God – One Being, Three Persons

Introduction

I planned to include this post as a section of another post:

Golgotha Conspiracy, Who Killed Jesus

It turned out to be a distraction to the main thrust of that post. It was and is better as a post that stands alone. It is not possible in the scope of a blog article to lay down an exhaustive description of God. I will not even try. I will give you a broad-brush view of what God has revealed to me. It is a majority view of those who have placed their trust in him. At the end of the article, I will point you to an excellent resource that will give you a more complete view of God.

Can We Know God?

The answer to that question may be controversial. We cannot know God unless he reveals himself to us. At one level God has revealed himself to everyone. Many suppress that revelation and reject what they inherently know is true.

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (Rom 1:19–23)

These days we have become so arrogant that we skip the birds and animals and go straight to ourselves. We have made ourselves the object of our worship. We call this progress. We say we are progressing out of primitive ignorance into enlightened consciousness. The truth is we have reverted to the trap that our original ancestors got caught up in.

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen 3:2-5)

So, our progress is not progress at all. It is a regress. I am not immune to regression. My life started at the same place that everyone else did and the process was, in fact, a process not an event.

How God Revealed Himself to Me

When I was about 14 years old (more or less) the process started.

I grew up in an average American, post-war (WWII), middle-class, suburban, single-mom lifestyle. I had never suffered deprivation, other than not being able to do what the other kids did. I was pretty normal by all conventional standards.

The model I learned for life was this:

1. Birth
2. Childhood advancing to a knowledge of what I wanted to BE
3. Going to college to learn how to be that
4. Becoming that
5. Doing that for 40+ years
6. Retiring
7. Doing whatever I wanted for the remainder of my life
8. Death
9. Burial
10. The End

All the while being a good person and contributing to the betterment of society. And, I was always supposed to be a credit to my family name and a patriot, a good American. These were the values inculcated in me as I grew. We were not churched people, just good people.

I came to know that the lessons taught to me were not an adequate model of reality. It became clear to me that the model was false. Otherwise, the entire package was a huge prank, a complete over-engineering of life. There had to be more than that. And I determined I was going to find the truth about it. For the moment, it didn’t include God. I only knew there was more truth to discover.

As I assessed what I knew about mankind I intuitively knew that there had to be more to reality than I was being taught. That is not a declaration of my intelligence. It is a declaration of God’s initial steps of revealing himself to me. I didn’t yet know what was going on. I knew I didn’t have the full picture of reality. The nature of the cosmos requires more than random chance and time for an origin.

That was the beginning. The journey was more than ten years in the completion. And I expect it to continue throughout eternity. God is that big. In the meantime, my life became a progressive exercise in pushing the envelope. I pursued classic Greek Mythology. That didn’t hold the answer. The gods of mythology were no more advanced than the people who made them up. Often, they were less than, in their emotions. I looked for the answers in Literature. I found ideas, but nothing satisfying. Poetry was pretty much the same. Philosophy held promise for a while. I concluded, in the end, that the philosophers could not all be right. Their contradictions were too many. But they might all be wrong.

I came of age in the 60s so it was easy to opt for the old New Age mindset and its psychedelic boost toward enlightenment. In the end, it turned out to provide some fun parties. The musing was great, but underneath were the same self-centered values I was trying to avoid. Not to mention that it landed me in prison for two years.

I joined a Hindu Ashram and dedicated everything I owned, which wasn’t of much value, but it was everything. But the adherents turned out to be as valueless as the general society, and every bit as self-serving. That was a disappointment.

So, I made up my mind to go back to logging which I had done for a year along the way. The money was good, and the lifestyle was robust. The plan was to earn enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Calcutta and walk up into the Himalayas for the real deal. I had a valid passport and wasn’t worried about violating my parole. I wasn’t coming back. I was sure I could find the right swami there that would help me become God.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” … But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. (Ge 3:1–2, 4-5)

Same temptation, different garden. By now I was 25 years old and even though I grew up in America I had never heard the Gospel. Upon returning to logging country to make my escape, God entered a full-court press on me. I found myself surrounded by friends who had become believers while I was away. I found a church full of local people who were sharing the Gospel with me at every turn. Within six weeks God made his final reveal to me and I was in the fold. His decisive reveal was convincing. The change in the lives I saw in people I knew was too. And the character of the new people I was meeting was convincing.

