the Trinity, I just never thought about it.

But what I knew of God, I knew that I’d sinned against God the Father, I knew that God the Son had come to die for me to forgive my sins. And so I didn’t comprehend the Trinity. And yet I believe I was saved back then in 1991.

Here we see a picture of the Trinity. Is this passage in and of itself proof that there’s a Trinity? It’s not proof in and of itself.

But it’s a good place that makes the case. Because here we see all three of them. There’s a teaching that, well, there’s just Jesus.

and Jesus is the Father, Jesus is the Son, Jesus is the Holy Spirit. You see this in Oneness Pentecostalism and some other groups. And that it’s just Jesus, but sometimes we see him as these different things.

He’s these different aspects of God at different times. Well, here, all at once, we see the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit distinctly, and they’re interacting. It’s not Jesus throwing his voice into the heavens and making it sound like God.

And it’s not Jesus putting on an illusion that the Holy Spirit comes down and lights on him. What we see here is Jesus, we see God the Son obeying the will of God the Father, being baptized and beginning his ministry. We see the Holy Spirit sort of coming down and lighting on him like a dove and confirming this.

And then we hear the voice of God the Father calling out and saying, this is my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased. And what we see is not only all three of them together and yet all three of them separate, But we also see how they work together and have the same will, the same motivation. They’re working toward the same thing.

It’s not as though they have to have a meeting and vote and two out of three, but one wants to do this. They are all of the same will and all working toward the same purposes. There is unity in this Godhead.

So it’s also not three separate gods. We turn to another passage after we look here and see what should be the Trinity very clearly in these verses, we turn to look at 1 John. 1 John.

If you’re using a newer translation, one of the issues I have with some translations of the Bible is that they leave a few passages out. One thing I always do is turn to 1 John 5 to see how it reads. There are some versions that will leave this verse out that we’re going to look at.

I think this is one of the clearest indications of the Trinity in the Bible that we’re going to look at today. Some versions will leave this out. And for that reason, some people say, well, we shouldn’t base our entire argument for the Trinity off of this passage.

I agree. This is not the only passage that speaks to the Trinity. But I also think there’s good reason that we won’t get into today.

I think there’s good reason for believing that this passage was in the original text and that we should believe it’s part of Scripture. We’re going to start looking at verse 5. It says, Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?

So here when we’re talking about the Word, when we’re talking about the Son, we’re talking about Jesus Christ. And he says that Jesus, who is the Son of God, in verse 6, this is he that came by water and blood. Now what he’s referring here to is the coming of Jesus as the Son of God. That was confirmed that he was the Son of God when he was baptized.

Now sometimes the Bible talks about water and blood and it’s referring to cleansing. In this case, some bad arguments have been made, I think, for baptism being a part of salvation because of that. But in this passage, I believe it is talking about his baptism because it’s talking about him being the Son of God and that he came by water and blood.

What sort of, if you look at the Gospels, the things that sort of book in Christ’s earthly ministry, he sort of goes public here. I know his first miracle was turning the water into wine, but he kind of goes public here when he’s baptized by John, and God the Father says, this is my son. He’s confirmed at that point to be the son of God.

Toward the end of his earthly ministry, he sheds his blood and he dies on the cross, And because of the way he goes through that and what he accomplishes and the signs that accompany that, what does the centurion say? Does anybody recall what the centurion says? After Christ has died, truly this was the Son of God.

We have confirmation at the beginning of his ministry and there at the end of his ministry, right after he said, it is finished, and he gave up the ghost. The earth shook, the skies darkened, the veil in the temple was torn, tombs opened up, and the man said, this is the son of God. And so we have confirmation from the beginning of his ministry to the end of his ministry and by everything he did throughout that he was God, the son. And so it says here, this is he who he refers to in verse five, Jesus, the son of God.

This is he that came by water and by blood, even Jesus Christ, not by water only, but by water and blood. He says it again to make sure we get it. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness because the Spirit is truth.

Okay, God sent him. God the Father sent him. He was confirmed to be God the Son, and the Holy Spirit bears witness.

The Holy Spirit convicts us and affirms to us that what he said and what he taught was the truth. And it says in verse 7, this is the part that’s left out of a lot of Bibles, For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. Who’s the Word? Jesus.

It says that all throughout John chapter 1. John, who also wrote this book, calls him the Word all throughout John chapter 1. There are three.

So if you don’t mind, I’m going to substitute the word Jesus there just to make it clear. I’m not adding to the scriptures, just trying to clarify who he’s talking about. For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. and these three are one.

I’d say that’s a pretty clear statement of the Trinity. And it harkens back, talking about the water, harkens back to his baptism, where we saw all three of them separate, but cooperating and united in what they were doing. So throughout the Bible, is there one verse that says, one God, three persons?

There’s no verse that says exactly that. There’s no verse in the Bible where you will see the word Trinity. You know what?

there are a lot of words that aren’t in the Bible, but the concepts are. So you may hear that argument from time to time. Well, it never says the word Trinity in the Bible.

