Trinity

28
May
2024

John 3:16 – Father, Son, and Spirit in Action

Trinity Sunday was observed this week. The Gospel reading for the day included a well-known and well-loved passage from Scripture, John 3:16.  I’ll share here a message based on John 3:16, pondering the actions of the Triune God on our behalf.

For additional thoughts for Trinity Sunday and season, see also the post, “We trust in a God who goes beyond our understanding.”

God Loves You

In the town where I grew up, it was not uncommon to be stopped on the street and asked, “Are you saved?” (The questioners were students from a small Bible college in the town.) You won’t find the question, “Are you saved?” as a mission strategy used by any of God’s witnesses or apostles in the Bible.  You will find them, time and again, telling and retelling the simple, straightforward message of why we needed Jesus and what Jesus did for us.  God’s message is not a question, “Are you saved?” but a declaration: “You are saved!”  God doesn’t interrogate us, pressuring us to make decisions we don’t have the spiritual power to make. Instead, he tells us where we stand when we are standing outside of his grace, and he tells us how we are rescued by his amazing grace.

The message God speaks to you again and again in Scripture is that he loves you. The most famous such Bible statement is John 3:16. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

That one sentence is the Word of God in a nutshell.  It holds within it a complete story of how much we needed God and how much his love has done for us. God loves us so much that he, the Father, gave up his Son. God, the Son, gave up his life. God the Holy Spirit gives us life when he brings us to believe in what God has done in Jesus. God—the Father, Son and Spirit—in threefold fashion is our Savior from the sin and desperation in which otherwise we would perish.

Let’s look at the love of the Father first. God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son.  Amazing. Simply amazing. For one thing, we marvel at the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit who exist in one Being. We stand awestruck at that thought. We never fully fathom how God can be how he is—but he is! And then we’re amazed at the grace of God, that he would give up his Son, who is one with the Father, letting his eternal Son die in order to rescue us. We did not live to please God; we live to please ourselves. We are people who are ruled by our desires—desires that fight against God so that we do not and cannot obey God’s laws (see Romans 8:5-7). And yet God loves us! What grace! It is undeserved and unappreciated, but God loves us anyway. Like a father of runaway children who left home to live in the streets, God loved us even though we made ourselves unlovable. He kept his arms open to receive us even though we told him not to wait up, that we weren’t coming home. God loves us like a Father who never gives up on his children—and gave his most beloved Child, his own eternal Son—so that we could be his children and included in his family. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (1 John 3:1).

And Jesus, God’s own Son, was a willing participant in this plan. Jesus did not object to his role in our redemption. He looked straight ahead and hoisted the cross on his shoulder and began to drag it to the place where he would be executed as the ultimate act of God’s love for sinners. Even before it happened, Jesus matter-of-factly told his disciples, “The Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him” (Mark 10:33-34).  When one of his disciples said, “No! Never, Lord!” Jesus scolded him for thinking that way, for not having God’s plan in mind (cf. Matthew 16:21-22). “Christ loved us and gave himself for us,” is how Scripture tells the story (Ephesians 5:2). No one took his life from him; he laid it down of his own accord (John 10:18). The apostle Paul pondered on the magnitude of what Jesus did, saying, “Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7-8). That’s an amazing amount of love—God the Son gave up his life to make us sons and daughters of God with him, when there was nothing inherently in us that made us worthy of such a gift.

And there’s still more. God, who sent his Son from heaven, who gave his life on the cross, is not content to leave it at that and then let it up to us from there. He brings his love to us personally. He pours out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he gives to us (Romans 5:5). The Holy Spirit gives us life from God.  Notice something in the familiar words of John 3:16, that whoever believes in God’s Son (Jesus) shall have eternal life.  Believing in Christ is not something we, of ourselves, have the power to do. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). We were dead in our spirits, but God made us alive with the Spirit’s message of Christ. The Bible says it quite plainly:  A person “without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:14 NIV). We needed the Spirit to take the blindness from our eyes so we could see God, to lift the veil of deadness from our hearts so we could believe in God.

