John 3:1-17
✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
We tend to take for granted the belief that there is only one God. And of course, that belief is true; that’s what we’ve come to learn and know from God’s Word–it is written, “The Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4). But apart from Scripture fallen mankind has more commonly held to the pagan belief in many gods. Fallen man has tended to believe that there are different gods for different areas of life and of the world–the god of the sea, the god of war, the goddess of love and fertility, and so on. Pagan people believed that they would have success in battle, or better health, or increased wealth if they did the right religious things to cause the gods to bless them. Even today, there are those who give reverence to the spirits of trees and animals and mountains as if they were divine, or will pray to their ancestors as if they were gods. This is one of the reasons why we reject praying to the saints and calling on deceased loved ones. Looking to them for guidance and for help is nothing else than a dressed-up version of the old paganism.
And when we talk about belief in only one God, we’re not merely talking about some generic higher power, some impersonal universal force that we can tap into spiritually somehow. That is the way of Hinduism and new age belief–that in reality we all are gods, we all are little pieces of the one divine soul of the universe. What a great deceit the devil works, making people think they’re spiritual and wise while they basically worship themselves.
You’ll notice in all of these false religions that there is a common theme, namely that the divine, the “gods” end up being just a projection of human beings on a higher scale, just a more powerful version of ourselves. The gods are made in man’s image in other words, or sometimes even in the image of animals and other created things. St. Paul speaks of this in Romans 1, “Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man–and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves”–notice how idolatry and sexual immorality are connected–“(they) exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”
This is why we have Trinity Sunday, so that we can take a moment to get all of this right. For it is only by God’s own revelation of Himself in His Word that we come to know the truth of who He is. Apart from the Word, we can know that He exists and that He’s powerful; but sin so clouds our minds and hearts that we cannot know Him rightly; the truth is inevitably distorted and we are drawn into devilish deceit. In fact Scripture specifically says that the worship of gods other than the Holy Trinity is worship offered to demons (1 Cor. 10:20).
We believe in the God who is not simply a higher version of ourselves, not a stronger creature, but One who is beyond creation: God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things, visible and invisible, and in His Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made man, and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. The one, true God is triune–one divine Being in three Divine Persons, Trinity in Unity; three distinct Persons, yet not many gods but only one God. It’s not something you can fully explain–how could you ever expect to fully understand the almighty and eternal God? You can only believe and confess His Word.
You may try to picture the Trinity, but be careful. No analogy really works completely. Some compare the tri-unity of God to the three phases of water–solid ice, liquid water, gaseous steam. Ice, liquid, and steam are three forms of one thing, water. However, God exists as all three at once; He’s not the Father sometimes and the Son sometimes and the Holy Spirit sometimes, like water. He’s all three all the time from all eternity, as at the baptism of Jesus, for instance. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit aren’t temporary modes or phases or roles of God. They are three distinct, eternal persons in the one Godhead.
Mathematics and geometry offer a little help. The triangle has three distinct legs. Take away any leg, and you no longer have a triangle. The cube has three dimensions; lose any one dimension and you no longer have a cube. But that still makes the persons of the Trinity only part of God rather than fully possessing the divine essence. My favorite analogy is the simple equation: 1 x 1 x 1 = 1. But at the end of the day, probably the best thing we can do is simply to confess what the creeds say and leave it at that.
God reveals Himself first as Father. This is particularly important in a time when fatherhood is often cast aside as non-essential. Our society is experiencing a whole host of negative consequences and fallout from the diminishment of fatherhood and all the things that metastisize to fill its place. Patriarchy isn’t the problem here; sin is the problem. The answer isn’t matriarchy or some new non-binary gender fluid paradigm. It’s a return to the Fatherhood of God as it is exercised rightly in the home and church and government. God is our Father, not our mother. As Father, He is the source of all things; He is the head, the provider, the protector, the One who is full of goodness and mercy in His Son, the Man Jesus Christ. When people try to apply “mother” language to God, inevitably feminine concepts like the cycles of the earth and the circle of life enter in, which again are really nothing other than paganism and the worship of creation rather than the Creator.
We do have a spiritual mother, however–the Church. The blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of our Lord, is a picture of the Church. For as she gave birth to our Lord Jesus, so we are born again in the Church through our baptism into His body. The holy font is the watery womb of the Church. There we are joined to Jesus’ death and resurrection and given a new life.
This is what Jesus was speaking about with Nicodemus when He said that you must be born again. Your first birth was a still birth, spiritually speaking. All the sins that bug you–or that don’t bug you but should–those are the symptoms of your still birth. You may have been a perfectly healthy baby, but you were born into the death of your father Adam. And you can’t fix it or reform yourself. You must die and rise. You must be born from above, of water and the Spirit. That’s creation language, when the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters in the beginning and brought life to the world. That’s what the Holy Spirit is doing still today, bringing new creation and new life to fallen human beings through water and words. Your first birth made you a mortal child of Adam. Your new birth in Jesus makes you an immortal child of God. You are in Christ, and so you are a new creation. The old is gone; the new has come. You are a member of God’s family. Jesus the Son invites you to pray with Him, “Our Father.” Our mother, the Church, teaches us these things by the working of the Holy Spirit through the Word.
And so we stick with the Triune Name of God which He has revealed and given to us in His Word. He is the Father who begets the Son who sends the Spirit; and He is the Spirit who proclaims the Son who brings us to the Father. If you think about it, we come to know the Trinity in reverse order like that: the Holy Spirit teaches us of Christ our Savior, making us children of the heavenly Father. In love for this dying world the Father sends His beloved Son into the world, conceived in our flesh by the Holy Spirit to restore us to life.
It’s important for me to make a particular point about this here: not everyone who believes that there is only One God has the same God as we do unfortunately. Our Jewish and Muslim and Mormon neighbors are not worshipers of the Trinity, and therefore they have a different god. They don’t even worship the Father. Jesus was very clear about this when He said, “He who rejects Me rejects Him who sent Me” (Luke 10:16). Since Jesus is God, if someone does not worship Him as God, sadly they have a different and false god.
Only the true God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son Jesus to be the medicine of immortality to rescue you from the deadly venom of sin. He was lifted up on the cross for you to take away your sins, so that whoever believes in Him by the working of the Holy Spirit will not perish but have everlasting life. That’s the Trinitarian love of God for you.
That is why we joyfully confess the doctrine of the Holy Trinity today. For it is our very life; He is our very life. This is why we hold tenaciously to Scriptural confessions of faith like the Athanasian Creed and reject anything that is contrary to it. It’s not out of an arrogant intellectualism. Rather, we know that this is the only true God who is love; this Jesus is the only one who is the way, the truth, and the life. And no one comes to the Father except through Him. Here’s the only medicine that can heal you. All the others are just quacks. Ultimately it is out of love for our neighbor that we reject all false religion, so that they may know and believe the saving truth of the Holy Trinity–the Father who reaches out to us fallen creatures in mercy, whose Son takes on our nature and bears our judgment and saves us, whose Holy Spirit delivers to us all the saving gifts of Christ in the preaching of the Gospel and the holy supper. It’s all from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit; and back again in the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father. This is our God. This is our Lord. We desire no other.
Blessed, then, be the Holy Trinity and the Undivided Unity: let us give glory to Him because he has shown mercy to us! For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.