Pro Life Challenge

The Triune God

The Triune God Of The Bible

The doctrine of the Trinity — that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are each equally and eternally the one true God — is admittedly difficult to comprehend, and yet is the very foundation of Christian truth. Although skeptics may ridicule it as a mathematical impossibility, it is nevertheless a basic doctrine of Scripture as well as profoundly realistic in both universal experience and in the scientific understanding of the cosmos.

Both Old and New Testaments teach the Unity and the Trinity of the Godhead. The idea that there is only one God, who created all things, is repeatedly emphasized in such Scriptures as Isaiah 45:18:

A New Testament example is James 2:19:

The three persons of the Godhead are, at the same time, noted in such Scriptures as Isaiah 48:16:

The speaker in this verse is obviously God, and yet He says He has been sent both by The Lord God (that is, the Father) and by His Spirit (that is, the Holy Spirit).

The New Testament doctrine of the Trinity is evident in such a verse as John 15:26, where the Lord Jesus said:

Then there is the baptismal formula:

One name (God) — One "what" and three "who's."

JESUS — That Jesus, as the only-begotten Son of God, actually claimed to be God, equal with the Father, is clear from numerous Scriptures. For example, He said:

HOLY SPIRIT — Some cults falsely teach that the Holy Spirit is an impersonal divine influence of some kind, but the Bible teaches that He is a real person, just as are the Father and the Son. Jesus said:

TRI-UNITY — The teaching of the Bible concerning the Trinity might be summarized thus. God is a Tri-unity, with each Person of the Godhead equally and fully and eternally God. Each is necessary, and each is distinct, and yet all are one. The three Persons appear in a logical, causal order. The Father is the unseen, omnipresent Source of all being, revealed in and by the Son, experienced in and by the Holy Spirit. The Son proceeds from the Father, and the Spirit from the Son. With reference to God's creation, the Father is the Thought behind it, the Son is the Word calling it forth, and the Spirit is the Deed making it a reality.

We “see” God and His great salvation in the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, then “experience” their reality by faith, through the indwelling presence of His Holy Spirit.

Though these relationships seem paradoxical, and to some completely impossible, they are profoundly realistic, and their truth is ingrained deep in man's nature. Thus, men have always sensed first the truth that God must be “out there,” everywhere present and the First Cause of all things, but they have corrupted this intuitive knowledge of the Father into pantheism and ultimately into naturalism.

Similarly, men have always felt the need to “see” God in terms of their own experience and understanding, but this knowledge that God must reveal Himself has been distorted into polytheism and idolatry. Men have thus continually erected “models” of God, sometimes in the form of graven images, sometimes even in the form of philosophical systems purporting to represent ultimate reality.

Finally, men have always known that they should be able to have communion with their Creator and to experience His presence “within.” But this deep intuition of the Holy Spirit has been corrupted into various forms of false mysticism and fanaticism, and even into spiritism and demonism. Thus, the truth of God's tri-unity is ingrained in man's very nature, but he has often distorted it and substituted a false god in its place.

Most Important Verse in the Bible

Most Important Verse in the Bible

Why some Old testament laws are not followed

 Applying God's Law

Written by Michael Horton of the White Horse Inn.

          You know, every time a debate comes up on homosexual marriage or on war, a whole host of topics; on one hand conservatives sometimes invoke the theocratic promises, commands, and threats of the old covenant as if they could just be lifted from the context of Israel's covenant with God and apply to any modern country. While liberals and secularists simply dismiss these Old Testament passages as morally offensive "texts of terror."