The Father loved us and gave up his Son. The Son loved us and gave up his life. The Spirit loved us and gave us the gift of faith, so that all the love of God would be revealed to us and believed by us. God loves us through and through, from start to finish—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As I said at the outset, there’s no question about whether or not you are saved; there is a definitive answer, a declarative statement. God loves you and has saved you in Christ and has convinced you of that truth by his Spirit. God’s love is not a question; it is a fact, a certainty.

Still, even though we know this, our fragile hearts find ways to question God, to question whether God really loves us. You know how it goes, something like this: God, you say you love me … but then why, God, is my life so difficult?  How come people who don’t seem to care about you get all the breaks in life and I get nothing? How come I have to struggle and scrape to get by? You say you love me, God, but I have a hard time seeing it. If you love me so much, why don’t you make my life better?”

Why do we ask such questions? Why do we make such accusations against God?  Why do we find ourselves doubting his love? Because we look for evidence of his love in the wrong places. We look for evidence of the wrong sort. We look for evidence in terms of earthly things and earthly advantages and earthly successes. That typically isn’t the sort of evidence of his love that God gives.

Let me ask you this: Would you say that God the Father loved his Son, Jesus? Yes, of course. He even said so for people to hear when Jesus was on this earth. When Jesus was baptized, God’s voice was heard from heaven, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love” (Matthew 3:17).  There were two other occasions later in Jesus’ time on earth when the same thing happened—God spoke from heaven and said, “This is my Son, whom I love.”  God loved Jesus;  we’ll take that as an undeniable fact.

Yet Jesus said of his own life on earth, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). Jesus had no mansion, no castle, not even a house. He went from place to place all the time. At the end of his life, Jesus’ wardrobe consisted of the clothes on his back. And those clothes were stripped off of him and divided up by soldiers who crucified him. Jesus was stripped naked and nailed to a cross and hung up to die. 

God loved Jesus. How could God allow his own Son whom he loved to be treated like that? Because God had a higher, better, bigger goal in mind. Jesus would die without a thing in this world to his name, but would rise again to life and have us as his own. He and we look forward to eternal pleasures in the kingdom of heaven (cf. Psalm 16:11).

God isn’t so much concerned about how nice your house might be on this planet, or how much luxury you can afford, or how many clothing choices you have when you look in your closet. Oh, he will give you enough to get by—you can thank him for that. But all that stuff is surely not the main way in which God wishes to show love to you. His love to you is mainly in Jesus. His love for you is intended to connect you to him for eternity. His love to you is most concerned with preparing a place for you in the mansions of heaven, not making sure you’re comfortable in some suburban subdivision here below.  If you look for God’s love in terms of what kind of house you can afford and what kind of car you drive and what kind of friends you have in your neighborhood, you’re bound to be disappointed. Look to God, instead, for the best of what he has to give you:

  • Love that is constant in Jesus even when persons in this world seem not to love you. 
  • Life that is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit even when what you experience in this world seems to be one failed promise after another. 
  • A relationship that is solid with the Father in heaven even when relationships on earth with family and friends are cracked and strained and unstable.   

Don’t look for evidence of God’s love merely in people and things—see the evidence of God’s love in God himself, in what he has done. God so loved the world (and God so loved you) that he gave his precious Son, Jesus Christ, to secure eternal life for you. 

God loves you. If you ever have any doubt about that, look at what the Father did. Look at what Jesus did. Look at what the Holy Spirit has done and is doing. Salvation is not a question; it’s the deepest, greatest truth in the universe. God loves you in Christ and has made you his own by his Spirit, and you will live forever in him. Hang onto that love—the best love there is, no question about it.

Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Posted by David Sellnow
04
Jun
2023

Thoughts for Trinity Sunday

“Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5, World English Bible).

We trust in a God who goes beyond understanding

by David Sellnow

Image by jette55 from Pixabay

There is an ancient Christian creed that says, “We worship one God in three persons, and three persons in one God,” that “the Father is eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy Spirit eternal. Yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal Lord God” (The Athanasian Creed). Can you explain that? That makes no sense humanly speaking, mathematically or logically. Yet we declare it to be true.

