How Can God Be Three and One

One day, many years ago, two friends were swimming in the water at Myrtle Beach. Suddenly, one spotted a triangular-shaped fin approaching through the murky green water near the other friend. “Shark!”, he yelled to alert the other friend.

About that time, the second friend’s big brother stood up out of the ocean and took off the shark-fin hat he was wearing, enjoying the panic he had caused his little brother and friend.

Sometimes, we have difficulty seeing everything around us deep enough to understand what is going on, and we make assumptions based upon just what we can see. In the case of the three friends, the problem was that the two younger friends could only see what was above the surface. They assumed that a shark was under the surface, when it was actually the big brother playing a trick with that plastic shark-fin hat.

And so it is with the Holy Trinity of God. There is far more under the surface than what is visible – and what’s under the surface may be very different than what we think we see.

Genesis 1:1-3; I Peter 1:1-9; John 1:1-5, 14-18

This is the first sermon in a new series: Answering Tough Questions. During this series, I’ll try to be answering some of the tough questions we get asked about God, Christianity, and the church. And hopefully, you can take these answers and provide them to the people who have asked you these tough questions.

We have all heard the formula: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

We have all heard that God is Three-in-One, a Trinity, a Tri-unity. We sometimes call the Trinity the Godhead to distinguish the complex from the simpler God the Father.

But just what does this mean? Are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit separate Beings, or are they the same Being?

Yes. Yes, they are separate, but yes, they are the same.

But how can this be? Even John Wesley, the founder of Methodism believed fully in the Triune – the Three-in-One – God, but argued that it was very difficult to understand.

Well, first of all, we need to be certain in our understanding that Christians claim all three members of the Trinity are God.

We don’t have problems with recognizing the claim that the Father is God. In fact, when we think about God, we naturally think about God the Father, the Creator of the Universe, who, as Creator, is outside the Universe but can extend into the Universe, like a man who builds a home begins outside the home but can enter into the home. And God the Father has a name which God gave Moses at the burning bush: “I am that I am”. In the ancient Hebrew the name (when we use the Western alphabet) was written YHWH. Now we aren’t 100% sure how this was pronounced because the earliest written Hebrew didn’t have a way of indicating vowel sounds, but scholars are pretty sure it was pronounced “Yahweh” which was often shortened to “Yah”. But the English translation is “I am that I am”, or just “I am”. This is why certain Christian songs talk about the great "I Am".

Notice that the name explains that God is the Creator. All other people and things are creatures – create-ures. God is THE Being. “I am that I am”. God exists because God exists. And that answers the question that sometimes pops up – “where did God come from?” God is fundamental. The great “I am” is not only the Creator, but is the creating principle itself, the creating power, the entire concept of creating.

Likewise, we have little trouble accepting the concept of Holy Spirit as God. The old term was Holy Ghost, but Ghost has come to mean an evil spirit to most people, so the modern term is Holy Spirit. After all, we know that God is a Spirit Being, and therefore if there is a Holy Spirit, then that Spirit must either be God or be part of God in some manner. In the Greek, pneuma means spirit, breath, or wind..

But many people have trouble accepting Jesus the Christ as God. After all, Jesus was a man who walked on the earth. And this was debated heavily for the first three hundred years after Jesus’ Resurrection. Here are some basic ideas that lead us to conclude that Jesus the Christ is God.

First, Jesus said He was God. Where? First of all, in all those places where Jesus says “I am”, as in the time Jesus says, “before Abraham was, I am” and everyone around picked up a rock to stone Him because they understood He was claiming to be God. This sort of mention of “I am” happens repeatedly, most often in the Gospel of John.

And then there are the miracles where Jesus heals people, brings people back from the dead, and also claims to be able to forgive sins. After all, by what authority can Jesus forgive anyone of their sins unless He has a special connection to the Father who declared what is sinful and what is not sinful under the law. Only God can forgive sins – which is exactly what Jesus does.

And there is also the time Jesus said in John 10:30 – “I and the Father are one.” Which is a pretty clear statement of what Jesus thought.

Now, we know that Jesus may have thought He was God, but that doesn’t make Him God, right? So what are the other possibilities?

He could have been a crazy lunatic who had read too much Scripture and walked in the sun too long. But His teachings and the loyalty of His followers don’t describe a guy who was insane. Instead, the teachings of Jesus describe a man who had deep wisdom, knowing far more about life and the universe and people than anyone else.

He could have been a liar, perfectly sane but lying on this one issue. Well, if so, it was the one thing in ancient Israel that virtually guaranteed Him a violent death. In fact, His claim to be God was ultimately the crime that He was executed for. He was killed because He claimed to be God, even in front of the assembled elders of Israel as it says in Matthew 26:63-66. And when He was taken in front of Pilate, John 19:7 reads: The Jewish leaders insisted, “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God.”

I don’t know about you, but somewhere before that point I would have probably admitted that I was lying – if I was lying. Maybe even if I wasn't lying...

