The Mystery of Tri-unity

            God revealed Himself to Israel as a Trinitarian God. I know, the word “Trinity” doesn't appear anywhere in Scripture. But neither does Christmas, “give your heart to Jesus,” or PowerPoint slides and believers don’t seem to have a problem with that.  The concept of Tri-unity, or Trinity, expresses a reality about God found throughout the Scriptures:  that God is a compound unity. The ancient Jews knew this. They captured it in the Hebrew name for God.  Most Semitic peoples called God El.  But in Genesis 1 and throughout the Old Testament the word for God is Elohim (that ‘im suffix makes it plural).  Even in the Shema  (Hear, O Israel, the Lord, the Lord our God is one …), Israel’s central statement of faith, God is recognized as the compound unity.  The Hebrew word for “one” is never used in the Old Testament to indicate absolute oneness, but rather the idea of complete unity.  The Hebrew word for absolute oneness is yachid; Isaac was Abraham’s one and only son. But that’s not the word used in Deuteronomy 6.  There the word is echad, the same word God uses when He speaks of his covenant grace giving Israel one heart and one way (Jeremiah 32:38-39). It’s not that everyone is sharing one single heart, but a uniting of many people to one commitment, a compound unity.  When a man and a woman leave their families and are made one, the word is echad, the same oneness of unity. So, up until the time of the Second Temple, God was understood as a Being that could assume different forms and functions.  Not three Gods, but one Being known in three identities .

                Jesus was no fan of Second Temple Judaism. When he had a conflict with scribes and elders of the Temple, our Lord is fighting against a Judaism that had become corrupt. His woes pronounced on the scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23) show his disapproval of their legalism and Unitarian totalitarianism that made God the servant of Israel and discriminated against anyone who was not Jewish and wealthy.  It was really not unlike the so-called "progressive" anti-Biblical neo-Christianity of today. Faith is defined as tradition, administrative hierarchies control the Church, and every ungodly practice is excused in the name of becoming “relevant” to (read appeasing) the world. When the Church tries to tame God and make him a toothless Preserver of the old ways, you can bet that human tyranny and superstition will rule the hearts of clerics.  

                We've seen how the medieval Church baptized the pagan cosmology of Aristotle and then tried to fit God into it.  Trying to understand the Trinity as taught by the Roman Church is just about impossible. In fairness, they did the best they could with a concept that was never intended to be systematized intellectually. Heaven only knows how many martyrs went to the flames because they committed the heresy of modalism or Arianism or Nestorianism or tritheism (just to name a few) when asked to explain the Trinity. The Church claimed God’s tri-unity was a mystery and defined faith as the acceptance of the superstitious and illogical impossibility decreed by an “infallible” Pope or church council.   Aristotelian logic turned the Trinity into a logic puzzle rather than providing any meaningful insights into the person-hood of the God who, Jesus told us, is Spirit.

In this series I want to make the point that Spirit implies a higher order of matter and energy than what we experience in our three dimensional plane.  With this cosmology, the Trinity becomes completely rational.  That is not to say that God becomes totally understandable, but that God’s existence as described in the Scriptures can be talked about and fit into a larger schema than medieval cosmology allowed.  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit live and work in the Heavenlies.  Rather than the word “Heaven” with its medieval connotations of clouds and cherubs and dead relatives, I would like to use a different term for the realm in which God and beings of Spirit exist.  Heavenlies is my term for dimensions 4-10 of our existence which we cannot access with our mortal (three dimensional) body. 

Let me start here.  God isn't a name, although we use it that way.  It’s his job description. Our culture tends to lump every aspect of divine work and purpose into the name God.  But God is a title of reverence and respect.  As is the word, Lord.  It is an ancient word denoting the top position in a hierarchy of authority. When we aim for precision in our God-talk, it clarifies much of the muddle that the medieval cosmology has created.

The unity of God revealed in Scripture is comprised of these primary identities: Elohim, Yahweh (the unpronounced covenant name of God) , The Father, The Son, the Suffering Servant, and the Holy Spirit.  There are many other appellations that could fill a large book and many tomes have already compiled the Biblical names of God. But I’d like to consider the Tri-unity from the perspective of how each identity interacts with creation. Each inhabits a different level of the created order and each has a different part to play in the on-going unfolding of history.  So how may understand their compound unity?

