Curtin OCF, 12.10.2007
Reading:
20 “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. 24 Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. 25 O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. 26 I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (John 17:20- 26)
Introduction
I am pleased to be here and speak on this topic of the trinity and unity in the body of Christ for a number of reasons. Firstly, because the doctrine of the trinity is the most foundational of all Christian teachings. Where there is deviation in this teaching everything else is distorted. There is nothing like the Christian understanding of God as trinity in any other religion or philosophy in the history of humanity,it is unique. Secondly, I am very passionate about this subject because we are commanded “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matt 22:37). To love God as he is to love God as a trinity. Finally, I have been involved for many years with causes committed to the expression of the unity of the church e.g. Australian Evangelical Alliance, Prayer Summit movement.
Before I go further let me give a few comments about a few key terms used in this address. The word ‘ trinity’ itself (from Latin trinitas), means three in unity. While not found in Scripture, it is a word used for conceptual clarity and simplicity to describe who the God whom we believe in and worship.
Secondly, whenever I use the word “know” in this talk I am using it in its primary biblical sense, which is to know a person by intimate relationship e.g. “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain (NIV “lay with his wife”)” (Gen 4:1); ““You only have I known of all the families of the earth;”” (Amos 3:2; “this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3). (This final reference is especially important for our subject.)
What is the Trinity: The Trinitarian Theorem
Perhaps the simplest way to think about the trinity is by means of a theorem that goes like this:
1. There is one God: (Exod 20:2-3; Deut.6:4-7; 1 Tim.2:5-6, James 2:19)
2. God is three persons: Father, Son, Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19; 2 Cor.13:14; Eph 4:4- 6)
3. Each of the persons is God: Father (Gen 1:1 etc.); Son (John 1:1 – 4; 20:28; Heb. 1:3, 8 etc.); Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19; 1 Cor 2: 10 – 11 etc.)
While this method is logical it is lifeless. Since God is the “living God” (28 x in Bible) the way we come to know him as trinity must be dynamic and relational.
How Do we Come to Know God as Trinity?
People become confused about the trinity when they try to think through how three distinct beings can be one. We do not come to know who God is by abstract reason but through relationship. Let me use the analogy of marriage to explain this. The Bible speaks of husband and wife becoming “one flesh” (Gen 2:24), this reality is only knowable within the covenant of marriage. As we can only know what marriage is by being married, we only know God as trinity by sharing in his divine life. Peter says, “he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). To share in God’s nature is to share in his love. The basic truth about God is that “God is love” (1 John 4:8).
This statement only makes sense within the framework of the trinity. To say God is love is not to say “God loves”, it is to say that what makes God to be God is love. A Moslem, Jew or Jehovah’s Witness etc. could not meaningfully say “God is love” because in eternity, before anything was created, their God had no companion to love. The doctrine of the trinity teaches us that the mutual love that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have for one another in their eternal relationship was always what made God to be God. (The essence of God is love.)
For us to be made in the image of God (Gen 1:26) is for us to love and be loved. It is as we are aware of being loved by God, and return that love, that the reality of God as trinity breaks in upon us. This does not happen in a vacuum, it is a result of what we call “revelation”.
Revelation is God’s personal gift of himself. Just like only “Esther” can reveal who she is as a person on the inside, only God can reveal God on the inside. Revelation is God showing us what he knows about himself in his inner life. He may sometimes use outer things to do this e.g. answers to prayer, miracles etc. but the revelation of the trinity is God communicating himself. This self- communication on our behalf reaches its fullness in the relationship between Jesus and his Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. (This is why the Gospels are our primary source for understanding who God is.) Everything about the life of Jesus is a manifestation of the trinity. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9), “I and the Father are one.”” (John 10:30).
We come to know God as trinity through reflection on the relationship we experience with him as Father in the light of scripture’s Spirit inspired witness to Jesus as the Son of God (John 20:31).
Where to Begin?
In terns of tonight’s topic, the relationship between the trinity and the oneness of the church, there are a range of relevant scriptures. [For example, Ephesians 4:4- 6, “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— 5 one Lord (Jesus), one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”].
The scripture however that takes us most intimately into the relationship between the trinity and the church is in John 17 (from which the reading for tonight was taken). This passage is often called “the high priestly prayer of Jesus”. It is John’s record of what Jesus prayed for us immediately before his arrest. As it is prayed in the shadow of the cross it draws out of Jesus what is deepest in his heart. Jesus himself had taught, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt 12:34) and the book of Proverbs says, from the heart “flow the springs of life.” (Prov 4:23). This means that the recorded words of Jesus in prayer take us into the heart (= deepest being) of God. Andrew Murray once said, “It is the life that prays”. Jesus’ prayers expose his inner life to us; they take us into the depths of his self consciousness. What we find within Jesus however is not self- awareness, in the ordinary sense, but awareness of the Father.
The Self Consciousness of Jesus
Three themes dominate John 17, glory (“glory/glorify/glorified” appears 8 times in the passage), love (2 x at the climax of the prayer) and oneness (6x). According to Jesus these are related in a purposeful manner:
a. First, love gives glory: “my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (24b)
b. Second, glory creates unity: “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one” v. 22
This gives us a sequence, love> glory> unity. We can examine each of these major themes in turn.
