I’m enjoying our study through the book of Ruth, and I’m also looking forward to where I think we’re going next in our Monday night studies. As I’ve mentioned before, for a couple months now I’ve been excited about revisiting the scriptures to simply study about who God is and how He’s revealed Himself. While non-believers regularly talk as if God must be this far-away, unknowable being, we worship the only God Who has actually shown Himself–He wants us to know Him! All of this means that I’ve been studying the Christian teaching known as the Trinity. And so, after Ruth, it’s to the Trinity I hope to turn on our Monday nights. It will dovetail nicely with where Pastor Joe’s been on Sunday mornings as we think about the Holy Spirit, and it will give us a few weeks to sink our minds into God’s word as a declaration of Himself to us.
I’ll post more about these studies as we get closer to beginning, but for now, I thought I’d share some stuff I’ve found to be helpful in thinking about the Bible’s teaching on all this. First, here are the links to download four messages on the Trinity which I have to say are excellent: This guy is speaking to a college christian fellowship, so he’s very easy to listen to (he’s a British guy with a good accent and a good British sense of humor). They will get you pumped to dig into the word to see these things for yourself:
Messages by Mike Reeves on the Trinity (Mp3 downloads)
- Why we have problems with Trinity
- Trinity is the Answer
- Trinity in Revelation and Creation
- Trinity in Salvation
And for a little more, here’s an article by the same guy called “Three is the Loveliest Number.” Here’s a section from the beginning of it:
…there is the God we know and love—and then, in some mental ivory tower far, far away, there is that Trinity stuff.
That mathematical mystery.
That mind-bending oddity.
That strange, even embarrassing idea.
Yes, deep within the Christian psyche today seems to be the notion that the Trinity is an awkward and odd irrelevance, an unsightly wart on our knowledge of the true God. And so, when it comes to sharing our faith, we speak of God’s offer of salvation, we speak of God’s free grace, but we try not to let on that the God we are speaking of is a Trinity. We wax lyrical about the beauty of the gospel, but not so much about the beauty of the God whose gospel it is.
It is time to stand up and say, “No!” to such nonsense, to turn our backs on the absurd notion that our beautiful gospel could ever come from a God who is not the very perfection and essence of beauty. For the health of the church and our faith, we must be proud of who our God is. And since the Trinity is no mere theological icing resting atop our God—since the living God is Trinity—we must be resolutely and thoroughly Trinitarian in all our ways and thoughts.
Only then will we truly enjoy what sets the living God apart from the gods of human imagination. Only then will we know a God good enough to offer truly good news. And this, in fact, is the nature of the very eternal life for which we have been saved: knowing God. As Jesus prayed, “[T]his is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).