CAN YOU FATHOM THAT?

[Colossians 1:9-20]

          Introduction to the Scriptures: [Read Colossians 1:9-14] That paragraph is just loaded with the privileges and opportunities that are ours, but which we take for granted or even neglect. He goes on to speak of Christ in verse 15 . . . [continue reading 15-20]. I promise you we will not explore that text in depth. It would take at least a full term on a graduate level, I suppose, to explore those concepts. But we are going to take the heart of it, its reference to how the whole fullness of God is revealed to us.

Prayer for Illumination - Gracious God, in this worship hour we come to you humbly recognizing that we know very little. In fact, what we know, what we think we know must hardly be measurable. And yet, you have given us minds to comprehend. You have given us hearts and spirits to experience who you are. You have chosen to reveal yourself to us at many times and in various ways, through the prophets of old and now in these last days through your Son who is the radiance of God in our world. (See Hebrews 1:1-2) So I pray that your Spirit would be unleashed in this place to help us grasp something more of who you are and the difference it must make. We are just glad to be in your presence today, whatever we may or may not comprehend. I pray that you would minister to our souls through our reason, when that is possible, and then beyond as your Spirit and ours commune with one another in this place. We pray it in the name of Jesus the Christ, the Word become flesh who walked among us, AMEN.

Message

          In our look at the Trinity last week, we acknowledged that God is beyond our categories to comprehend, like attempting to explain a three-dimensional object within the boundaries of a flat, two-dimensional world. Some of you may have thought we should end our consideration of the Trinity right there, simply admitting that we don’t know very much. But the fact that we may not fully comprehend the Trinity does not mean that we cannot know or understand God at all. Indeed, throughout the Scriptures we are urged to know God.

Know the God of your father [Solomon is urged], and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing mind; for the LORD searches all hearts, and understands every plan and thought. [God knows us.] If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will cast you off for ever.

That’s raising the stakes about knowing God, isn’t it? That verse, 1 Chronicles 28:9, should certainly motivate our study, for it tells us an honest search to know God will be rewarded, but to ignore Him is not only to be ignorant, but to be lost! In his book, Knowing God, J. I. Packer points out that this is, after all, what we are made for – to know God – and this is what gives us our ultimate delight for we were made for Him.

          Most of you know that my favorite author of all time is C. S. Lewis. (If you don’t know that, this is probably your first Sunday at West Side.) I was introduced to Mr. Lewis via his book, Mere Christianity, almost exactly one year after his death, and the book absolutely blew me away. Since then I have read voraciously nearly everything he wrote, many of those books several times over. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to England to visit his home and hear various Lewis scholars tell what they had learned of him. I could hardly contain my excitement as I visited his home, as I sat in his favorite chair, as I walked to his parish church, and visited the Magdalen College campus in Oxford which he loved so well. I strolled Addison’s Walk as it meanders through the great trees, crossing over the tributaries to the River Cherwell, offering vistas of the Magdalen Tower as its carillon chimed the hour. Lewis had loved this walk, and often joined other Oxford dons like J. R. R. Tolkien here to reflect on the great, classical themes, or simply to celebrate their friendship. It was there that Tolkien said something that ultimately moved Lewis to become a Christian. I drank in evensong at the King’s College chapel in Cambridge, where Lewis finished his career, almost unable to contain myself at this incredible opportunity to get to know the man I admire so much.

          But if it is a privilege to get to know another fallible human being like ourselves, what an incredible privilege it is for us to get to know the God who created quarks and planets and great, spiraling galaxies, and even black holes! How exciting to walk with the One who himself walked through all the Great Ages of Mankind, from the enigmatic pyramids to the exotic Orient to the Golden Age of Greece and beyond! What an opportunity to listen to the One who composed the music of the spheres, and to take the hand of the One who alone walked through the experience of Death itself, our great enemy, to emerge unscathed! We have an unprecedented opportunity to know God! Nothing could be a greater privilege, nothing could be a greater delight!