But the third reason we believe that Jesus is God is that after all these claims, after His execution for the crime of claiming to be God – God raises Him from the dead. And there were over 500 people who saw that He had come back from the dead, with four separate written accounts and another five authors from the time who accept as facts both of these concepts – that Jesus is God and Jesus has been raised from the dead. We know that the Jesus movement suddenly bloomed and grew before 70 AD, just as the parent religion of Judaism was in a losing battle with Rome which resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD – and these histories are from Jewish and Roman writers, who mention this new religion. There is plenty of evidence that the story of Jesus being raised from the dead is true - in fact, the only real objection is from people who have already decided that no one can come back from the dead - which is the very reason Christians have labeled this resurrection a miracle - it is true that this is a special case, since people don't normally rise from the dead.

So, since Jesus claimed to be God, performed miracles, was executed for claiming to be God, and was raised from the dead by that same God, we believe that Jesus was correct when He claimed to be God, for a holy God would not allow His reputation to be stained by a liar or a nutcase. Jesus must be God.

But how can there be God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – and there be only one God?

I’m going to give you a few analogies, but we must understand something. The Godhead is unique – there is nothing completely like God in the Universe, so these analogies will fall short. But they may each teach us something about the nature of the Godhead.

Let me hold up my hand with three fingers extended. Do you see one hand? Or three fingers?

To a certain extent, this is like the Godhead. Our answer of three or one depends upon how we are looking at the hand/fingers, whether we are focusing upon the hand or the fingers. Although, if we really think about it, we understand deep down that fingers only describe part of a hand, that there is no contradiction at all, simply a choice in where to focus our attention - the hand or the fingers.

This is an example of what philosophers call the problem of categories. Our brains are designed in such a way that we like to quickly put ideas and objects into categories. Apples and oranges and lemons and pears are fruits. Carrots and beans and cucumbers and zucchini are vegetables. But what is a tomato? We get confused, because it crosses the line between the definitions used by gardeners – to gardeners, tomatoes are fruits – and the definitions used by chefs – to chefs, tomatoes are savory, not sweet, and therefore they are vegetables.

Or there is the idea of a black swan. Around 1800, if you would have asked any scientist on earth, he would have told you that all swans are white. It was part of the description of what a swan was. But then, a species of black swan was discovered in Australia, and our category became confused.

Likewise, I went to a chili cook-off a few years ago, and there was a category for “white chili”. What do you mean, “white chili”? Chili must be red – with tomato sauce. But no, it turns out you can have white chili, beans and meat and peppers in a white sauce. A new category. And we get confused over the question of whether the Godhead should be put in the category of one God or in the category of three gods. And the answer, just like white chili, is that there is a new, special category for God. One God in three persons.

Yet the question of the Godhead is not just a problem of putting the right category on the Trinity, it is not just a problem of looking at things from two different views, it is not a matter of looking at the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as pointer finger, middle finger, and ring finger parts and the Godhead as the whole.hand, for there are indeed three different personalities which are each fully God – perhaps persona is a better word – and there is one Godly substance which unites them together as one. Yet it is not true that you can lop off one of the Trinity like you can lop off a finger – for the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are each complete by themselves. But it is true that our willingness – or not – to put God in a separate category is critical to our understanding.

Another approach to understanding the Godhead is to look at the egg. An egg is composed of shell, egg white, and yellow yolk like God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Father. Yet it is difficult sometimes to tell just where the white and the yolk separate, for at the boundary, they are somewhat mixed, aren’t they? And if you were to put the egg in a blender, the white and the yolk are impossible for us to tell apart without special instruments, but we know they are both there.

In this way, we can learn something about the Trinity – Although we often talk about the Three as separate entities – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – the reality is that the boundaries between them are not sharply cut and dried, just as the boundary between egg yolk and egg white is not sharply defined. And the early church fathers realized that there is one Godly substance – yet three Godly persona – which are perfectly in harmony with each other to the point where it becomes difficult for an outsider such as us to see the difference between the Father and the Spirit, for example.

We also know that a full egg is actually quite strong compared to just the shell of an egg. And so the Father and Spirit strengthen the Son. Have you ever noticed that Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel Chapter 14 that He must go away before the Comforter, the Holy Spirit will come? Almost like the egg shell must be broken before the egg white can come out.

Repeatedly, Jesus states that He is in the Father and the Father is within Him. There is an intermixing between the two that confuses us, for Jesus prays to the Father and says the Father sent Him, and tells us that He will go back to the Father – yet He also says that He is in the Father and the Father is within Him. They are together and yet they are also distinctly separate. Our category processor in our mind breaks down and screams for help.

Some people have tried to explain the Trinity as the Sun, the sun’s rays, and the warmth that we receive from the Sun. In this analogy, the Father is the Sun, the rays are the Christ, and the warmth is the Holy Spirit. This is more a functional explanation than anything, explaining how the Trinity acts together yet separately.

A related view is this. Imagine a water pump, a water hose through which the water flows, and a man who directs the flow of water. In this analogy, the water pump is the Father, the water is the Spirit, and the man directing things is the Christ. For we see in John 1 that “everything that was created was created through the Word” and “the Word became flesh” as Jesus Christ.

In this view, we understand that God the Father is the power source behind creation. The Word, the Christ who became Jesus is the wisdom that directs how Creation is made, and the Holy Spirit sustains the creation that has been made, doing the direct work of making and keeping the creation going.

This functional view makes a lot of sense, because we see Jesus finding a need – For example, Lazarus needs to come back from the dead. Jesus prays to the Father, Who is the source of creating power, and then Jesus commands, “Lazarus, Come Forth!” Finally, the Holy Spirit animates Lazarus again, allowing Him to come out of the tomb.

Yet we can also be led astray by this, for it makes us think that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are different components in a system, parts of a whole when they are much more intermingled. Consider this:

In Luke 4, Jesus is "full of the Holy Spirit". In Luke 10, Jesus is "full of joy through the Holy Spirit".

A modern functional analogy for the Trinity is based upon the idea of software. When we decide to go onto the Internet, we use a piece of software called a browser. Internet Explorer is one, Safari is another, Chrome is a third brand of browser, Navigator or Mozilla is another. That is the piece of software on our computer that asks for the information from a server – a computer located hundreds of miles away that has the webpage sitting on it. So a browser asks for information from a server and receives information back from that server and then displays it so we can understand it on our computer screen.

In this analogy, the Holy Spirit is like the browser, allowing us to easily communicate with God the Father through prayer. The Father is the Server in this analogy. Two pieces. But there is one additional piece of software needed.

When you decided to use Chrome as your browser, there was a special piece of software called an installation program that installed the browser on your computer. Without that installation program, you couldn’t ever use the browser to talk to the server.

In our analogy, if we want to use the Holy Spirit browser to talk to God the Father, who is the far away server with all the information on it, we have to first have Jesus Christ install the Holy Spirit within us. Jesus is the installation program, which came from God the Father/server, and installed the Holy Spirit, which proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Now when we look at this all in operation, we can look at an installation program as separate from the browser it installs, both of which are separate from the server. But we can also look at them as a software system, a single piece of software with three parts, all of which are necessary for everything to function well.

(As an interesting aside, you may be aware of the two classic Christian churches, the Roman Catholic in the West, and the Orthodox churches in the East. They split around the year 1000, in reality over the question of whether Rome was the boss over all Christians, or just western Christians. But the split was framed as a theological debate over the question of whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, or from both the Father and the Son. The Orthodox believe that the Spirit proceeds just from the Father, while the Roman and most western Protestant churches believe that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Of such things are church splits made! Read this book for more information.}

So back to the Trinity.

Imagine that you have a company. The Company is run by three people. In a normal company, those three people would always be arguing and debating about what to do, how to budget, what the next priority is…you get the picture.

But imagine a company where the three managers are so much in tune with each other that there is never any disagreement. Imagine that whenever they speak, no one ever says, “You should have said this”, or “You should have said that”, because they all three are always in perfect agreement with each other, an agreement that comes from their mutual wisdom and love. Such harmony. Such love! This is the Trinity in operation.

Yet, the three are different in some respects. The Father has tremendous power to create, while the Son has the power to direct the creating process. The Spirit connects all Creation together, can provide perfect communication, and is everywhere present, while the Son can only be in one place at one time – the Father is everywhere at all times. Two are spirit beings – one is not only God but is human. All completely trust each other – and all love us.

And all are necessary for our salvation.

For the Father created the Universe and each of us. The Son came to earth to teach us by word – and by the deed of His sacrifice upon the cross – that the Trinity loves us deeply. And the Holy Spirit then comes to each of us, normally at our baptism, to connect us to the love of the Father and the Son, because the Son cannot be in all places at once, but the Spirit can be, giving us access to the wisdom of the Father and the Son so that we can make good, wise decisions in our lives.

Have you ever wondered why, after Jesus died on the cross, He had to return to Heaven? For He could have stayed. But He tells us that for the Holy Spirit to come, He had to leave.

For imagine this. If Jesus had stayed, the Jesus movement would have grown – as far as His voice could project. People would have gone to Israel to find Jesus, and then stayed, because they would not want to leave and wander the world.

The disciples did not leave until Jesus was gone and the Holy Spirit arrived, because the Spirit proceeds from the Son like dandelion seeds come from a dandelion flower, and the Spirit moves throughout the world where ever it desires to go – while Jesus never traveled more than a couple hundred miles or so from his birthplace in Bethlehem. As a human at that time, he couldn’t.

But the Spirit today is in Jerusalem – and London - and Nairobi – and Seoul – and Sidney – and Rio – and Mexico City – and Atlanta – and New York – and in Clarksburg, here today.

Give thanks for God’s love today. Take an opportunity to pray for yourself and for a friend, neighbor, or family member. Speak through the Spirit to the Father that sent His Son to die just for you…and me. Amen.