Shall we pray Father in heaven as we have been singing these hymns we have been contemplating about the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit We have been contemplating the incarnation of the Son who came who came with a mission of a magnitude that mankind could barely grasp and even today It is hard for our minds to enter into these things and to grasp what was done by him for us We pray that as we think about his work and who you are that your spirit would guide and direct in Jesus name Amen pleasure to be with you this morning and Andrew Michaels tells me that if anyone wants to be able to download this PowerPoint It will be put on the on the chapel's website and then you have all the references this morning I'm going to be speaking about the Trinity and that is of course a Very large subject. I see that the time is that it's now 10 to 12 But I will do my best to to do this as efficiently as possible without dishonoring the material When you begin a given book some of the references are at the end of the PowerPoint Stated in a formal academic matter. You can find them when you begin any such treatise on the Trinity It seems to me that as I look over them in my collection. They all start in the same way They all say that I can't do this They all basically say this is impossible that the human mind cannot fully grasp the nature of God And then they go on to say but let me try to help you let us consider some humble illustrations Let us look at the scriptures.
Let us see what truth we may have to protect us and indeed these things are are very very important One theologian University of Edinburgh said the subsistence of God is such that he is one in his essential being But his divine essence exists in three modes or forms each constituting a person but in such a way that this divine essence is wholly in Each person and this was not the only writer for theologian John Stock also used this word subsistence I'm not used to using the word subsistence in this way. It's being used in the sense of underlying existence the underlying existence of the three persons of the Trinity we need to Think about these things For various reasons one is that even going back to the early church and the heresy of a man named Arias from Alexandria You have Arianism and Arianism has manifested itself in various ways over the centuries Jehovah's Witnesses Islam Mormonism none of these religions do justice to who the Lord Jesus Christ is and we read this morning in the breaking of bread from First John and first John says that this is a very very Central matter as to who Jesus Christ was that he was fully divine. He says even though we touched him He is fully divine verse 10 refers to that word in terms of in first speaks of the cleansing and so on and And then in verse 10 comes to the word well Deuteronomy 30 talks about the word. Where is the word?
Moses says it's very near you Yes, indeed and John in the beginning was the word with a capital W Yes, the Lord Jesus is being referred to here because the important thing is that we have a relationship with the divine Person Jesus Christ and I will add of Nazareth the miracle of the incarnation Heresies such as the Jesus only movement in the Charismatics came into play and that is the Perhaps outcome of having a highly imbalanced view and going down a path emphasizing the Sun to the exclusion of the Father and the Spirit in the Shaverit and our bit services morning and evening services with the Jew you'll say the Shama God is one Save that every morning say that every evening and emphasize it on the day of atonement Yom Kippur God is one he Has the property of oneness in unity that is a distinction from singularity Unity is a property that refers to how it is possible for there to be as it were components that are one and the same And yet there are if you will modes or forms and each being a person in his own right But these are deep waters and these things can sometimes unsettle us especially when we are under attack and When are we under attack? All the time the enemy doesn't sleep the enemy never gives up. He's always attacking our minds He's always trying to gain our affections. He's always trying to introduce error And so it is important for us to be strong in our hearts and minds The philosopher Swiss philosopher Francis Schafer wrote a book perhaps back in the 70s.
How should we then live? Well, if you have a concept of the Trinitarian nature of God God is a triune God Then it affects how you think Because God the Father is the architect of the universe. He is the planner. He is the great mind and That means that how you think should be affected by your relationship with God what you do Should be affected by your relationship with God because Christ was sent from the father to execute the God the father's will He is the executor in the Trinity in what you do do you honor the Lord and one of the beautiful things I think about the Trinity as portrayed to us and as we look around not only creation but at our fellow man We can marvel at the concept of inspiration God breathed into the first man and made and said he's in the in my image Marvelous thing John 3 34 talks about the Jesus that the Lord Jesus was filled with God's spirit in a measureless manner without measure Yes, but especially if you know the Lord you have God's spirit within you and then looking around at people Everybody has their own Manner when my son was struggling one of my neck Eric not Nicholas struggling academically was in a special private school they it's very sort of 20th century and educationally they looked at his marks and in fact he learned to read there he went in not able to read but he came out able to read and The at the graduation they wanted to give out awards and There they were sort of I think struggling.
What do we give Eric? You know the various kids with all of their academically oriented awards, but the principal came up with an award for my Eric She said he is now of the order of the flourish everything that Eric did he did with a flourish he did with character he did with a certain measure of inspiration and Everyone here we were thinking this morning as a kind of a tangent I would say to the Lord's Supper about fellowship because it came out of the men's meeting and One of the wonderful things about fellowship is that I get to know your flourish I get to know the manner in which God has made you you there's a certain inspirational quality to your personal character and I love it Can you imagine what a horrible world you would live in if everybody was exactly like you? Oh my goodness I wouldn't want to live there but as I See and meet and get to know other people created in the image of God and who actually often share my faith in Christ and have the spirit of God Within them they have their flourish they have that influence and over and over again as we go through our lives and ask the question How should we then live we can honor people who are created in the image of God? How they think and how they act and the flourish with which these things are done?
It reminds me of the Trinity This is a well-known diagram that I saw some years ago and it came up immediately under Google images So it's still out there except it's a lot easier to get your hands on Some time ago a man named mister mjor spoke from this very pulpit and said this in words. He's passed away now mister mjor But we're all sitting there. I think and there's a measure of Shock the Sun is not the father. That's not something you would typically hear from a pulpit is not the father But the Sun is God and the father is God and the Holy Spirit is God.
It is a Trinity our God is triune How we pray how we worship should be in full recognition of that reality? I think it also makes it easier to defend our beliefs if we understand our beliefs a little better now a Triune God who is three in one perhaps represent some kind of paradox and Then we feel that we're put on our back foot in defending the faith but really the universe is full of paradoxes there are people that argue amongst themselves in the highest level of physics that Totally disagree about the explanation for paradoxes. It's well known that when Albert Einstein came out with his theory of relativity Somebody took great that exception to this and found 99 other Scientists and put together basically a book on why Albert Einstein was wrong and somebody said to Albert Einstein Do you know that they put together a response to your theory a hundred people have contributed to it? He said well if it was wrong one would have done and of course all of those hundred guys are all we don't even know who they are But everybody knows who Albert Einstein is and everybody's heard of the theory of relativity Do you know that a photon which is a parcel of light traveling at the speed of light old school 186,000 miles per second?
Because it's traveling at the speed of light time has stopped for the photon I wonder if God is trying to tell us something there God is light and yet the photon can pass M32 Andromeda on its way here which takes an incredibly long time and Things are happening in the Milky Way galaxy things are happening Perhaps just wind blowing and dust blowing around in the Andromeda galaxy and those two things were not happening simultaneously And yet time has stopped for the photon go figure this kind of paradox is not easy to explain Light itself exhibits both a wave Behavior under the equations of James Clerk Maxwell a Scottish Christian physicist These equations are used to this day to describe light as a wave not as a particle My son you might say makes a living on it because he deals with the design or used to now He switched they switched him until recently they were giving him the work of antenna design Well, that's all governed by Maxwell's equations And yet it when you try to with the multi-slit experiment when you try to Prove that you have it's pure waves. It doesn't work is it a wave or is it a particle? Because according to conventional it can't be both but it is both so You have in addition I don't want to spend too much time on physics that I know little about but more recently We have the the realization of quantum entanglement which cannot be explained nobody can explain this if two electrons are entangled quantum Lee what happens to one and it could be at the other end of the M32 galaxy if it's quantum Lee entangle to an electron That's within this piece of wood what happens to one is instantly reflected in the other one They are quantum Lee entangle. They've even built rudimentary computers based on this because there is no electron traveling through a transistor At all it's based on quantum entanglement So how is it then their questioning?
