2026-05-31 Holy Trinity

Scripture Readings

Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!

I’ve got a real interest in early church history. As Lutherans, we tend to kind of default to the Reformation with Luther and the other Protestants. But that was only around 500 years ago. What happened before that? How did Christians understand God and theology way back, like 1,900 years ago!? It’s fascinating really. Often we have ideas about God and faith that resemble an evolutionary approach. Now, I don’t mean Darwinism but just the concept. Like God was always One and then as time went on the understanding of God as the Holy Trinity developed. Scholars will often put this kind of idea forward because they have PhD dissertations to write and academic journal articles to publish and so on and so on.

Then people look to the Jews and ask about how they understand God. What did Moses teach in the Old Testament? “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). The Great Shema they call it. See! God is One. This whole Trinity idea was invented later, they’ll say. God has only ever always been just one. But the interesting thing is that this narrow unitarian idea comes from later Rabbinic Judaism, especially in their extra-biblical writings called the Talmud in the neighbourhood of 600AD. That’s a good 600 years to object to any Christian ideas about Jesus being God. So you can’t really appeal to the Judaism of today for teaching about the God who is revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures because of that anti-Christian bias.

But when you actually read the Old Testament, you quickly start finding loads of examples of God revealing Himself in ways that aren’t strictly unitarian. We heard a couple again this morning in the opening verses of Genesis: “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (1:2). And again in verse 26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ Our image. Our likeness. Our is more than one.

And, as you read further in the Old Testament you run into the concept of “The Angel of the Lord.” We hear this and think ‘Oh, it’s just an angel.’ But you can translate it “The Yahweh Messenger.” It comes across as a divine and especially prominent being linked to the Messiah. Isaiah 9(6) calls Him the — “Wonderful Counselor” in Hebrew. But in the Greek Old Testament the words are the “Angel of Great Counsel”.

This idea comes up again with Hagar in Genesis 16 where an angel speaks as God in the first person. Hagar literally calls Him “the God who sees me.” In the sacrifice of Isaac with Abraham, who puts a halt to the slaughter? An Angel who then speaks as God. Think about Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32. Think about Moses and the burning bush in Exodus 3. Who appears to him? None other than this ‘Angel of the Lord’ who then tells him that He is “the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” Ex 3:15.

These examples keep going! Israel is led by a pillar of cloud and fire during their long trip to the promised land in the wilderness. “When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance of the tent, and then He (the Lord) would speak with Moses.” The cloud speaks as God! When Joshua sees “the commander of the army of the Lord” in chapter 5, he falls on his face and worships him. Gideon. David. Elijah. Hezekiah. This Angel leads armies, protects and punishes Israel, defeats Israel’s enemies and often speaks and acts in God’s first-person voice. Who exactly is this Divine figure if God is one!?

Now some people have said, well, this is just the same one God wearing different hats. Or, like an actor, putting on a different mask. But this isn’t correct. It’s theologians trying to logically work out and solve the mystery that the Scriptures ascribe God like qualities and attributes to more than just the One God. Later on, this particular idea of the masks was identified as a heresy known as “Modal Monarchianism.” It says that God is One but appears in different “modes” like one mode for the Father, another mode for the Son and another for that Spirit that was hovering over the waters at creation.

The early Church Father’s chose careful language to describe and explain what the Scriptures revealed about God. They said that truly, God is One. He has one Divine essence or substance. Yet at the same time, He is revealed as having three “persons.” And these three persons share the same essence. So here’s your complimentary Five Dollar Greek words of the day. The three hypostases (persons) are homoousios — they share one and the same divine essence (mia ousia). So the Father is a person, the Son is a person and the Holy Spirit is a person, not 3 gods but One God.

This theological understanding really explains these two verses from Exodus. “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (33:11) and only nine verses later you have God saying “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (33:20). According to God’s glory and essence, you cannot behold His extreme holiness. But if you look at the person of the Son, who is “the icon (image) of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) then you can. Jesus Himself tells us “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (JN 14:9).

