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Last night I read this passage from a guy named John Webster on the Holy Spirit and the Trinity. It’s a little dense,  but very thought provoking, and so I wanted to post it here (the first paragraph), along with the quote I tried to read (the last paragraph), but didn’t have with me. I’ve included other portions from the same section as well, for context.

Unity is a relational term when applied to God: the divine unity is not monadic, relationless and undifferentiated. Rather, it is organic and dynamic, expressed in the personal histories of the sending of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit. ‘The Divine unity is a dynamic unity actively unifying in the one Divine life the lives of the three Divine persons’. Divine unity does not lie behind the threeness of God; rather, it is the event of the peace of the divine life between Father, Son and Spirit.

This will…involve careful specification of the notion of ‘person’ as applied to God. ‘Person’ is again to be conceived relationally: the person is not an autonomous subject but rather is constituted as person in relationship and dialogue. Understood in this way, the divine ‘personality’ or ‘subjectivity’ does not preclude relationship and differentiation; indeed, it is relationship. God’s personality is God’s relatedness to himself.

If God’s triunity is thus understood as a personal, related society, then the danger of absorption of the Spirit into the person of Christ will be considerably lessened, precisely because God’s being will be seen as fully plural. A pluralist understanding of God’s being, moreover, will furnish the
basis for understanding the distinct role of the Spirit in the divine economy, related to but properly distinguished from those of
Father and Son. This will, in turn, serve to reinforce a sense of the distinct identity of the Spirit…

First, the Spirit is the one who is sent out into the world through the church and who thus demonstrates that God’s life is a life open to the creation.  Because the Spirit is sent, ‘the triune God is the God who is open to man, open to the world, and open to time’. The Spirit is a protest against monadic conceptions of God in which the divine life is seen as ‘a closed triangle’,  complete in the enjoyment of its own inner relationship and unconcerned to reach beyond itself into the history of the world…

Last night we continued our study of the Trinity by looking at the Holy Spirit. Here are the notes:

1. How we met Him: 
Promised: Ezekiel 36:26-27, Isaiah 42:1
All over Jesus’ life: Luke 1:34-35; 3:15-16; 3:21-22, 4:1-2; 4:14-21
We meet Him in the life of Christ. He is completely involved with everything about Jesus from start to finish.

2. How He relates to the Son & Father:

His relationship to the Father and Son is revealed in Jesus’ teaching:
John 7:37-38 – given to Jesus’ followers
John 14:15-18 – personally distinct
John 15:26-27 – He proceeds from the Father, and is sent by Jesus. He points to Jesus.
John 16:5-15 – He is God with us, doing the work that needs to be done
Matthew 28:19 – He shares God’s name

• The Son was sent from the Father, in the Spirit, and became Incarnate. He is God with us.
• The Spirit is sent from the Father, by the some, and indwells us. He is God in us.
• (Or “The Son is God with us by becoming one of us. The Spirit is God with us by living among us.”)

3. Who He is in us:
The life of the mission of the church: Acts 1:7-8
God Himself in us: Romans 8:8-9

 4. What this means for us:   

1. God is with us. His life is open to us. He has invited us in and included us.
2. What we were missing—true life, true connection to God—God gives us by sending His Spirit into our hearts.  Everything is dead and broken without Him. Everything is fixed and alive with Him.
3. We have the power to obey Him, because He is in us.
4. We can really know Jesus, and the Father. In other words, the Father sent the Son to become One of us, He died for us and now lives forever as a perfected Man and the Son of God, and then the Spirit came to live in our hearts—we know God, Father, Son and Spirit. 

Much of what you find yourself thinking about when you start to look at what the Scripture teaches about God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is how the three persons in God relate to each other. There’s so much in scripture about it, even though it’s often not the first thing you notice when you’re reading. Personally, I’ve discovered that, for some reason, I had developed this way of sort of “skipping over” and not noticing the things in any given verse that give us insight into how the Father relates to the Son, and so on.

Along those lines, I found this summary of lots of Biblical data from Fred Sanders very helpful:

The Father loves the Son, sends the Son, and glorifies the Son. He also sends the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ name, in response to his request, and is worshiped in the Son and in the Spirit. He and the Son indwell one another. He has life in himself and has given to the Son to have life in himself. He is the judge and has committed judgment to his Son.

The Son was with God in the beginning, in the bosom of the Father, and was and is God. He made all things. He was sent by the Father, became flesh, and lived among men. He obeys the Father, prays to the Father, and after his resurrection ascends to the Father. He asks the Father to send the Holy Spirit, sends the Holy Spirit himself, and breathes out the Spirit on his disciples. He and the Father indwell one another. He receives from the Father life in himself and the right to judge.