But there is a third option: namely, to interpret the Bible as it interprets itself. The Bible isn't a manual of timeless ethics, but a history of redemption. Within that unfolding history, there are different covenants that include their own structure of laws. To be sure, there are universal moral laws that God inscribed on the human conscience in creation, as in the Ten Commandment and Jesus' summary. But the civil and ceremonial laws of the Mosaic covenant were attached, as Calvin calls them, as appendices of the Ten Commandments for the era in which he had taken Israel under his wing as his special nation. This is a unique, unrepeatable, and non-transferable relationship. As long as Israel obeyed these laws that separated the nations as holy from among the other nations, it would be blessed. If the nation disobeyed, it would be sent into captivity. However, the promise that God made to Adam and Eve of a coming redeemer, which was solemnized in the covenant with Abraham, was an unconditional covenant. As Paul declares in Galatians, the later covenant that the nation of Israel swore at Mount Sinai to obey all of the words of the law could not annul the earlier covenant that God swore to Abraham: namely, salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

In different eras of redemptive history, God descends to dwell with a particular people, creating a small-scale copy of his heavenly temple. During these eras, when every aspect of life-civil and religious-is declared by God to be holy, there are frequent suspensions of ordinary providence and common law in favor of God's direct miraculous acts of judgment, deliverance, and reigning. The Garden of Eden was just such a holy sanctuary, then the ark in which God carried Noah and his family to safety, then finally the land of Canaan. There is God's demand to sacrifice Isaac, which God withdrew just before Abraham was to plunge the knife into his only beloved son. There is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Only begrudgingly did God accede to Israel's demand for a human king, since God alone was the direct ruler of his people. And then there are the holy wars in which God himself led armies to cleanse the land of wickedness, idolatry, oppression, violence, and immorality. An analogy might be the declaration of martial law, in which some constitutional liberties are suspended. During these Old Testament episodes, when God directly intervens in executing his judgment and establishing his righteous rule, we have previews of Christ's ministry as prophet, priest, and king. The whole apparatus of Israel's theocracy, including its distinctive laws, was not to last forever but to foreshadow Christ's kingdom and his work of redemption and his return in final judgment of the whole world.

Take Christ out of the center of this history, and the Old Testament becomes a strange book of laws written by a primitive people to justify their own land-grabs through ethnic cleansing.

So now we go back to these so-called "texts of terror" and what do we see? We see the serpent corrupting God's holy garden, and Israel as God's viceroy called to cleanse it from impurity. We see God standing in personal judgment over creatures he made in his own image who have nevertheless turned their gifts against him and each other. In their idolatrous religion, they sacrifice children to the gods and raid neighboring peoples in merciless violence, leaving a trail of blood and tears. Folks, if you have trouble with the righteous wrath of God in these Old Testament portraits, you are not going to do any better with Jesus, who spoke of everlasting punishment in hell more vividly and repeatedly than any prophet.

But for now, Jesus repeatedly explained in his earthly ministry, it is not an era of martial law but of common grace. In the Sermon on the Mount, he takes the place of Moses at Mount Sinai: "You have heard it said, 'Hate your enemies,' but I say, 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...For God sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike.'" Far from saying these laws were wrong, Jesus fulfilled the law in every detail. In fact, during his ministry he said, "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning." Not only his earthly emissaries, but Satan himself was now dethroned, cast out of the heavenly sanctuary where he accused the brethren day and night. James and John want to call down fire from heaven upon a Samaritan village that rejected the gospel, but Jesus "rebuked them sharply," we read, and reaffirmed the purpose of his mission: namely, to preach the gospel and indeed to be the gospel by his death and resurrection. Jesus certainly warned of a final judgment up ahead, but this is the Day of Salvation.

Because of this regime-change, there are no holy wars because there is no holy land-except for the spiritual war in heavenly places that we fight with the Word of the gospel and the holy temple "made without hands" which is Christ and his body. As we read in Hebrews, the old covenant has been rendered "obsolete" by the arrival of the perfect prophet, priest, and king: our Lord Jesus Christ. We don't need a holy land or a geopolitical realm because now the reality has arrived. Although the New Testament repeats the moral laws that he gave to humanity in creation and to Israel at Sinai, the laws that form the unique constitution of the old covenant theocracy are no longer in force. With the apostles, therefore, we read the Old Testament in light of its fulfillment in Christ, which is revealed in the New Testament. We do not flatten out the biblical commands as general, timeless, universal principles, but follow the New Testament's own approach as it interprets the old covenant in light of the new.

Reformation Day