1. Love
At the centre of Jesus self- awareness, or his sense of identity, is the knowledge of being loved by the Father. This awareness of the Father’s love is a gift given in the Holy Spirit. e.g. “And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; 17 and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”” (Matt 3:16- 17); “In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven” (Luke 10:21)
For Jesus to be loved by the Father means that all the resources of God’s Fatherhood are made available to him by the Holy Spirit – the wisdom, goodness, power, peace, joy etc. of God. This is what constitutes him to be the Son of God. [In one place he says, “Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me.” (John 16:32)]
2. Glory
Near the start of his prayer in John 17 Jesus says, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” (John 17:5). “Glory” involves the expression of all that God is, in this context it is close in meaning to “honour”. The glory that the Father gives the Son in accomplishing his “work” is the opportunity to fully express the God’s love for lost humanity through sacrifice.
The relationship between glory and suffering is clear throughout scripture. As Christ agonises over his coming death in John 12 he prays, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”” (John 12:27 -28). After his resurrection he explains to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, ““Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”” (Luke 24:26). Paul says of his own ministry, “I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.” Eph 3:13.
The work that Jesus has accomplished for the Father (John 17:5; 19:28, 30), so that he may return to his eternal glory in heaven, is the taking away of everything that is an obstacle to unity. He achieves this by entering into the state of being totally cut off from the experience of the love and glory of God. In his cry “”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” (Mark 15:34), we see that Jesus has lost his sense of being loved by the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. Here he has no awareness of glory, which is no awareness of sonship.
The cost to the trinity of our salvation is that in the death of Jesus the Father, Son and Spirit are unable to pour themselves into one another in the way of self –conscious love. This is the cost of our reunion with God. Only the absolutely other- centred suffering of the cross has the power to destroy the self – centredness which gets in the way of oneness.
3. Unity
Only sin stops humanity from spontaneously receiving the revelation of the essential unity of all that God created in the beginning (Gen 1:31), and within this the revelation of God himself as a unity in diversity – a trinity (cf. Rom 1:20). Sin is the opposite of the trinitarian life because it is essentially self- consciousness, self- centredness.
When Jesus died on the cross and took away the sin of the world (John 1:29) he defeated the power we have to put ourselves before others. The result is, “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (John 17:26). Love makes things completely one. Where there is perfect love there can be no fragmentation, only unity.
The expectation of Jesus as he prays in John 17 is that the unity of the church will be so visibly complete that it can only be explained by onlookers on the basis of the indwelling of God’s supernatural love; “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me…. I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” (John 17:21, 23)
Unity of the body of Christ
When the Bible speaks of the unity of the church it never talks of this as something to be achieved. There can only ever be “one body” (Rom 12:4- 5; 1 Cor 12- 13; Eph 2:16; 4:4, 25; Col 3:15), one bride/temple/household etc. In the book of Revelation the church in each city is represented by a single lampstand (Rev 1:20). There is only one church in each city e.g. “the church in Jerusalem” (Acts 8:1; 11:22), “the church of God that is in Corinth” (1 Cor 1:2) (See also Rev 2:1, 8, 12, 18; 3:1, 7, 14.). This does not mean there were not multiple gatherings of believers in a city, but that they all understood themselves to be essentially united. People have coined the expression, “one church many congregations” to help explain this.
The New Testament has no concept of denominations as we know them today. Paul is totally bewildered by the behaviour of the church in Corinth, “each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” 13 Is Christ divided?” Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1 Cor 1:12- 13)
The solution to the problem of disunity in the church is found in Paul’ words in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Fragmentation in the body of Christ is a symptom of a self whose loyalties are divided between God and other things. Only the power of the cross can transform this.
Christians are at liberty to hold differences about many things, but they are not permitted, if they are truly Christians, to hold differences about the nature of God as trinity, his love, glory and unity and the oneness of the church. At the centre of the consciousness of all believers, whether they call themselves “Baptists”, “Pentecostals”, Evangelicals, Charismatics, Catholics or “OCF’ers”, must be Jesus’ relationship with the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. This sharing in God’s own life is the inner reality of the unity of the body of Christ.
The Self- Consciousness of the Christian
I have been told that your theme for the year is “In His Steps” and that the key text is from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” (Eph 5:1- 2).
As Paul wrote these words the centre of his consciousness was not himself but Christ. Jesus sacrificial death revealed to Paul that God loves us more than he loves himself, “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died” (2 Cor 5:14). To walk in love as Christ loved us means to pour yourself out for others as Jesus did, it is to sacrificially honour others, this is how we are immersed by the Spirit into the Trinitarian life of unity.
Conclusion
It is not an easy thing to imitate God (Eph 5:1). In a few years most of you will return to different places in the world that you call home. In most of these places the church has inherited a level of manifest disunity that fails to image the prayer of Jesus, “I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” (John 17:23). It is not easy to pray, praise and cooperate with other believers who have beliefs and practices different from our own. What it requires is to love without ceasing, to love others as God loves us (John 13:34- 35) in the love that covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet 4:8). This forgiving love is in fact the reality of the trinity in the midst of the church; it is not a theoretical proof that God is Father, Son and Spirit but a living demonstration of who he is in the eyes of men and women who otherwise will never be able to believe in the living God.