Biblical Corroboration

That is the short version of my story but the Bible attests to the reality of God as well. The Christian position is this: the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God, inspired by God. He used the agency of forty authors over fifteen hundred years. He doesn’t prove it. He reveals it. We fail to believe it to our peril. Let me give you a few examples.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:16–17).

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen 1:1).

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good. (Psa 14:1)

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. (Psa 19:1)

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. (Ecc 3:11)

For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself (Heb 6:13)

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Rom 1:20) – It warrants repeating

God does not waste time proving himself. He knows who he is. He reveals who he is. He calls to himself whom he will. It is up to us to respond. And we will respond if he calls us.

As we yield to God in belief the inner awareness of God grows stronger and more distinct. We begin to see God as a loving heavenly Father (Ro 8:15). We learn from the Holy Spirit that we are children of God (Ro 8:16). We understand that Jesus lives within our hearts (Eph 3:17, Php 3:8, Col 1:27, John 14;23). We experience this with such intensity, that love wells up within us, though we have not seen the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Pet 1:8) [i]

Who God Is

The Challenge of Describing God

God characterizes himself in the Bible as:

• one being – God,
• in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We do well to characterize God as He characterizes himself. It is a difficult concept to wrap your head around. But what kind of a God would he be if we could understand everything about him? When I refer to God as he/him it is because that is the way that he reveals himself and refers to himself. It is not an arbitrary choice on my part. I am following his lead. He made me. I didn’t make him. Idolators make gods who are not God. Believers listen to what he reveals about himself. He speaks in his scripture.

The Dichotomy

To say that God is unique is a ridiculous understatement. One of our challenges is that we do not have any adequate human vocabulary. We can’t do justice to the vastness of the gulf between the nature of God and the nature of humankind. That makes all descriptions of God fall short of the mark. But we do need to talk of Him. So we do the best we can.

The first thing we must say about God is that he is holy. That may be his foundational attribute. Though it is a fundamental attribute of God, it is a mistake to see it as a religious term per se. “Religious” is an attitude held by people in the expression of devotion to God. Holy is an attribute of God himself. Holy carries with it a sense of whole or uncorrupted. It also implies otherness and transcendency. God is completely other than man and so far above us that we cannot know him unless he reveals himself to us.

We must be careful not to confuse holy with sacred. Sacred derives its confirmation by way of human agreement. Holy derives its sanction from God. It is our agreement that makes him sacred or not to us. God is holy in his own right, whether we agree or not.

At the same time that God is holy, he is also immanent, coming close to us by his choice and his will. He dwells within us so that we may know him, according to his decision, not by our decision. If we know him at all it is by his mercy.

These quotes from scripture express the tension between transcendence and immanence. This is how we may know him.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my way higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isa 55:9)

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. (Deu 29:29).

We cannot approach God on our strength or prerogative. He is “other” than we are by a long way. But we can with contrition ask him to reveal himself to us. If we do in earnest, he most likely will.

A Working Description of God

I found this image a few years back. It comes as close as one can get to a visual that will help us conceive of the person of God. Yahweh is the name ascribed by the ancient Jews to identify God from all false gods.

The diagram shows us these truths without ascribing any inferences by positioning:

1. The Father is Yahweh (God)
2. The Son is Yahweh (God)
3. The Holy Spirit is Yahweh (God)
4. The Father is Not the Son and is Not the Holy Spirit
5. The Son is Not the Father and is Not the Holy Spirit
6. The Holy Spirit is Not the Father and is Not the Son

Characterizations 1-3 illustrate that each person is equal. They are all God.

Characterizations 4-6 illustrate that each person is separate. They play separate roles in the Godhead.

God is one Being. Within that Being there exists three coequal and coeternal Persons. They are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The challenges with it.

1. The doctrine rests completely upon the truth of the first clause: there is only one God.
   • One God
   • But it also insists that God’s Being is one, unique, undivided, indivisible.
   • We insist on monotheism.
2. The definition insists that there are three divine persons.
   • We are not saying that there are three Beings that are one Being.
   • We are not saying that there are three Persons that are one Person.
   • The second clause speaks of three divine Persons, not three divine Beings.
   • God is one “What” and three “Whos”
     • Being is “What”
     • Persons are “Who”
3. We understand that the relationship among these divine persons is eternal.