Can you explain the Trinity?

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. This last week we began a new series entitled the Upper Room, which is detailing Jesus final evening with his disciples before his arrest, crucifixion and resurrection. In the course of this evening, or the first couple of verses that we just looked at this last week, we talked about that Jesus is God.

He claims to be God himself. All things have been given into his hands.

He and the Father are one. If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father before. Abraham was I am, as in the Great. I am the beginning and end, who was and is and is to come. The the Eternal One, the I am.

He makes these claims about Himself all the time. But then we also see Jesus speaking of the Father. And even during the context of our series, we’ll see him refer to the Spirit, the counselor, the comforter, as if these are distinct from Him. Even when he says I and the Father are one, the way that he words that there’s a distinction between I and the Father, and yet we are one.

And if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.

So the question for this week is very simply, can you explain the Trinity? How does this work? What is going on? Is God talking to himself? Is there any way to understand this?

Well, there’s no way to understand it fully. Complexities of the Trinity I think we will continue to learn throughout all eternity. We’ll never get to the bottomless depths of God. But there are some things we can say which can be very helpful. Historic understanding of the Trinity is that God is three persons.

That does not mean three parts. That doesn’t mean each. You know, person is a third of God. It’s not that it doesn’t mean personalities. God has one personality shared by the three persons.

It doesn’t mean one earth. It doesn’t mean three. Different minds like Father, Son, Holy Spirit, each have different minds, different thoughts, different wills, different volitions. Not that God has one of those. God has one mind, one will, one volition, one personality, one part, one being.

So persons are none of those things. Persons are the early church was able to kind of decipher from different texts. Persons are relational identities. They are what makes it possible for you to connect with another one. Perhaps ways that I understand persons that are helpful are.

You can think of. There’s been some recent debates over the last 10 years over whether corporations are persons. If a corporation is a person, then it can be sued. It can have responsibilities. You know, it’s where it’s its connection Point to other persons.

But you think about a corporation, right? How many minds make up a corporation? Many. Right? Or how many wills could make up a corporation?

There could be many people running one corporation. Even if the corporation is understood to be one person, it could have many people behind it. Or we’ll say it the other way. There could be one human mind that is responsible for making the decisions for many corporations. Right?

And if each of those corporations is considered a person, then you have one mind running, so to speak, many persons. Another way to think about the concept of person is it’s often tragically what a slave doesn’t have. You know, there was a time in our country where slaves were not considered to be persons or they were only considered to be three fifths of a person.

Even though they were a whole human, they had a whole mind, a whole will, a whole personality. Right?

They weren’t considered persons. It is this relational identity, your connection point to the outside world. And so God has three of those three persons. And so if you ask, when Jesus talks to the Father, is he talking to himself? The answer is kind of yes and no.

You could think. And of course there’s problems with this analogy. And no analogy can capture God. But you can think about if there was one human mind that was running, we’ll say three different corporations who are considered persons. You could have that one human mind speak through this person over here, this corporation, you know, to this one over here.

But it’s all run by the same one mind, one will. Now another layer of complexity is, okay, that’s God as Trinity. But then we also have Jesus as a human and Jesus, while God has one mind, one will, one being Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, the Son has a second mind. Will being the second person of the Son, Jesus has both a divine nature and a human nature held together by his personhood.

So there’s not two persons within the Son, there’s one person, but he has two natures.

And so then sometimes in scripture, we see Jesus human nature and interacting with the world, or maybe even interacting with God like he grows and learns and things. And other times we see Jesus divine nature coming through his person. But maybe the nature of Jesus will be another one of these talks someday.

For now, we’ll just consider the Trinity as three persons and one divine being with one mind, one will, one personality. So thanks for the question and we’ll see you next time.