The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, is sent by the Father on the Day of Pentecost in response to the Son’s request, and is also sent at that time by the Son. He is breathed out by the Son. He bears witness of the Son and brings glory to him.

The three work together in harmony. Through the Holy Spirit, they come together to the disciples, who as a consequence live in the Father and in the Son.

[From The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything]

Last night we continued our study in what it means for us that God is a Trinity. We looked specifically at how Jesus revealed himself to be the Son of God the Father, and the implications of this self-revelation of God.

Intro:
Last week, we saw how God revealed himself as the only true God in the Old Testament, and left all kinds of hints that there was some unsaid details about who He is; and that Jesus came in the NT and demonstrated that there is plurality in God…Jesus is now included in our understanding of God.

1. What we see (in the life of Christ): Jesus is the Son of the Father.

Matthew 3:16-17  Right from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry we see that there’s something new and special going on, with a voice (clearly God) speaking from heaven, someone distinct from the voice, the Holy Spirit, descending onto Jesus, and Jesus being recognized as a the unique, totally pleasing Son of God by God’s own voice from heaven.

John 3:16-17  Jesus spoke like this right from the beginning of His ministry, as here, in this famous passage, He mentions His Father as distinct from Himself, and yet includes HImself uniquely in the purposes of the Father. This leads us to this important principle: How God saves us shows who He is. Or you could say it this way: God chose that the way He would save us would show us who He is. Specifically, Jesus shows us that in God is more than one person. Specifically, there is Son and Father. He lets us in on the relations in God, on his relationship to the Father, and their conversation.

See John 5:16-30

The Son:  does only what He see the father do (19); responds to the Father (20); is sent by the Father (23); Gets life “in Himself” from the Father (26); gets authority from the Father (27); seeks the Fathers will (30).
…yet: knows everything the Father Does (20); like the Father—Gives life to whoever He wants (21); Judges all (22); receives the same honor as the Father (23); His word gives everlasting life (24); raises the dead (29)

The Father:  Doing things that the son does (19); loves the Son (20); commits judgment to the Son (22); Has life in Himself, and grants to the son to have life in himself (26); gives son authority to execute judgment (27). Also John 3:15-17 … gives His Son out of love for the world, to save us.

2. What this means (about God Himself): God was always Father and Son.

John 17:4-5, 17:24 This relationship of Father and Son has always been who God is.
Key: John 1:18, 14:9 – Jesus is not just showing us things about his time on earth, but about God

 3. What this means to us:

1. God is happy, and fully alive (relationally), in Himself. Before the universe, there was life and love.– There was Father and Son and Spirit with each other. (and conversation, planning, glory)

2. Jesus shows us God (John 1:18)
a. God the Son, sent, doing the Father’s will, sacrificing Himself humbly
b. God the Father (seen in Him), loving the world and sending His own Son, to heal us:

So what Jesus shows us about how He relates to God is true of the way it’s always been. Jesus shows us, first, that relationship, love, exists in God, and also some of how the relationships work. Jesus is God the Son, being sent by, obeying, loving, and displaying God the Father. Or, as one commentator put it: “The Father is the divine fountainhead in which the being of the Son has its source; the Father is God sending and commanding, the Son is God sent and obedient.” (CK Barrett)

Ending Discussion Questions:

1. Does God need us to be happy? To have company?
2. Is it more God-like to command or to obey? Is it more Godlike to send or be sent?
3. What kind of new view of God emerges when you begin to see these things?

Probably shouldn’t post while emotional…But studying for Monday nights is leading me into some amazing places. Just read this prayer, from an old theologian, and it’s overwhelming me!

Lord our God, you wanted to live not only in heaven, but also with us, here on earth;
not only to be high and great, but also to be small and lowly, as we are;
not only to rule, but also to serve us;
not only to be God in eternity, but also to be born as a person, to live, and to die.

In your dear Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, you have given us none other than yourself,
that we may wholly belong to you.
This affects all of us, none of us has deserved this.
What remains for us to do but wonder, to rejoice, to be thankful,
and to hold fast to what you have done for us?

Last Monday night we began our study of the how God has revealed Himself to be three in one, and what that means for us. Here are the notes:

Intro:   Why we’re doing this:

1. Not to get smart,
2. To know God better—it’s really who God is.
3. It’s an essential piece of your Christian understanding.