There are a lot of words that it doesn’t say in the Bible. It doesn’t mean they’re not there. The concept is in there.

And, you know, guys, there are so many other places we could look at in the Gospels that allude to the Trinity because we see God the Father and God the Son interacting. And then we see God the Son and God the Holy Spirit interacting. And just the way Jesus talks about, and the apostles later on talk about the three, we can piece together that there are three and yet there are one.

The way we arrive at this is that first of all, the Bible teaches that there is only one God. I think we should all be able to agree with that. That wasn’t something new and different to Christianity.

The Bible teaches that there’s one God. That’s been revealed from the beginning of time. God said in the Old Testament that he was one God.

God said in the Old Testament that, just to give you some scriptures here, in Deuteronomy 6. 4, hear, O Israel. We talked about this in Sunday school.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. That’s a prayer called the Shema that, if I’m not mistaken, observant Jews were supposed to pray three times a day to remind them there’s one God. You don’t go worship all these idols and things.

There’s one God. There’s only one God. He says in Isaiah 43, You are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me, and understand that I am he.

Get this, before me there was no God formed, and neither shall there be after me. He said, before I was, there was nobody. And that doesn’t mean God was formed.

God always has been. But before I was there, there was no other God formed before me. And you know what?

There’s not another one coming after. There’s just one. 1 Timothy, to bring it into the New Testament, It says, for there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ. So the Bible teaches there’s one God from the first page to the last. And yet even in the Old Testament, we see there’s a little more to the story than just there’s one God and that’s the whole story.

Because even in the beginning of the Bible, when God is creating man, do you remember what he said? Let us make man in our image. The Trinity, ladies and gentlemen, which is spelled out more explicitly later on, is already being hinted to in the earliest pages of the Bible.

And there are scholars that will say, well, that’s aliens. Aliens created man. What?

Okay, I don’t see that anywhere in here. I don’t recall. You will not see the word space aliens in the Bible.

There might be the word alien, but it’s talking about a foreigner. You will not see extraterrestrials in the Bible. Okay?

He said, let us make man in our image. That is the one God talking amongst himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So the Bible teaches there’s one God, but it also teaches that the Father is God.

It says in Philippians chapter one, and this is just one example, there are many places where the Father is referred to as God, but it says, grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. From God our Father, the Father is referred to as God. The Bible teaches that the Son is God. Again, just one of many places where Jesus is referred to as God.

But it says in John 1. 1, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Verse 2 says, And the same was in the beginning with God.

So Jesus was both God and He was with God. No way to make sense of that, I think, unless there’s the Trinity. But Jesus was called God.

There’s one God, and yet the Father is called God, the Son is called God, then the Holy Spirit’s called God. One of many places. In Acts chapter 5, I think this was alluded to in the lesson this morning as well.

Acts chapter 5, Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost and keep back part of the price of the land? This is where Ananias and Sapphira sold some of their property. And you know what?

If they had just wanted to give 50%, that was fine. They could have come in and said, we’re giving half of the proceeds. But they kept back part of it and still said, here we’re giving all of the proceeds of the sale of our property to the church.

And Peter says, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit about the price of the land? He says, whilst it remained, was it not thine own? And after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?

He’s basically telling him, it was, yes, in a sense it belongs to God, but in another sense it was his, I mean, God, do with it what you want. There’s no reason to lie about it. Was it not in thine own power?

Why hast thou conceived this thing in thy heart? Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. Wait a minute.

He just said he lied unto God. But earlier he said, Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Ghost? Well, I don’t know about y’all, but I can put two and two together and surmise from that that Peter’s saying here, the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit is God.

So the Father is God. The Son is God. The Holy Spirit is God.

But there’s one God. Three persons in one God. because the Bible demonstrates the unity and the equality of all three.

As we’ve talked about in 1 John 5, 7, there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. See, they’re all God. They’re all distinct, eternally distinct, I like to say, because it’s not just one God who shapeshifts, and sometimes He’s the Father, and sometimes He’s the Son, and sometimes He’s the Holy Spirit.

No, they’re all three, and they’re all there working together and all cooperating and they’re united. And the Bible goes a little further and demonstrates that they’ve got some common attributes. And just for a couple of examples, it talks about them all three being eternal. We don’t have time this morning to go into all the verses I’ve got written down.

So if you want to write them down, I’ll give these verses to you or you can see me afterwards. Talking about them being eternal, God the Father in Psalm 90 verse 2 talks about Him being eternal. Micah chapter 5 verses 1 through 2 in a prophecy about the coming Messiah, talk about Jesus being eternal. Jesus wasn’t created. Jesus didn’t just start being in Bethlehem.

He has been, the Bible says, in the beginning was the Word. He was there from eternity past with God the Father. Talks about the Holy Spirit being eternal in Hebrews 9.

14. Another one, and I just wrote down two of their common attributes, that they have in common that only God has. I’m not eternal. You’re not eternal. Some days it feels like an eternity, but we are not eternal beings.

We have a beginning. Now we go on an eternity future, but we have a beginning. So we’re not eternal in that sense.

We’re not omniscient. No matter how much we think we know everything, we don’t. God alone knows everything.

And yet the Bible says that God the Father in 1 John 3. 20 is all-knowing. It says that God the Son in John 21.

17 is all-knowing. And it talks about the Holy Spirit being all-knowing in 1 Corinthians 2, 10, and 11. And again, if you want those verses to look them up, don’t just trust me.

Check it in your Bible. But if you want to get those verses and didn’t get them written down, you can check with me afterwards and I’ll give them to you. So if I’d had more time, I could have spent more time.

I would love to have a chalkboard behind me and write things down. We can make a pretty solid case. Well, more than pretty solid.

But I can make, you know, I’m not an expert theologian. I try, but I’m not. I can make a pretty solid case.

There are others who I think can make a completely convincing case. But I can make a pretty solid case that there is a trinity, that there’s one God in three eternally distinct persons who are co-equal, co-eternal, share the same essence and will and nature. But having looked at that, we move on to why is this non-negotiable?

Why is this so important? Because, you know, there are a lot of churches that don’t believe in the Trinity. There are some liberal denominations who teach that Jesus Christ wasn’t really the Son of God.

He was just a man. And in that case, I guess it’s just God the Father. So that’s not a Trinity.

There’s the Mormon church that teaches that it’s three different gods. And they actually teach that there are more gods than that, but they’re only the three that we worship. Then there are, of course, all sorts of false religions that teach various deities of their own.

There are the Jehovah’s Witnesses who teach that there’s just Jehovah God, which I guess they would equate with the Father, and then Jesus Christ was a created being. That’s not the Trinity either. So there are all sorts of ideas, and these people seem to know their stuff, and they seem like very nice people, moral, good people.

We would say they’re good Christians apart from their beliefs, the things that make you a Christian. And so why is it that the Trinity is non-negotiable? I can give you two reasons this morning and then we will close.

The first reason that the Trinity is non-negotiable is that a false concept of God is idolatry. Guys, there’s no way around that. Idolatry is a false concept of God.

Because what idolatry is is when we put anything that is not God in the place that only God should occupy. Anytime that we worship something that is not God, it’s idolatry. It doesn’t matter if we worship God also.

The point is we’re worshiping something that’s not God. The worship that we give belongs to God alone. Is there anything besides God that is worthy of our worship?

Anything? Y’all awake this morning? There’s nothing besides God that’s worthy of our worship.

And if I occasionally get to a point where I start thinking more highly of myself than I should, and I start to worship self, that’s idolatry. If I go put a little gold statue on a shelf in my living room and bow to it three times a day, that’s idolatry because I’m worshiping. I’m giving away what belongs only to God, that worship, and putting something else in its place.

If I forget what God says or what God wants and I spend my entire life in just the pursuit of money, it’s idolatry because I’m worshiping money when my worship belongs only to God. If we are worshiping God, but we are worshiping God without the Trinity, we are worshiping a false idea, a false conception of who God is. Now it may not sound as clear cut as some of the other things we’re talking about, but God condemns the practice of twisting and distorting who he is into something else.

In Romans chapter 1, if you want to turn there briefly, we’re going to look at a couple of verses. Romans chapter 1 is such a powerful passage of scripture, and I think if it was more often taught and more readily understood, it could really, and lived by, it could turn our entire society around. But Romans chapter 1, starting in verse 21, it talks about the Gentiles in that day, and really there are a lot of parallels with our time too, people who don’t worship the true God.

It says in verse 21, because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened. And before this, it talks about how there’s some knowledge of God that’s evident to all men. We sort of instinctively know that there’s a God.

And I don’t think it’s just instinct. There are good philosophical arguments. There’s good evidence, I think, for belief in God.

You know, I don’t just believe in God because that’s what I was taught. There’s part of that. But I studied it out as well, and I think there are good, compelling reasons.

why I’m convinced, not just from what I was taught, but from evidence, from philosophy, that there’s a God. But it’s sort of ingrained on us as human beings that we’re sort of, the belief in God is sort of innate. That’s why kids don’t really have a problem with it.

It’s when we start growing up and get too smart for our own good, we think. But we know there’s somebody out there who’s above us. Now, is that knowledge of God enough for us to be saved?

It’s not. But we even look around at creation and see there’s a God. God is talking before this in this passage that he has revealed aspects of himself and his existence and his nature to the world.

And that most people, even though they recognize the things that he’s put out there to point them to him, have instead gone the other way. And because when they knew God, they glorified him not as God. They said, we don’t want to worship that God.

We know he’s out there, but we’d rather do this. And they weren’t thankful for what God had done. It became vain in their imaginations.

They started to think and invent wild things that we’ll just, we’ll worship this way a

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