Jesus introduced us to the Almighty Father who is yet our “Dada” as Jesus taught his followers to address him in prayer (Matthew 6, Mark 14:36, Romans 8:15).  The Father is completely transcendent.  In fact, The Father is probably outside of the creation.  If there are 10 dimensions to our reality as science now theorizes, then The Father must logically dwell in the 11^th.  In the same way I cannot fit inside the plot of a book I create, The Father cannot squeeze into this creation.  The Father can’t be a part of what He creates.  As such, the Father is unfathomable. The Father was called both Elohim and Yahweh in the Old Testament.  He is the unity as well as originator of all that is (Psalm 148).  The Father is present everywhere and is greater than the sum of all matter, thought, and energy in this and all possible universes.  The Father is the author of providence and election.  The Father is nothing like us, nothing like anything in all creation. In our language and experience we don’t know how a sentient being isn't either male or female.   Yes, The Father is not male (Numbers 23:19).  That Jesus called him Father was a necessary anthropomorphism for understanding his power and ultimate authority in a Semitic setting where fathers reigned as supreme potentates of their families.  But there is nothing remotely human about the Creator. Jesus said quite clearly that no one has ever seen God but only the Son (John 6:46). I think it likely that we will never lay eyes on The Father as He will always be behind the reality we created beings experience.  When the Scriptures say we will see God, we will see the Risen Christ, The Lamb of God, the Suffering Servant.

Wait a minute, if Jesus said no one has ever seen God, then who did Abraham see when he was 90 years old walking between the smoking carcasses (Genesis 17)? Who appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18)? Didn’t Moses get a glimpse of God’s backside on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 33)?  The Old Testament is full of stories about people seeing God. Logically, they can only be seeing the aspects of God’s identity that can and do operate within our three-dimensional world.  Since the Father is external to the creation, whenever the faithful have interacted with God as a person, they are dealing with the Son or the Spirit who can and do inhabit this realm.  The Son appears throughout the Old Testament.  It was the pre-incarnate Christ who visited with Abraham at Mamre and carved the 10 Commandments on Sinai stone.  The second person of the Trinity  was the Commander of Yahweh’s army who appeared to Joshua (Joshua 5:13).  He was the angel at Bokim (Judges 2:1). He called Samuel in the night (1 Samuel 3).  He meets Elijah under the juniper tree (1 Kings 19).  The Son met David at Ornan’s threshing floor (1 Chronicles 21:15).  He showed himself as the Suffering Servant to Isaiah and the man in the whirlwind to the prophet Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1).  These human-like theophanies are appearances of the Son.  He appears as a man, but he is not trapped in our space-time as the flesh-and-blood Jesus will be.  The work of the Son is first and foremost to reveal the Father.  The Son lives the righteous life, redeems the elect, and intercedes for sinners.  His last act before ascending as the King of Creation was to bequeath to his redeemed the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the revealer of the Son (John 16:13), the action-agent of redemption. From before time, the Father and Son must have formed a complete loving unity. The Father loved The Son and gave freely to His only begotten.  The Son received from the Father, and gave back worship and adoration. This was God’s life before the creation – the greatest love affair imaginable. Love is the motive behind creation: God’s innate longing to share the greatest of all gifts -- that of existence itself.  And the bond that held Father and Son in this perpetual dance of devotion was/is the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit is the invisible bond that also unites believers elect in Christ to their true identity in the Heavenlies (Ephesians 2:6).  The Spirit guides and energizes everything it touches.  The Holy Spirit may operate in our three dimensions but usually is not perceptible to our sight.  In the Old Testament, the Spirit was the dynamo that seemed to make a bush burn and speak to Moses. The Spirit was the cloud pillar by day and fire column by night that led Israel through the desert. The Spirit would come upon people for special tasks in God’s plan and then be withdrawn. So David would pray, “Renew a right spirit within me…and take not your Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51:10-11). This pattern of temporary Spirit possession ceases after the ascension of The Son to his rightful place as King of Creation and the events of Pentecost described in Acts 1-2.  The Son gives the Holy Spirit to the elect believers in Christ to be our Helper, our Comforter, our Abiding Strength and link to the Heavenlies where we are said to now live with Christ (Col. 3:1).  Our life as Christians is a life like that of Jesus (Romans 8)– propelled by the Spirit, inspiring prayer and gifts and fruit to build up the faithful congregation of God’s elect in preparation for the final denouement of their identity as the children of God (I John 3:2).

          The mystery of Tri-unity is the revelation of the eternal faithfulness and awesome power of Father, Son and Spirit; their unity and their special ministries in the unfolding plan of God to redeem a fallen creation and restore it to its original intended glory.  And that’s where we turn next.