The Greatest Mystery of All
As we consider the Trinity (or the triunity) of God, we first of all must recognize from the Scripture that it is indeed a mystery.In I Timothy 3:16, Paul declared, "Without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit..."
So great is this mystery that our minds can't fully wrap themselves around its reality. We simply can't understand the mystery of the Godhead.
But this should be no surprise.
We must remember that we are dealing with an infinite God, and
when we try to understand Him with our finite minds, we are bound to run into insurmountable difficulties.
How can we talk about one God and yet three Persons of the one God?
Yet that is what the Scriptures present to us.
I have no intention of trying to explain the Godhead. It is beyond the capacity of the human mind to fully comprehend. We must simply accept what the Scriptures tell us: There is one God who is manifested in three Persons, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
G. Campbell Morgan explained a big part of our problem in understanding the Trinity He declared, "The idea of one essence subsisting after a threefold manner and in a trinity of relationships finds nothing in the phenomenon of nature upon which it can fashion as a sufficient symbol."
That is, there isn't any symbol in the physical universe that can adequately picture the triunity of God.
Yet we do try to find one.
We're always attempting to find some kind of symbol by which we can make an analogy describing the Godhead.
But as Morgan said, there just isn't anything in nature that can adequately depict the triunity of God.
Paul called it a mystery and, because it is a mystery, we cannot expect to reduce it to logical precepts.
Our finite minds rebel against this. They say, "The Trinity is a contradiction; how could there be one God and yet three Persons in that one God?"
Because of the difficulty of comprehending the Trinity, there will always be those who jump in and deny the three Persons of the one Godhead. But beware!
Denial of the Trinity always brings the denial of the deity of Jesus Christ and the personality of the Holy Spirit.
Some people have suggested that the Trinity is a mathematical absurdity.
One plus one plus one, they point out, equals three. But this proves nothing. One times one times one equals one.
You can't disprove the Godhead mathematically.
No, we must stick to what the Bible declares about the nature of God. And it says the Holy Spirit is God. It teaches us there is one God, manifested in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The Westminster Confession says it like this: "There is but one living and true God. In the unity of the Godhead there are three persons.
One God of one substance, power and eternity. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit."
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