Sermon for Trinity

[Machine transcription]

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Dear Saints of God, in just a few minutes we will confess together our faith in the
words of the Athanasian Creed.
Every year when we confess the Creed on Trinity Sunday, there’s always questions about it
afterwards and I want to just address those questions now before we say it because I don’t
want to miss the main thing.
The first question is always, what, Pastor, what is this about the Catholic faith?
faith. Whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold to the Catholic faith. And the Catholic
faith is this, and this is the Catholic faith. What does that mean, Catholic faith? Are we
Roman Catholics now? The word Catholic means according to the whole in Greek, or maybe
a better word for it would simply be universal. Catholic is the opposite of the local congregation,
congregation, the independent congregation that sits on its own. When we say that we
confess the Catholic Church, we’re saying – or the Catholic faith – we’re saying
that we confess the faith that was – has confessed by all Christians in every place
and at every time. That’s what that means. And the confession of the Holy Trinity, the
first great mystery of the Christian faith, and of the incarnation of Jesus, the second
great mystery of the Christian faith is that faith, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
one God in three Persons. We worship the Trinity in unity and the unity in Trinity, neither
confusing the Persons or confounding the substance, dividing the substance. So this is what the
word Catholic means there.
Now, the second question that I always get every year about the Athanasian Creed is this
business at the end that talks about the judgment of works. We will say in a few minutes, those
who have done good will enter into eternal life, and those who have done evil into eternal
fire. And the question is, well, pastor, is that not works righteousness?
Now this language of the judgment of works and those who have done good going to life
and those who have done evil going to condemnation is biblical language. It’s just how the Bible
talks about the final judgment. So certainly, if the Bible talks that way, then we should
talk that way. But does it contradict with what the Bible says about salvation, by grace,
through faith, apart from works, so that no one can boast? No. No. We know that it is
impossible to do good unless we first have faith. And we know that even after we have
faith, that every work that we do is soiled with sin. So even our good works require the
Lord’s mercy and forgiveness to be truly good in the sight of God.
Here’s I think the key verse for understanding. St. Paul writes, or Hebrews 11 says that apart
from faith, listen to this, apart from faith it’s impossible to please God. That means
if you do not have faith in God, everything you do, even your best, holiest works are
not pleasing to Him. But by faith, the opposite is also true, that by faith you are in fact
pleasing to God. First, by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, the doctrine
of justification where the Lord looks at you and He takes away all your sin and He adds
to you the perfect obedience of Jesus, and then also by the work of the Holy Spirit so
So that you begin to love and serve God and bless your neighbor.
Now why does the Bible talk so much about a judgment according to works?
Now this is just, this is my guess on this.
So imagine the pulpit lowers down.
So here’s my opinion.
I think it’s a pious opinion, but you can take it or leave it for this.
But here’s why I think the Lord speaks so often about judging works.
You imagine the last day and we’re all gathered together before the judgment seat of God,
and He’s dividing the sheep and the goats, those who believe in Him to His right and
those who do not believe to the left, all who trust in Me come into the kingdom, all
who don’t depart from Me.
And I just imagine that on that day there will be a great protest of all of those who
are being sent away from the Lord’s presence eternally, and they’re going to say, now wait
a minute.
How can you judge us based on if we believe in you or not?
we’ve been trying to get into heaven by our works. We’ve been trying to get in by
our efforts. We’ve been trying to be good enough. That’s what… that’s the judgment
day that we were preparing for out there, and the Lord says, fine, if you want a judgment
of works, let’s do the judgment of works. And the result is exactly the same, because
apart from faith, you cannot please God, but by faith you are pleasing to Him. And I think
I think this is why the Lord speaks so much of this… of the judgment in this way.
So Catholic and so the judgment, those who have done good enter into eternal life and
those who have done evil into eternal fire.