Well, it's reality local if the electrons in here are actually reflected somewhere else in the universe by electrons that they're quantum Lee entangle to what is the definition of here? They're questioning the locality of reality itself. This is very paradoxical So when people sort of throw back at your face that they don't believe in the Trinity because it's paradoxical There are plenty of paradoxical things. There are plenty of things that are beyond our finite human minds to understand So we shouldn't be too bothered by having a limited ability to explain the nature of a god who is infinite Should we we should not be too?
anxious about that and yet I'm saying to you this morning that we also have a responsibility to understand and to believe in a triune God It's important in terms of scripture versus that are important the Harris Harris reference at the end of this gives in fact Perhaps ten different categories in which the Bible clearly teaches that God is triune And I'm only going to pick a very limited number of examples of the reality of the Trinity in Certain aspects the first being creation so We have God as the creator in Isaiah 42 5 God the Lord who created speaking of the Father the Son John 1 3 all things were made through him and without him wasn't Nothing was not anything made that was made this is a very good Defense against Jehovah's Witness teaching which teach who teach that Jesus was created well if Jesus was created then he's in the category of things created But you cannot be in the category of things created and be the creator at the same time and John 1 3 clearly teaches that that anything that is in the category Of being created was made by Jesus himself through God And of course we can go right back to the beginning of the Bible and read that the Spirit of God covered over the face of the deep Going back to creation so the scriptures do tell you that God the Father God the Son and God the Holy Spirit We're all part of creation We might think of the Father as the the designer the architect He is also a source and emminator a sender especially in terms of sending the Sun We have the implication here in verse 18 that the Father sent the Sun with a specific purpose and we have in 334 for he whom God has sent utters the words of God God God sent the Lord Jesus in terms of the Sun the Sun is the manifestation of the Father the implementer the executor Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name as we were just singing Emmanuel Which means God with us? John 1 14 a wonderful verse and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we be held his glory the glory as of the only begotten of the Father full of grace and truth The Spirit the animus the generation the glory Again going back to creation the Spirit of God was that creation hovering over the face of the waters Romans 810 the Spirit is life Christ is in you in terms of salvation as distinct from creation We can think in terms of the plan of salvation the execution of our salvation and the reality of our salvation We'd all think agree that God's role in salvation is a very doctrinally important thing There is one verse in your New Testament Titus chapter 3 verses 4 through 6 that actually in one passage Brings out the triune God in salvation But after that the kindness and love of God our Savior toward man appeared not by works of righteousness Which we have done but according to his mercy he saved us by the washing of regeneration I mean doing of the Holy Ghost which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior the three persons of the Trinity in our redemption In terms of our sanctification our ongoing Christian walk Jude we read that we are sanctified by God the Father First Corinthians 1 verse 2 we read that we are sanctified in Christ Jesus in first Peter 1 2 We read that we are sanctified of the Spirit through the sanctification of the Spirit So your Christian life is the activity of the entirety of God the Trinity of God is involved in every aspect of your Redemption and your sanctification and so as I have been saying we can look around and look at people and look at creation and think about God as the designer Jesus as the executor and the Holy Spirit the one who makes everything beautiful and who gives life to everything I was quite amazed with a movie produced by teller of the pen and teller magician pair and Multi-millionaire engineer inventor he became entranced with a piece of art called the music lesson by Vermeer and Vermeer Did this around at 1663 in Delft the Netherlands? He lived his whole life there It's present owner is our king in the sense that it is part of the royal collection of art and it hangs in Buckingham Palace So if you want to go see it you're gonna have to pay to get into Buckingham Palace I stood in front of it when I heard the price I said no thank you but this piece of art is here and the Fascination that jennison had with it was that when you look at it in tremendous detail it is basically an impossible level of detail so jennison said well Let me see what I can do here because I'm gonna try to use first of all what's called a camera obscura you know that a few camera means room in latin and If you took a box and put a pinhole in it You could get you would get on the far side of the box in a dark container the upside-down image of this room It would go through the pinhole with no lens and the whole image of this room would be upside down in the back of a dark Room a dark box and they said you know various scientists who look at art have said this is maybe he used a camera obscura Tim jennison tried to do this and he said no there's problems with what's called color constancy. It's not good enough Well, what about optical devices that involve putting a mirror at 45 degrees and actually moving it along as you paint and He began to do this and then he began to add more and more Optical devices to try to bring about what the movie is called Tim's Vermeer Tim jennison wanted to make a Johannes Vermeer Now when you look at that painting it has a structure it reflects the mind of the artist I am going to paint a music lesson and there's gonna be teacher and there's gonna be the student and there's gonna be windows With light coming in there's gonna be beautiful fabric in the foreground.