          It is in that spirit that we have begun to explore the Trinity together, because what we find when we set out to know God is this very Trinity which has baffled us for so long. Now keep in mind that no one would ever have made up the doctrine of the Trinity. To do so would have been foolish, since it contradicts what appears to us the most basic logic – how can there be one God in three persons? What happened was not that someone made this doctrine up but that this God, who is so far beyond us, made himself known to us in this way, as some kind of tri-unity. As people encountered this singular God in such diverse ways, they were eventually constrained to try to make some sense of it all, and the result of their attempt was this doctrine which we are now seeking to understand. Rather than viewing this as a burden or as an unnecessary exercise, we need to recognize that in its very complexity undoubtedly lie clues to some of the most intriguing questions we have about life, and about ourselves, and about God, and about the universe!

          In Old Testament times, and indeed well back into pre-history, people had encountered God, a mystical God. They knew God as source and creator, they knew Him as the power behind the universe, they knew Him as likely judge, and some ultimately came to know God as personal in some way – harboring mind and will and emotions not unlike our own. Above all, the people whose heritage has become our own came to know God as One. Shema, Israel: Adonai elohaynu, Adonai ekhad. Ekhad - One. “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Of course this would have to be true, for, if you think about it, a second god would limit the scope and power of the first, and neither would be infinite. And if you are not infinite, you are not God.

          But then, along came this man who seemed to know the mind of God intimately and thoroughly, who spoke with an authority which seemed to define Truth itself, who could speak to a raging storm and command it to be still and creation itself responded [What was that all about?], who could heal congenital blindness, and even raise a man from the dead! More startling, perhaps, was His absolute goodness and His utterly unselfish service to those who could return no favors. This man stood apart from the rest of humanity, unique within this world. He seemed to represent in His person all that they had come to know of God down through the centuries and the millennia of human thought, with the singular exception that He was himself human and material, and everyone knew that God was transcendent and immaterial.

          Several weeks back, we explored His remarkable statement to His disciples, “I and the Father are one. He who has seen me has seen the Father.” But this just didn’t make sense. How could He be one with the Father and yet be separate from Him, talking to Him, praying to Him?

          While they were trying to decipher this mystery, He extended it even further by introducing the Holy Spirit as a separate person, and their confusion was simply deepened. Who was this third person now to whom they had been introduced, this paraclete, this Counselor, who would come from the Father at the request of the Son to live with and even within the believers? Each of these three seemed to be, in some mysterious way, one with God, you couldn’t really separate them, and yet they were all distinct persons who could be identified separately, and who occupied different roles in relationship to them.

          They could not answer these questions, but their subsequent experiences confirmed the reality their minds could not comprehend. This man who called himself the Son of God suffered a horrendous death, and then to their astonishment brushed aside this previously unassailable enemy, and after convincing them of His unprecedented victory over death, ascended into heaven bodily, as He had said He would, instructing them to make disciples of all nations, and stating clearly what we are talking about here. He said, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Those are Jesus’ words. And just a few days later they had a vivid personal encounter with this Holy Spirit at Pentecost, who set about transforming their lives and their world. What could all that mean?

          Well, they may not have been able to explain it, but they knew what they had seen and what they had heard. John would later write, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” It is worth our listening, isn’t it? It may not make a lot of sense, but it is the God we have encountered, he was saying.

          So the early church began proclaiming the good news that somehow God himself, the Creator and Lord of the universe had appeared in the man Jesus Christ, and that the Holy Spirit of God had now been unleashed in this world, with overwhelming effect. How it all worked was beyond them, but that it worked was undeniable. It was their personal experience. So the early church was launched, not on a doctrine but on a compelling and irresistible encounter with a truth that was beyond them.

          And those who wanted to know the truth and experience its liberating power – you will remember Jesus had said, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” – began to explore this exciting new dimension which they had encountered in the Living God. Was this the God they had met on the pages of the Old Testament? Could they send their roots back into what they had already known?

          Well, interestingly, a closer examination of the Scriptures began to reveal some truths previously overlooked. This is interesting. For example, in God’s account of creation in the very first chapter of Genesis, we read, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” Was this just an expression of the “plural of majesty” reflected in the plural Hebrew word for God, Elohim? A closer look reveals that cannot be the case because the initial verb, “God said,” is singular – it goes with a singular subject, and the second verb, “let us make,” is plural – it goes with a plural subject. So right there in the first words of scripture we are introduced to a God who is singular and plural? How can that be? A singular God joining with himself in a plural task? It would seem so.

          Then there is the subsequent statement, after the Fall: “The man has now become like one of us.” That’s interesting, isn’t it? That is not a simple plural of majesty. It doesn’t fit that pattern. In fact, it sounds very much like a conversation! As does His invitation at Babel, “Come, let us go down and confuse their language.” There is a conversation going on within the Godhead. Or His question to Isaiah, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” – once again both singular and plural. You see, this singular-plural God was hidden all through the Old Testament.

          Even the great Shema, this classic statement of the singularity of God in the Hebrew language,“the LORD is one” rejects the Hebrew word for singularity, yakhid, and instead chooses the word ekhad, which can be used to speak of a unity that is actually a union of several factors. It is the very word used in Genesis to describe how a man and his wife may become one, ekhad. They would not become yakhid. They might become ekhad. That is the word used for God – a unity, yet one which does not eliminate individual persons. So even in the coming together of a man and woman we reflect something of the image of God. What a remarkable thing that in this powerful statement of mono-theism, we still have an opening to understand God as multiple somehow.

          The apostle Paul seems to have assumed the Trinity in his writings, although this was all nonsense to him until he had personally encountered the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and been embraced by the Holy Spirit. But it was the apostle John, the greatest theologian among Jesus’ disciples, who realized that Christ had existed from the very beginning. Indeed, he had heard that from the lips of Jesus himself. He tells us in his gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [And then that] Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . full of grace and truth. [John 1:1, 14]

What an astonishing picture is emerging here as God begins to reveal himself to us!

          So the stage was set for an exploration of the meaning of this gigantic and striking revelation of the nature of God. It would take the church nearly 500 years to refine its thinking and define its terms in an attempt to make sense of what they had encountered. They would have to decide many things. They would have to decide whether Jesus Christ was actually God, or whether He was only in some way like God, or whether God had simply come to inhabit His earthly body. Whichever conclusion they drew would have profoundly different implications for us and for our under-standing of God and of salvation and even of ourselves. If in some way Jesus actually was God, had He been brought into being at some point in time? That didn’t make sense. Or somehow was He adopted by God the Father – or was He eternally co-existent with the Father; and if the latter, was He subordinate to the Father, or were they co-equal? These were all serious questions. Was Christ different in essence from the Father? Or was there no difference at all? Perhaps the God we know as Father simply wore different costumes to perform different tasks. You have to understand this.

          Similar questions would have to be answered about the Holy Spirit. Was this just another way of describing God’s generic activity in the world, or was the Spirit a unique and separate person as Jesus seems to have implied? And if He were a separate person, what would be His relationship to the Father and to the Son? Did the Spirit have particular jobs to do that were distinct from the responsibilities of the other members of the Godhead? And if their roles were different, were they each on their own? Or did one coordinate the activities of the others? Again, the implications of their answers would be profoundly significant. There is plenty for theologians to do for a long time.

          Unfortunately, scholars and thinkers, like all of us, motivated too often by pride or prejudice, always subject to their own intellectual limitations, often disagreed with each other in attempting to answer these questions. Finally it became evident that some authoritative leadership would have to be given, and the very best scholars and teachers, 300 bishops and over 100 other church leaders representing all sides of the questions from all across the civilized world, were brought together at Nicea in what is now Turkey, in 325 AD, to see if they could arrive at a consensus on these matters. Wonderfully important discussions and debates ensued, with all positions continually subjected to the biblical accounts of the first believers’ encounters with Jesus Christ and with the Holy Spirit.

          Finally, a remarkable creed, or statement of their conclusions, emerged, which was refined and revised a number of times over a century and a quarter, until being adopted in its final form at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. That was the creed we recited earlier, known as the Nicene Creed. It is the church’s best attempt to express what is inexpressible, but what we nevertheless encounter in the Living God.

          In the end, they decided that both Jesus and the Holy Spirit, though distinguishable from the Father, were fully God, and that they were eternally co-existent with the Father, although the Son was in some way “begotten” of the Father from the very beginning, and the Spirit “proceeded” from both the Father and the Son, but, again, from the beginning. The ultimate consensus of the most brilliant minds to consider this unexpected revelation of God can be stated in two, critically important propositions, and these we must know and explore if we are to know God. That is where I take you finally today in our exploration of the Trinity. 1) There is only one divine essence or substance, and 2) In this one divine essence there are three persons. To understand this difficult but essential doctrine, we need to understand two crucial terms which the early church Fathers struggled long and hard to define and to apply. Those two terms are nature and person.

          Let’s look at the term nature first. Nature is the fundamental essence of a thing – the basic qualities which set it apart from other beings. For example, suppose I were to visit your home and find there, in addition to yourself, a pet cat, a parakeet, and a philodendron. While you are all made up of essentially the same organic substances, I imagine I could quite easily tell you apart. The reason is because of your fundamental nature. You have human nature – it’s different from the others. The cat, while it thinks it has human nature, in fact has a cat nature, your parakeet a bird nature, and your philodendron presumably a plant nature. If you had three cats, or nine birds, I would still recognize the similarities and differences in their respective natures, and I would notice that, despite your differences, you and your wife or husband or housemate each shared a fundamental nature which united you, but set you apart from the others. That is what we talk about when we talk about nature.

          Nature, then, refers not to an individual, nor a personality, but to a group – the genus or species of which you are a part. All of that particular species partake of the one essential nature. Now corporeal, bodily, or physical substances can be divided, and they can pass along their common traits by generation. So there can be any number of individuals, whether cats or birds or persons, who share the characteristics of their fundamental nature.

          But here we come to our first difference. God’s nature must of necessity be indivisible. If it were divided, remember, no portion would be comprehensive, and therefore it would not be God. It must also be non-transferrable because it is already complete; it cannot be extended. Three divine substances would limit and exclude each other. No one of them would be infinite. Therefore unlike created beings, there cannot be multiple individuals existing side-by-side who share a portion of the divine nature, as we share a portion of the human nature – the divine nature is indivisible. The whole fullness of God, therefore, must dwell in each of the persons we meet on the pages of scripture – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – or they are simply not God. But, of course, this is precisely what Colossians 2:9 says about Jesus: “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” All the fullness of God lives in bodily form in Jesus. And in John 16 Jesus explains the Holy Spirit will reflect all of God as well. So each member of the Trinity shares the whole fullness of God, we are told, although this essence may be expressed uniquely in each of them.

          Now I hope we’ve gotten a little bit further in thinking about nature or essence. Your thinking may have been challenged, but actually, nature may be easier to understand than the second term, person. Your nature distinguishes you from the birds. Personhood allows me to distinguish between you and your spouse who shares your nature, or for that matter, even between you and your identical twin, for person indicates a distinct center of consciousness within our species. Although it is not entirely adequate, after trying a number of different technical terms, the word “person” was finally chosen to distinguish between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit in the theological discussion we have been considering. There are a few things we know about persons: Persons are conscious, persons may communicate, persons may experience “feelings” or emotions, persons may will a particular course of action, persons may carry out that course of action. What is unique when this term “person” is applied to God is that God has only one mind and one will. Thus there can never be disagreement among the persons of the Trinity. Even though they may act separately, they always express a singular will. Furthermore, everything experienced by one will be experienced by each of the others (the pain, the joy, all things).

          So we have one God in three persons. Three distinctive and identifiable persons, three centers of consciousness, all sharing fully in the singular divine nature or essence. Say what? . . . If you are still struggling with this, you may be encouraged by the words of the famous church historian Philip Schaff (v.III, p.677), “The word person is in reality only a make-shift, in the absence of a more adequate term.” And then I love this statement from Schaff, “Our idea of God is more true and deep than our terminology.” In other words, we grasp something in our ideas that we cannot express in our words, and then he goes on to say, “the essence and character of God far transcends our highest ideas.” In other words, in our encounter with the triune of God, we begin to see something larger which we simply attempt to express with very inadequate terminology.

          So in beginning to understand nature and person, we have at the very least opened up a window into the complex and intriguing character of God which has vast and profound implications for our understanding of life.

          Because this concept of three distinguishable persons within a singular entity is so important, yet so difficult to grasp, we have tried down through the centuries to aid our understanding with analogies from our familiar world. Now that is a good thing to do. We need to have some concrete images of this abstract truth. Analogies, of course, are always imperfect, and will ultimately fail. However, that does not make them invaluable. If we can discern why they fail, we may learn something more about God from our analogy.