If we have those things down, that’s good because the main thing about the Athanasian
Creed is not those two points, but this confession of the great mystery of the Christian faith,
with the mystery of the Holy Trinity, that we worship one God, we worship the Trinity
in unity and the unity in Trinity. The Athanasian Creed is called the Athanasian Creed after
Saint Athanasius, not that he wrote it. In fact, it’s an honorific title. Athanasius
died before the creed was published, but it was named after him because he was, in the
ancient church, the great defender of this Trinitarian doctrine and of this great confession.
passion. So we want to lean into this as far as we can. But we have to know that as we
lean into this great mystery, we can only go so far, as far as the Bible will let us
go and no further. We have to be careful too. The old Lutheran theologian, Matthew Hafenreffer,
you’ve heard of him. He was a professor in Tubingen around the year 1600. He said regarding
the mystery of the Trinity that when we speak of these things, we are only able to stammer.
We try to speak as clearly as we possibly can, but we have to be very careful and limit
our words and guard our lips so that we do not fall into error.
Saint Augustine, a thousand years, well, 1,300 years before, said this in the introduction
to his book on the Holy Trinity.
He said, in the case of those who inquire into the unity of the Trinity, of the Father
in the Son and the Holy Spirit, we must be careful because in no other subject is error
more dangerous, inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable.”
Let me say…
I’ll say that again.
We must be careful because in no other subject is error more dangerous, inquiry more laborious,
or the discovery of truth more profitable?
So let’s cover first the basics of the doctrine of the Trinity. We speak of one God, always
one God in three persons. And we can, I think, boil it down to five assertions that the Bible
makes and say this is about as simple as we can get the doctrine of the Trinity. The first
assertion is this, there is one God. The Christian church has from the beginning been accused
of being polytheists, of worshiping three gods, this is absolutely, undeniably, and
categorically false. We worship one God. There is one God, and the very first commandment
is this, you shall have no other gods before me. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the
So first, one God. Second, the Father is God. We see this, and this is probably of all the
five statements that we have, this is probably the least controversial of all of them. God
the Father is God. The third statement, and this is perhaps the most important and where
it gets fun, is that God or Jesus Christ the Son is God. We consider this over and over
in the Scriptures. We hear, for example, the confession of St. Thomas, who on the Sunday
after Easter says to Jesus, my Lord and my God. I think the most important and the most
beautiful argument that, that Jesus is God in the Holy Scriptures is that He is worshipped,
and God alone is to be worshipped. So even when He was a baby, in the lap of His mother,
the wise men come, and the text tells us that they fell down and worshiped Him, Matthew
chapter 3.
Or the disciples, when they come and find Jesus on the mountain in Galilee after He’s
raised from the dead, they fall down and they worship Him, and so do we.
We worship Jesus.
Jesus is God.
The fourth statement is that the Holy Spirit is God.
The Holy Spirit is a person, not a force.
The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Holy Trinity, and maybe the clearest biblical
text confessing the divinity of the Holy Spirit is when Annias and Sapphira, remember in the
opening chapters of the book of Acts, they had sold some property but held back some
of the profit and they come to see Peter and he says, why have you lied to God? You’ve
lied to the Holy Spirit. The fifth statement, so there’s one God, the Father’s God, the
Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. The fifth and final statement is this, the Father is
not the Son, nor the Son the Holy Spirit, nor is the Holy Spirit the Father.” There
is a distinction between the three persons of the Holy Trinity. And those five statements
together are the basis of the doctrine, biblical doctrine, and teaching of the Holy Trinity.
Now here’s where it starts to get fun because when we start to read and study and consider
the Holy Scriptures and consider the unity of the essence and the plurality of persons,
what we start to see is that there is a long and ongoing conversation, most especially
between the Father and the Son, that God talks to Himself, and He lets us hear how
that conversation goes.
Now, this is scattered all throughout the Scriptures, and we considered one of the passages a couple
of weeks ago when we were listening to Jesus pray to God the Father, but here’s… I’m
going to give you a little bit of homework and we’re going to go through it a little
bit today in the sermon. But Hebrews chapter 1 and chapter 2 goes through a lot of these
places. In fact, if you want to think of Hebrews chapter 1 as a category of all those times
when God the Father talks to the Son and it’s recorded by the prophets in the Old Testament.