The conundrum of the Trinity is just one of the many secrets of God. Consider Jesus Christ himself. Jesus is Son of God and Son of Man. In Christ all the fullness of God is present in a human body, the Bible says (cf. Colossians, 2:9). Can you explain how that is possible, that God became human and lived among us? Incredible, isn’t it?  Yet it is also true.

Consider the wonders God has done. Out of nothing, God made everything. He called the universe into being. Can you scientifically account for the intricacies of the created order? The most brilliant scientific minds continue to search and study such questions. God’s word asserts that his divine hand is behind it all. To quote a psalmist: “Heaven is declaring God’s glory; the sky is proclaiming his handiwork. … His lightning lights up the world …  and all nations have seen his glory” (Psalm 19:1; Psalm 97:4,6, Common English Bible).

God tells us that he will one day resurrect our bodies from the grave. Dead tissue will come back to life. Scattered ashes and decomposed bones will rise up again as the same people who once lived in these bodies. Is that something you can devise and do at home? If we understood how resurrection could happen, surely somebody would be building a life-reviving business right now. But we don’t rationally comprehend such things. The miracles and mysteries of God are beyond what we can humanly conceive or do. It’s like Elihu told Job in days of old: “Surely, God is great. … My heart trembles and leaps out of its place” (Job 36:26, 37:1).

We believe in a God who goes beyond understanding. That is good–because where our understanding is limited, God is unlimited. His ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9). Even the revered King Solomon, who was renowned throughout the world for his wisdom, readily admitted his inadequacy before God. It is Solomon who tells us: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight” (Proverbs 3:5). Solomon’s own life story exemplified how following his own instincts became a meaningless “chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:11). He learned that apart from God, no one could enjoy life or have what they need (Ecclesiastes 2:25). 

When we ponder God’s triune nature, we may offer analogies like water, ice, and steam (the same substance in three different forms). However, none of our illustrations do justice to the greatness of God’s being. I once tried my own illustration for a children’s sermon. I asked three of the youngsters in church to come forward, and I said I was going to combine them into one person. Then I put my arms around all three of them in a bear hug and squeezed and squeezed. They laughed, but of course, they could not all be one in essence together. Yet God tells us that he is Father, Son, and Spirit, each distinct, and yet all three unified as one together in the divine Being. 

If we try to put God into a framework that fits our way of thinking, then as the author J.B. Phillips said, we’ve made God too small.  As Phillips wrote, the immensely broad sweep of the Creator’s activity, the astonishing complexity of his mind’s processes (which science labors to uncover), the vast sea of what we see as God’s handiwork–all this is only a small portion of who God is. We have only a glimpse of his awesomeness in the small corner of the universe in which we human beings live and move and have our being. 

We accept the greatness of God and all his miraculous doings on faith. Faith confesses that we live and move and have our being in God (Acts 17:28), though we can’t see him. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). We have not seen God, nor can we comprehend everything about him, yet we believe and trust in him with all our hearts. 

And God is worthy of being trusted. He is the LORD, Yahweh or Jehovah, whose name means “He is.” He just is, always the same, always existing, always the Lord. From everlasting to everlasting, he is God (Psalm 90:2). The number of his years is past finding out (Job 36:26). He fills heaven and earth (Jeremiah 23:24). He rides on the wings of the wind (Psalm 104:2,3).  He is beyond our reach and exalted in power (Job 37:23). He does great things beyond our grasp (Job 37:5). His greatness no one can fathom (Psalm 145:3). 

I could go on and on with more quotes from Scripture. The Lord is amazing in every way. An English translation of the ancient creed I mentioned before said it with style: “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible; and yet not three incomprehensibles, but one incomprehensible.” God is incomprehensible–infinite, uncreated, eternal, almighty. He is the Lord. Therefore, we trust in him–and our trust is not misplaced.

Solomon’s proverb pictures the contrast between trusting in God vs. relying on one’s own brainpower with an intriguing choice of Hebrew words. In English, we read, “Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5 WEB). The idea in the Hebrew word “SHa’aN,” (שָׁעַן) means to lean on something like you’d lean on a cane or walking stick. It holds you up, but barely. It’s a crutch that lets you limp along. On the other hand, for the Hebrew expression describing “trust in” the Lord, Solomon used another word: BaTaKH ( בְּטַ֣ח). It means to feel safe and fully confident, to have an unshakeable sense of security. To picture this, think of a young child finding security in her father’s or mother’s arms. Envision a sick or injured toddler, who is unable to understand the hurt. Still, she feels safe in her parent’s embrace. She will fall asleep there, calm and reassured. That’s what trusting God is like. And God is our Father. He is in control and can cure all ills. He is a very real help and refuge to us at all times, able to remove our fears (cf. Psalm 46). What a blessing to be held up and carried in his everlasting arms (cf. Deuteronomy 33:27)! We need not wobble along with only our own intelligence or ability to prop us up.

We recognize that God “dwells in unapproachable light” and “no one has ever seen or can see” him (1 Timothy 6:16). Yet while God is unapproachable, unimaginable, in so many ways, he does not wish to remain unknown to us or unseen by us. He wants us to be able to stand before his throne and see his face (Revelation 22:4), to know fully and see face-to-face the glory that is his (1 Corinthians 13:12). To that end, he provided a way for us to know him and come to him. While  “no one has ever seen God, It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). That, ultimately, is the basis for our trust in the Lord. We trust in God not because it makes such good sense or we understand every detail about eternity. We trust in him because he’s shown us such great love and safeguards our souls.

Faith consists not in trying to hold ourselves up with the crutch of our own understanding, but relying fully on the strong rock who is God, trusting in the Savior God provided (Jesus), believing because the Spirit has convinced us all this is true. That’s all we really need to understand. We know Jesus, and Jesus is sufficient to meet all our needs (Hebrews 7:26). Jesus bridges the gap between us and God. The peace which God gives us goes beyond all understanding, and keeps our hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7).  We rest assured when we are resting in God and his promises.

Let me add just one more thing as we conclude this meditation. Confessing that God goes beyond our understanding doesn’t mean we stop using our understanding—our minds and all the other good gifts with which God has blessed us. Trusting in the Lord doesn’t mean we go through life saying, “God knows what’s best for me, so I’ll wait for a sign from heaven”–about what job or career path to pursue, or what decisions to make. We use our minds and the skills God has given us. We take stock of ourselves, assess the gifts and abilities God has given us and the opportunities set before us, and we make decisions.  Trusting in the Lord and not leaning on human understanding doesn’t mean that when we get sick, we’ll decline seeing a doctor and just say, “I’ll pray about this, because I know God can heal me.” We will pray, but most certainly also will make use of help and resources available to us in God’s created world. All the while, we know that even if modern medicine cannot cure us, not even death can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord (cf. Romans 8:38,39).

Photo by Jessica Lewis Creative: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-mug-with-religious-text-from-holy-bible-4200823/

Our God has created us with much ability, much understanding, many resources and tools. We will use all those things to navigate our lives as best we can. But as people of faith, we also have this underlying confidence: A loving God who is far greater than us is always with us. When life hits us with challenges bigger than we can handle, when we can’t answer all the questions and dilemmas of our world, when death is on our doorstep or takes loved ones from us, when we are at our wit’s end … we still have our God, our heavenly Father, holding out his arms to fold us into his embrace. We still have our Brother, our Savior, Jesus, who gave his life for us and gives us life eternally with him. We still have our encourager, our Advocate (John 14:26), the Holy Spirit, who fills up our hearts and enables us to live with hope.  Dear friends, fellow believers, we have peace of mind and peace of heart in knowing God. And the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit will be with you, always (cf. 2 Corinthians 13:7).

Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Posted by David Sellnow