          So some have spoken of the Trinity as being like a singular egg, consisting of yolk, white, and shell. That of course fails because each is only a part, not the whole of the egg. Each person in the Trinity, by contrast, represents the whole of God. Others have spoken of water existing in three different forms as a solid (ice), as a gas (steam), or as a liquid. But once again this fails because water can only be in one form at a particular time, whereas God exists in all three persons simultaneously. Some have compared this to overlapping and co-existing roles in our human lives. For example, I may be a father, a husband, and a son all at the same time. But while this defines my relationship to someone, and may suggest my different responsibilities toward them, I am not a separate person in each of these roles. I am only one person, responding in three distinct ways. So that does not express what we learn in the Scriptures about God either.

          St. Augustine reasoned that since human beings alone are made in the image of God, we must in some way be an analogy of the Trinity. He sought an analogy in human memory, intelligence, and will. Others saw a similar analogy in body, mind, and spirit. These analogies stretch our rational categories and provide wonderful, perhaps even profound insights into the ways in which three things may share a common essence while existing in distinctive forms and accomplishing separate, but intertwining deeds. Nevertheless they are simply not rich enough in the end to reveal much about the persons of the Trinity, each of whom is a complex and fascinating person in His own right. Nor do they really teach us how they interact with one another.

          The analogy which works best for me is that of light. Light must have a source, which may be seen and analyzed, but it also has a reflection somewhere. If I turn on a flashlight, where is the light? Is it in my hand or is it on the wall? The answer, of course, is “Yes”. In fact, not only that, it is also in between. There are invisible rays which connect the source to the reflection. So light exists as a source, as a reflection and as the invisible rays that connect them all. In our analogy, the source would be the Father, the reflection of the source would be the Son, and the invisible rays connecting them would be the Spirit, each containing the entire essence of light in themselves. But there are limitations here as well, and all that these analogies really do is show us that things may be more complex than they seem, and that plurality in unity is not an entirely foreign concept to us. In the end, the Trinity entirely supercedes any human analogy, and we must simply return to our encounter with the Living God who surprises us by revealing himself in unexpected ways, but who nevertheless gives us opportunity to come to know Him, and even to know Him personally.

          Will we ever truly know God? Oh yes, we will one day know Him, though I suspect that an eternity of exploration will still not plumb the depths of His being. For now, as Paul informs us, we see Him as we might through a dark glass or maybe in a distorted mirror. One day, Paul promises, we shall see Him face to face!

          Until then, there is something far more important for us to contemplate. And that is that while we are seeking to know God, He has all the while known us entirely. He made us in His image so that we could know Him, He could know us, and we could share a relationship. In closing, I want to take you back to one of my favorite passages in all of scripture, Psalm 139. As we are exploring seeking to know God, listen to this:

O LORD, you have searched me and

you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.

[You hem me in – behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,

even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hid me and the light become night around me,”

even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.]

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.

When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

            How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!

                         How vast is the sum of them!

[Psalm 139:1-17]

          In the title to this message, “Can You Fathom That?,” I raised the question of whether we could fathom God. A fathom, perhaps you know, is a unit of measure consisting of outstretched arms. This is a fathom. But can we measure God? Oh no, we cannot even begin to get our arms around this God. . . . But He can get His arms around us – and He has done exactly that. While we were pursuing Him, He has been pursuing us. J. I. Packer reminds us that it is unspeakable comfort to know that God knows me, and that He not only knows me – knows every awful, corrupt, twisted thing about me – but nevertheless chooses to love me. I need not hide anything from Him. I could not in any case. But the great encouragement is that there is nothing that God will ever discover about me that will disillusion Him about me in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself. It is astonishing and humbling and supremely encouraging that He knows everything about me and yet, for some unfathomable reason, desires to love me, and died for me in order to accomplish that purpose. Can you fathom that?

Closing prayer - Father, I want to thank you this morning for being who you are even though we only barely begin to comprehend that. I thank you that you have given us the challenge of understanding something about the mystery of who you are. But I must ultimately thank you because in the hugeness of who you are, in the infiniteness of who you are, you have made us corresponding to yourself that you might know us, that we might know something about you, and that we might enter into a relationship that will bring us joy and delight, that will continue to feed us and encourage us and stretch us and grow us for all eternity. We still want to know as much as we can about you, but we thank you for knowing us and extending your grace to us that we might continue to be in a relationship with you, the Living God, who reigns over the universe and more. Walk with us then, for we pray it in the name of Jesus, AMEN.