This is what makes the incarnation of Christ our Lord so mind blowing. St. John tells us that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). At Christmas time we often get side-tracked by short-bread. But the mystery of God becoming Man for us and our salvation is what it is really all about. The mysterious second hypostasis of the Old Testament is revealed. It’s Jesus! The Word made flesh. Born of a virgin to save His people from their sins.

And, as we just celebrated last Sunday, The Holy Spirit who descended at Pentecost, is likewise the third person of the Holy Trinity. But this isn’t a later Christian invention either. Our Genesis reading hammered it home. But here’s a couple more. Psalm 104:30 says “When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.” Or how about Isaiah 48:16 that says “And now the Lord God has sent me, and his Spirit.” Or Nehemiah 9:20 that says “You gave your good Spirit to instruct them and did not withhold your manna from their mouth and gave them water for their thirst.”

The Scriptures reveal quite clearly how God is this Holy Trinity, One God in Three Persons. Each person is distinct, yet fully divine. It’s definitely a swim in the deep end of the theology pool! But each of us as Christians need to put on our water-wings and jump in. Because if you don’t know the truth about God, you’re going to get bamboozled by Satan, the world or your sinful notions.

To this end, the goal was not to explain how God is Triune (which is a mystery), but rather to guard that He is Triune — and do so faithfully, in accordance with the scriptures. The early church faced an onslaught of people and theologies that were running afoul of this doctrine. Gnosticism that taught that “secret knowledge” saved a person and that Jesus only seemed to be human. This went hand and hand with Docetism and Ebionism that taught Jesus was a mere human prophet or only appeared to be human. These were quickly followed by Marcionism that said the wrathful God of the Old Testament is a different and inferior deity from the loving Father of Jesus. Marcion rejected the Old Testament outright.

Then came Montanism which said new prophecies from the Holy Spirit (via Montanus and prophetesses) superseded Scripture. Monarchianism we already talked about. Then came the greatest theological crisis of the 4th century with Arianism. They taught that the Son (Logos) is a created being, subordinate to the Father and not co-eternal or homoousios. The Nicene Creed was formulated to combat this whacky theology and affirm Christ’s full divinity.

This was just the tip of the iceberg. In the 4th and 5th centuries came all kinds of Christological heresies like Apollinarianism, Nestorianism and Eutychianism. The Church likewise responded to these with the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, keeping the ducks in a row that Jesus had two natures in one person - a hypostatic union. But we will leave this for another day!

The early Church didn’t articulate the doctrine of the Trinity because they were bored or trying to impress Greek philosophers. They did it because they loved the God who had revealed Himself in the Scriptures, and they loved the people He came to save. They fought so fiercely for this truth because if Jesus is not fully God — if the Spirit is not fully God — then we are still in our sins, and our hope is in vain.

Yet because the one true God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — one essence, three persons — we have this astonishing comfort: the God who spoke to Moses face to face, the God who hovered over the waters at creation, the God who led Israel through the wilderness, that same God has come near to us in Jesus Christ. The invisible has become visible. The untouchable has become touchable. The eternal Son took on our flesh so that we might share in His life.

This is why the Trinity is not a burden to be solved, but a mystery to be held. It means that from all eternity, God has existed in perfect love and relationship — and in that love, He created you, redeemed you, and now dwells in you by His Spirit.

So jump in with your water wings. Read your Bibles. Study the Creeds. Listen to the Church Fathers. Not out of dry academic curiosity, but so that you may know the God who knows and loves you. Because when you know who God really is, you will love Him more deeply, trust Him more firmly, and worship Him more joyfully. And when the world, or your own doubts, or the latest scholar tries to tell you that the Trinity is a late invention, you can answer with confidence: “No! This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the God of Moses and the Prophets. This is the God who has revealed Himself fully in Jesus Christ — and He is for us.” To the One God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — be all glory, honour, and worship, now and forever. Amen.