And then Hebrews chapter 2 gives us the other side. What does the Son say back to the Father?
Let me just, and again I would encourage you to read Hebrews chapter 1 and Hebrews chapter
2 this week, but just let me give you a few of the examples.
Hebrews 1, verse 5 quotes Psalm 2, verse 7, where God the Father says, you are my Son,
today I have begotten you.
That’s what the Father says of the Son, and that speaks of His eternal begottenness.
Or, again, in Hebrews 5, chapter 1, verse 5, it quotes 2 Samuel, verse 7, where God
the Father says, I will be to Him a Father, and He to me a Son.
Hebrews 1, verse 6 quotes Deuteronomy, verse 32, which says, let all the angels of God
worship Him.
Hebrews 1, verse 8 quotes Psalm 45, verse 6 and 7.
This, by the way, is the passage that I can never remember.
I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to memorize Psalm 45 and it just will not stick.
So you all should have to remember it for me so I can point to you and you can remind
me what it says.
It’s an astonishing passage.
It’s the passage where it’s promised that the Messiah will have the Holy Spirit more
than anybody else.
So it talks about how Jesus is the one who will restore the Holy Spirit to humanity,
but it’s the Father saying this to the Son.
So, Hebrews 1, verse 8, quote Psalm 45, verses 6 and 7,
and God the Father says to the Son, listen to these words,
your throne, O God, is forever and ever.
Just, can you just imagine that the Father talks to the Son and calls Him God?
This, this is incredible stuff.
Hebrews 1, verse 10, quote Psalm 102, which says this,
says, you, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth. That’s the Father
talking to the Son, calling Him, Lord. Or Hebrews 113, quoting Psalm 110, we had this
last week, where the Lord God the Father says to the Son, sit here at my right hand until
I make your enemies your footstool. So God the Father is talking to God the Son and giving
Him all of these gifts. In fact, that’s the main thing, if we just want to think about
this, about what it means to worship the Trinity, what it means to have God, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit, it means this. It means God the Father gives gifts to the Son. And God the
Father and God the Son give gifts to the Spirit. And God the Spirit gives gifts back to the
Son and to the Father. In fact, in Hebrews chapter 2, we pick up the reverse side of
the conversation. It’s quoting what the Son says to the Father. So here’s a few verses.
Hebrews 2, verse 12, quote Psalm 22, that famous, my God, my God, why are you forsaking
me?
But it’s at the end of the Psalm.
It says that Jesus says to the Father, I will declare your name to my brethren.
And in the next verse, 2 Samuel, verse 22 is quote, chapter 22 is quoted, I will put
my trust in Him, the Son says of the Father.
Father. And then in the next verse it quotes Isaiah 8. Here I am and the children God has
given me. In other words, Jesus, now just think about this. Jesus gathers you up. He
comes and He redeems you. He dies for your sins. He cleanses you. He calls you His own.
He adopts you into His family. You are now the sheep of His pasture. He gathers you
together as His church and then He gives you to the Father as a gift. Here I am and the
children you’ve given me. So that God the Father gives us to the Son and then the Son
takes us and He gives us back to the Father. Now, I am maybe not the best giver of gifts.
I’ve been known to give some pretty ridiculous gifts in my time and I remember the very first
year that Carrie and I celebrated Christmas together, I thought I was so fantastically
triumphant because I got her an emergency medical kit as a Christmas gift. She did the
same thing that you guys are doing. What kind of gift is that? She said, I just don’t want
you to get hurt or anything, you know. But that’s what we might think. When we hear a
verse like this where the Lord says that we, we, you and I, His church, are the gift that
Jesus is giving to the Father. And we say, what kind of gift is that? What do you want
to give us? I mean, couldn’t you do better? And Jesus says, no. You and I are the best
that the Son has to give to the Father. Here I am in the children that you’ve given me.