1. The Trinity saved you when you were born again  (Galatians 3:1-2, 8-14; 4:3-7)
1. You heard the message of Jesus (3:1, 13; 4:3-5)
2. You believed (3:2)
3. You received the Spirit (3:2; 14; 4:6). That is, the Spirit of the God’s Son who makes us cry, “Father.”

See also Titus 3:1-7 – The Love of God appeared in the Son, who saved us by the Spirit.

2. The Trinity is how you know God now.  (John 14:8-11; 15-18) This way God is, is how you can “have a relationship” with God. We know the Father by knowing Jesus (14:9) We know Jesus by having the Spirit (14:18 + 23; 15:26). See also John 14:26 and 1 John 4:10-15. The Helper comes to us from the Father in Jesus’ name. And see John 16:5-7. This is a better way to live and know God than having Jesus in bodily form with us.

3. The Trinity saved you in the death and resurrection of Christ
Heb 9:11-14 – Jesus was on the cross offering Himself to God through the Spirit
1 Peter 3:18; Rom 8:11 – Jesus was made alive by the Spirit

Summing it up: 

1. This is the God you know. They way you can know Him is because He is this way. (if He wasn’t…)
2. Do you know Him? Do you have the Spirit in you? (Rom 8:9)
3. You can…He wants you to know Him. God is a communicator…He is a friend-maker. He has revealed Himself, and if you trust Him, He will fill you with His Spirit and make you alive.

As we study the Trinity, I’ll try to post helpful things which we might not get to cover during the weekly studies. For instance, here’s some great, practical help from Fred Sanders on how to see the Trinity in the most important place: The Bible.

A lot of Bible-believing Christians have trouble seeing the doctrine of the Trinity in Scripture. They see a verse here and a verse there that help prove the different parts of the doctrine (the deity of Christ, the unity of God, etc), but they don’t see the whole package put together in any one place.

Granting that the doctrine is not compactly gathered into any one verse (not even Matthew 28:19 or 2 Corinthians 13:14 are quite as complete or detailed as we’d like), we can take some steps toward thinking about the doctrine in a bigger-than-one-verse way.

Follow the whole argument of Galatians 4, for example, or 1 Corinthians 2, or of Ephesians 1, or of the Gospel of John, and you’ll see the Trinitarian profile of God’s self-revelation emerge clearly. You have to learn to think in bigger sections of Scripture than just a verse; the bigger the better.

This is the key to seeing what’s really there in Scripture: To get to the doctrine of the Trinity, you have to take three very large mental steps.

1. Read the whole Bible. Okay, maybe you can put off Habakkuk and Jude for a while. But you have to achieve some initial mastery of the long, main lines of the one story that is the Christian Bible. You have to be able to think back and forth along the canon of scripture, with figures like Abraham and Moses and David and Cyrus standing in their proper places, and with categories like temple and sonship and holiness lighting up the various books as appropriate. Get comfortable with the whole volume.

2. Understand the shape of God’s economy. [By “economy,” Fred means something like “the way God has governed and worked in the world”] The next step is to comprehend the entire Bible as the official, inspired report of the one central thing that God is doing for the world. He has ordered all of these words and events that are recorded in Scripture toward one end. It’s not good enough just to know the content of the whole Bible, if you misinterpret it as a haphazard assemblage of divine stops and starts. These are not disparate Bible stories, but the written form of the one grand movement in which God disposes all his works and words toward making himself known and present.

3. Recognize the economy as a revelation of who God is. There is still a third step, and it’s the biggest one of all. When you know the entire Bible, and understand that it presents to us God’s well-ordered economy, you still have to come to see that God is making himself known to us in that economy. After all, it is theoretically possible for God to do great things in world history without really giving away his character or disclosing his identity in doing so. This final step on the way to the doctrine of the Trinity is the recognition that God behaved as Father, Son, and Spirit in the economy because he was revealing to us who he eternally is, in himself. He wasn’t messing around with that Son and Spirit stuff. He put himself into the gospel.

That is the right way to interpret the Bible. It’s also the traditional way, recognized by the church fathers and the reformers. It’s also the Christian way. It yields the doctrine of the Trinity, not in scattered verses here and there that tell us a weird doctrine at the margins of the faith, but as the main point.

This Monday, I plan on beginning a series of studies looking at the way God has revealed Himself in scripture. Specifically, I want to look at how God has revealed Himself to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–One God. We use the word “Trinity” to refer to this…this way God is God. Not only is it one of those topics that Christians regularly find confusing, but it is also essentially practical; a maturing understanding of who God is as a Trinity will help us relate to God (and people) in a more fruitful way.   