There's gonna be a painting that I've got this all in my head This is what we're going to do. This is the designer aspect But of course it can't stay there it requires an executor it requires somebody to pick up the brush and Actually do it now at the end Tim jennison a multi-millionaire with a lot of time on his hands completed a Painting like this it's called Tim's Vermeer and he said I have failed I look at this painting that I have made using every optical device and trick and and taking years to do it And you know what it isn't a Vermeer and if you brought in art experts, I think they take about five minutes ago That's a forgery how? There's something about the flourish of the brush. There's something about the execution of this that that is unique to Vermeer the Holy Spirit gives that Unique flourish and execution to creation.
You are not a bunch of robots You are unique individuals and the more we look deeply into creation yesterday. I was watching my wife and I were watching I don't know why a BBC Earth video documentary on spiders not like I like spiders very much, but the Beauty of the web there's a spider that can actually connect to something 25 meters away So that's you know, you know spider-man This guy's actually very good. He can shoot 25 meters across a small river and then he can build the web and then there's another spider That says I know what you're up to I'm coming to cut your web because I think there's probably something to eat in it So he doesn't even bother he doesn't his emphasis is going around cutting other spiders webs to get some And and the sort of humor that's in there and the the amazing things that these creatures that have a brain You know like smaller than your pinky fingernail clipping the Incredible design of that the incredible execution of that and we as human beings look at that web and we look at that spider And we smile and the beauty of creation is something to marvel at and the beauty of the flourish that each one of you Represent to me is even more marvelous. That is because you are created in the image of God and you reflect the intellect of God You reflect in your actions I hope the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ and in your personality you are governed by the Holy Spirit and at this time of year we would We really should Think about the incarnation The Sun entered here time and space in 1968 an astronaut named William Anders on Apollo 8 saw an Earthrise.
We had a nice bright full moon last night We talked about sunrise is commonly we don't talk about moon rises very commonly. Well, here's William Andrews I saw an Earthrise I saw the earth coming up over the horizon of the moon as he circled the moon that one didn't land and It was Apollo 17 that Went up and the guy took a picture with the South Pole and the Antarctica and a big cyclone in the Indian Ocean and He said it seemed to me like a blue pearl No a blue marble I always think Pearl a blue marble because you know marbles have that funny stuff inside a blue marble hanging in space And he thought about how we are so tiny on that blue marble hanging in space inside of the Milky Way galaxy in a universe in which there are Billions of galaxies and there's that little blue marble hanging in space and he was in his spacecraft looking at it It's an amazing thing that God the Sun would enter the time space continuum and come to this place with a very specific purpose in the Capadiamante Museum in Naples you have the painting by Matthias Stom done at 1650 and those are the shepherds I didn't advance it. I want to go backwards. There we are the paintings called the Adoration of the shepherds and The way in which a lot of you might say scriptural sentiment was generated in During the Renaissance and so on and even before that was through paintings of Important shall we say religious events?
They were intended to evoke Worship evoke adoration make people think about the things that they should think about really the Brother David shares morning about the light and he may as well the light if you notice that there's light coming off of that baby Illuminating the faces of the shepherds. There's no other light in the picture and indeed he was the light of the world and indeed We should worship him not long after May 21st 1738 Charles Wesley wrote this his mystery all the immortal dies who can explore his strange design that God the Sun would come in The form of a child for you and for me Him says to his mercy all let earth adore let angel minds inquire no more It is beyond our analytical description, but it is not beyond our ability to worship him We should understand what God has done. We should understand the nature of our redemption We should appreciate who the triune God is and be very sure that we stick to that as part of our doctrinal foundation as Christian people And so this morning I Encourage you to in this Christmas season To worship the Lord Jesus Christ to allow the spirit of God that you have been given if you know the Lord to resonate and To empower you to understand what it is that God has done for you. Shall we pray?
Thank you father that we can think about the greatness of Redemption of redemption We thank you that you are changing us you are sanctifying us you have brought us into a relationship with yourself Help us Lord to honor that help us to love one another to see Something of Christ in other people to see something of your hand in other people Help us to always speak and to act at the unction and direction of the Holy Spirit in our own lives in Jesus name We pray amen. Thank you for your attention. I think we're going to sing