That’s in Hebrews 2.13. And then later on in Hebrews chapter 10, it quotes Psalm 40.
This is a bit of a riddle verse, but where the Son says to the Father, sacrifice an offering
you did not desire, but a body you gave to me.” That’s Jesus saying, the blood of
bulls and goats doesn’t work to atone for sin, but you gave me a body so that I can
die on the cross and win a people for your own self.
Now, this is an amazing series of texts. It turns out that God is talking to Himself.
The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are having a conversation, and that conversation
salvation is about you and your salvation and your redemption and your rescue and your
deliverance and the forgiveness of your sins. Can you imagine it? If we say, wow, here we
are down on earth trying to talk about the greatest thing that we can possibly talk about,
the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and it turns out that Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit in heaven sitting on the throne are talking about us and how to deliver us.
Francis Pieper, the old Lutheran theologian, I’m going to read this whole quote. It’s kind
of long, but he says something incredible. He says that the doctrine of the Trinity is
not to be considered an abstraction or some sort of academic thing, but rather it’s talking
about our salvation. He’s contrasting the natural knowledge of God, which is what we
can know about God through reason or philosophy or looking around. He’s contrasting the natural
knowledge of God with the biblical revealed saving knowledge of God, and he says this,
the natural knowledge of God cannot deliver us from an evil conscience. The Christian
knowledge of God, however, calms the troubled conscience. In fact, it is our salvation.
Scripture does not propose the doctrine of the Trinity as an academic question or a
metaphysical problem. With the proclamation that in the one eternal God there are three
persons of the – of one and the same divine essence, Scripture combines the further gracious
message that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son into death as the
Savior from guilt of sin and death. That in the fullness of time the eternal Son became
incarnate and by his vicarious satisfaction reconciled the world to God and that the Holy
Ghost engenders faith and thus applies to man the salvation gained by Christ.
When the Christian confesses, I believe in God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, he is
saying I believe in the God who is gracious to me, a sinner.
church. When we confess Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are confessing the God who is gracious,
the God who gives, the God who loves, and whose love is who He is.
Now, part of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is this, that because there is an otherness
in the unity of the Godhead, there is the capacity for eternal love. Because love requires
an object, love requires another. And if God is only one person in eternity, then in eternity
there is no other for Him to love. But God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all the way
along from the very beginning, and so He is by essence love. And that God who is love
continues to love by giving Himself to us. The Father who gives Himself to us with all
of creation and the Son who gives Himself to us even unto death to win for us eternal
life and the Holy Spirit who gives Himself to us so that we might be His holy people.
The God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the God who is love, who is the God who
loves you. This is what we heard in the text from John 3. And I think it’s why the text
is read on Trinity Sunday. It says,
For God so loved the world that He gave.
That’s what love does, it gives.
But He gave His only begotten Son.
And He gave Him all the way to your flesh and blood.
He gave Him all the way to your sin
and to the wrath of God that you deserved.
He gave Him all the way to the cross, to the whip, and the thorns, and the nails, and all
the way to the grave.
He gave Him completely so that He might have you completely.
Now consider this as we sort of finish our meditation this morning, that God the Father
Father and Son exist in this eternal conversation of love, this eternal giving and self-giving
to one another, and that we in our sin were alienated from that life of God, but that
God the Father said that I will now cut off my son so that you can be grafted in.
the Father who loves the Son forsakes Him on the cross so that He will never forsake you.
The Father who loves the Son strikes the Son with His wrath so that you can avoid it forever,
Father, so that you, children of wrath, so that we, children of darkness and death, might
be called the children of God and invited into this holy conversation.
Dear saints, this mystery, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, this mystery of the Trinity
is not only where we’ve
come from but it is also
where we are going.
And one day soon, because
of what the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit have done
for us, we will behold God
in his glory.
We will see him face to
face and we will rejoice
in his kindness that knows
no end.
And so let us rejoice.
You are a Christian.
We are a Christian people.
And this doesn’t just mean that we confess the mystery of the Holy Trinity, but that
we worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, world without end, amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen.