What is the Trinity?

There is abundance of teaching in the Holy Scriptures that God reveals Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not three Gods, but a Triune God. Scripture teaches that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, yet one God indivisible.

Such is the early and immense fact recorded in the Gospels, a clear witness to "the Trinity." What sympathy can one have with those who overlook such a fact and stumble over the term? Why be so tied to the letter, and so anxious to get rid of a word because it is not in the Bible? The thing is distinctly there.

The Holy Trinity — Three in One, and One in Three — is in its essence a mystery beyond human understanding, even the understanding of the renewed mind of the believer. In the very nature of things this must be so. How can the creature comprehend the Creator; the finite, the Infinite?

In human language, when we speak of a person we think of a separate being, separate existence, separate will, different characteristics, thoughts and plans belonging to each one and not shared with others. Carry that human thought into the subject before us, and the truth of the Trinity is entirely twisted and lost. Instead of the Trinity — Father, Son and Spirit, ONE God — we would have three Gods, an absolute impossibility.

During the Jewish period God, though known to be one, was not known as He is. "He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the people of Israel" (Ps. 103:7)... It was only Jesus who made Him truly known, as we see in that act of incomparable grace when He was fulfilling all righteousness by being baptised by John in the Jordan (Matt. 3:13-17). There, as the Holy Spirit descended on Him, the Father from heaven proclaimed Him to be His beloved Son. The Trinity stood revealed. It is in the persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that God, the one God, is really known.

Nor is this truth to be weakened in the least degree. The one who allows no more in the Godhead than three aspects of one Person is not a Christian, but a deceiver and an antichrist... the Godhead not merely in three characters but in Three Persons; and so distinct that the Father could send the Son (1 John 4:14), and the Holy Spirit descend on that Son in the presence of the Father and in the awareness of the Son (Mark 1:10-11).

John 14:26 tells us that the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father in the Name of the Son; chapter 15:26 tells us the Lord Jesus sends the Holy Spirit from the Father; chapter 16:13 says, "When the Spirit is come," that is, the Spirit comes on His own initiative. So we have the Father sending the Spirit; the Son sending the Spirit; the Spirit coming. These statements could not be true unless the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are ONE God.

The Father would have sent the Son in vain, and the Son would have come and died and risen again for nothing as far as men are concerned, if the Holy Spirit had not come to give an answer in the hearts of men to the grace of the Father and the Son... There could have been no Christianity, not one of us would have been a Christian, apart from the Spirit. He convicted us of our sinful, lost condition; it was by Him through the Word that we were born again.

If God has revealed Himself, as we see in the Scriptures, surely He wants that revelation to be received and valued above everything else. Our highest blessing springs from the revelation God has been pleased to make of Himself. The more we understand of these things, the more the very foundation of Christianity is laid in our souls, and the shaping power of such truth leads to the true worship of God as nothing else can.