I have a basic outline of where I think the studies will go–Four looking at exactly how God has shown us that He is Triune, and five or so looking at the practical implications (for us) of this revelation. The order may change (for example, study 2 may be about the Son before we focus on the Father) and the practical studies in particular may morph as i actually get into them, but here’s a general idea of how we might tackle this subject:

Our God Has Made Himself Known: Getting to Know The Trinity

1. Why this is So Exciting: The Only Real God Wants Us to Know Him
2. God is The Father Who Sends His Son in the Power of His Spirit
3. God is The Son Who Reveals His Father Through His Spirit
4. God is The Spirit Who Lives in the Son to Glorify the Father
5. The Only Real World: The Universe made by the Trinity
6. What We Are: People in the Image of the Trinity
7. What We’re For: Worshiping the Trinity
8. How to Stop the Hate: The Trinity and how we treat each other
9. Getting Over Our Past: The Trinity and how we heal

I’ve already posted some written thoughts, and links to four awesome messages on the Trinity that I highly recommend. Check them out. Can’t wait to get into it all with you.

Praise and thanksgiving be unto you, O God,
who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ
and set him at your right hand in the kingdom of glory.

Praise and thanksgiving be unto you, O Lord Jesus Christ,
you Lamb of God who has redeemed us by your blood,
you heavenly Priest who ever lives to make intercession for us,
you eternal King who comes again to make all things new.

Praise and thanksgiving be unto you, O Holy Spirit,
who has shed abroad the love of God,
who quickens us together with Christ,
and makes us to sit with him in heavenly places,
and to taste the good Word of God and the powers of the age to come.

Blessing and glory,
and wisdom and thanksgiving,
and honour and power and might,
be unto you our God for ever and ever. Amen

– Thomas F. Torrance.

I’m enjoying our study through the book of Ruth, and I’m also looking forward to where I think we’re going next in our Monday night studies. As I’ve mentioned before, for a couple months now I’ve been excited about revisiting the scriptures to simply study about who God is and how He’s revealed Himself. While non-believers regularly talk as if God must be this far-away, unknowable being, we worship the only God Who has actually shown Himself–He wants us to know Him! All of this means that I’ve been studying the Christian teaching known as the Trinity. And so, after Ruth, it’s to the Trinity I hope to turn on our Monday nights. It will dovetail nicely with where Pastor Joe’s been on Sunday mornings as we think about the Holy Spirit, and it will give us a few weeks to sink our minds into God’s word as a declaration of Himself to us.

I’ll post more about these studies as we get closer to beginning, but for now, I thought I’d share some stuff I’ve found to be helpful in thinking about the Bible’s teaching on all this. First, here are the links to download four messages on the Trinity which I have to say are excellent: This guy is speaking to a college christian fellowship, so he’s very easy to listen to (he’s a British guy with a good accent and a good British sense of humor). They will get you pumped to dig into the word to see these things for yourself:

Messages by Mike Reeves on the Trinity (Mp3 downloads)

• Why we have problems with Trinity
• Trinity is the Answer
• Trinity in Revelation and Creation
• Trinity in Salvation

And for a little more, here’s an article by the same guy called “Three is the Loveliest Number.” Here’s a section from the beginning of it: 

…there is the God we know and love—and then, in some mental ivory tower far, far away, there is that Trinity stuff.

That mathematical mystery.

That mind-bending oddity.

That strange, even embarrassing idea.

Yes, deep within the Christian psyche today seems to be the notion that the Trinity is an awkward and odd irrelevance, an unsightly wart on our knowledge of the true God. And so, when it comes to sharing our faith, we speak of God’s offer of salvation, we speak of God’s free grace, but we try not to let on that the God we are speaking of is a Trinity. We wax lyrical about the beauty of the gospel, but not so much about the beauty of the God whose gospel it is.

It is time to stand up and say, “No!” to such nonsense, to turn our backs on the absurd notion that our beautiful gospel could ever come from a God who is not the very perfection and essence of beauty. For the health of the church and our faith, we must be proud of who our God is. And since the Trinity is no mere theological icing resting atop our God—since the living God is Trinity—we must be resolutely and thoroughly Trinitarian in all our ways and thoughts.

Only then will we truly enjoy what sets the living God apart from the gods of human imagination. Only then will we know a God good enough to offer truly good news. And this, in fact, is the nature of the very eternal life for which we have been saved: knowing God. As Jesus prayed, “[T]his is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).