When I sat in science class about eight years ago, my teacher dissected a cow’s heart in front of us and proceeded to tell us we all had similar hearts pumping blood round bodies right now; leading to my sudden belief in the heart and its functions, and my inability to live without one. Akin to that revelation, has been the revelation of the Trinity to me thus far. If I had never known details of God’s three in one-ness, His triuneness would still not fail to continue making everything that is true possible; since every aspect of God is closely related to His creation and His will for it. Just as I lived ignorantly to my heart’s vital pumping efforts for many years, so have I to God’s truinity. Upon learning of the truth of my heart’s daily efforts to keep me alive, I was first led to awe and wonder. God, in the same way, revealing His existence in being an eternal and simple trinity has left me in wonder and a grown understanding and trust of Him.
Being raised up as a Hindu meant I was encouraged to worship many different Gods for different aspects of life; from the milk I drank for breakfast, to the spiders that crawl into my house uninvited - I was told to be grateful for it all, as each creation was a gift to me from a particular God. These God’s were known to have been at war with each other - and there was no unity between them - no sense of higher authority. As a Hare-Krishna Hindu, you can pick which God to put in your shrine at home, since most people wouldn’t be able to fit them all. The teachings of each God were all contained in different literature and seemingly incoherent. The lack of unity in their authority confused me as a child as I struggled to know whose teaching to believe in. When running across the Biblical teaching that God is One, satisfied my longing for a clear authority to listen to. It radically influenced my reading of the Bible, since I knew that if one part of the Bible seemed to conflict, then my understanding was off - not God’s Word - since it is the same unchanging God that speaks each word. It made sense to me at a young age, that there is one truth to look for and confusion would of course come when my understanding isn’t lining up with the entire single picture of God’s will.
The belief that Jesus is fully God, as the Holy Spirit is fully God did not conflict with this early understanding of mine, since they must be God for their wills to not be at battle against each other’s, which would have caused me the same confusion that Hinduism’s pantheism taught.
As a young new born believer, one thing I didn’t grasp were the words ‘you are the same yesterday, today and forever’ that hung across a banner in the foyer of my church. In my initial understanding, God being the ‘same’ always meant He could never do something that is out of His normal pattern - so all of a sending His Holy Spirit or Son seemed out of character to me; and I would leave those words ‘you are the same’ to the side, until recently where I have understood the words in a new light. Sanlon helpfully explains God’s ‘simplicity’ to mean He does not possess His attributes of ‘love’, ‘justice’, ‘wisdom’, etc; but He is His attributes - therefore meaning He can never lose or gain any of them. In other words, He is the same forever - an eternal non-composed being. Sanlon highlighted a helpful analogy for this from Augustine’s writings, which reads:
He is in Himself living, for He has life, and is Himself the Life which He has. It is for this reason, then, that the nature of the Trinity is called simple, because it has not anything which it can lose, and because it is not one thing and its contents another, as a cup and its drink, or a body and its colour, or the air and the light or heat of it, or a mind and its wisdom. For none of these is what it has: the cup is not drink, nor the body colour, nor the air light and heat, nor the mind wisdom. And hence they can be deprived of what they have, and can be turned or changed into other qualities and states, so that the cup may be emptied of the liquid of which it is full, the body be discoloured, the air darken, the mind grow silly…
Sanlon, 2014, Ch3. Simply Perfection: Simplicity Accords with Threeness
That cleared my misunderstanding of God. If He is Father, Son and Spirit; I now knew that He then has always been these three. ‘Begotten - not created’ made sense. It helped me to easily give Him the worship that He was due - the Father, the Son and the Spirit are all due worship. I had many conversations with Mormons the past summer over this matter, since they told me they believed in Jesus, and that He was a god, but not God - capital G - and that we all would soon be gods, in the same way Jesus is, with our own planets to rule. This to me sounded like multiple bits of Scripture not looked at systematically, nor fitted together coherently, but at the time I could not explain why I believed we weren’t quite going to turn into Jesus. However, now I feel more confident in responding to them with Scripture why Jesus is fully God as is the Holy Spirit - thus different and will remain different to His creation. The fact that Jesus is fully God is what makes Him taking a human body so magnificent and humbling.
“The greatest and most pressing problem facing the world is that people think God is less glorious, loving, magnificent and impressive than he is. The world at large will not automatically have an accurate conception of God.”
Sanlon, 2014, Ch1. Engaging with God: A God Unlike Us
This rang true to me not of just the world, but also of the people at my Church who might not be in contact with God throughout their weeks as much as others. No one in specific comes to mind, yet it has significantly caused me to realize the importance of ministering to the congregation when calling them to worship. We are fast approaching Christmas, and before singing the lyrics of one of my favourite Christmas Hymns, ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, I wonder how I can encourage the congregation to realize the weight of the words ‘begotten not created’ we’re singing to God. We know from Jesus’ words, that worship which pleases God is more than just singing truth about Him:
8 “ ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
9 They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’ “
Matthew 15:8-9 (NIV)
I’ve personally never been much of a worship leader in my eyes, though I bear the title at Church, I know a worship leader not only has to truly worship God themselves but also bring others to worship Him. The former is a strength of mine, but the latter is definitely not. My prayer now is for God to help me communicate effectively to my congregation His magnificence. As Sanlon highlights, God is truly impressive and when I dwell on that for long enough it causes me to be “lost in wonder… lost in love”, as Martyn Layzell’s song goes. (Layzell, 2003). Or as this comic strip demonstrates:
Just as heart seems to not have been disheartened but delighted at the idea that the vastness of the universe is ‘incomprehensible’; how much more should the vastness of the creator of this universe excite us to praise and worship Him? As Sanlon also points out, a comprehensible God is not the true God, but an ‘idol’ that is not worth worshipping. (Sanlon, 2014, Ch1). I agree that an accurate conception of God leads me to worship Him. Those ‘hallelujah’ moments when I’m reading scripture and something about God starts to make sense. Sanlon claims that to be able to concieve God accurately, ‘intellectual effort’, ‘a deep rich knowledge of the scriptures’, ‘patience and humility’ are all required.
I remember knowing and believing that Jesus is God at an early stage of my new Christian faith, and it changing my view towards Jesus’ words in specific. Knowing the truth that God is ‘three in one’ was the reason I started boldly speaking my prayers, at an early age, directly to God the Father and ending my prayers ‘in Jesus’ name’. Though now it is becoming clearer how vital this truth is for upholding many other Biblical truths
Bibliography
Layzell, M. (2003). Lost in Wonder. [CD] Tennessee: Thankyou Music. Available at: https://youtu.be/vzMubghVEM0 [Accessed 1 Oct. 2019].
Sanlon, P. (2014) Simply God. [ebook] IVP.
Written on: 2nd October 2019
Written on: 2nd October 2019
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