Revealing the Mystery of the Trinity
By Dandan, United States
The Trinity Becomes a Personal Mystery
In May 2018, encouraged by a friend, I encountered the Christian faith for the first time. By reading the Bible I learned that heaven, earth, and all things were all created by God with His words, and we humans were personally created by God from dust. We didn’t evolve from primates at all. That we can go on living is entirely from the sustenance of God’s own breath. I was shocked, and my heart became full of reverence and gratitude to God.
From then on I read the Bible every single day and attended gatherings enthusiastically, but there was quite a bit of the Scripture that I still couldn’t understand, particularly the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the one and only God that the pastor spoke of. This was really confusing for me. Since the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are just one God, why would we say that there’s both a Father and a Son? I really wanted to figure this out, so I plucked up the courage to go ask the pastor.
The pastor said, “The Father is Jehovah God. He’s mighty and very authoritative. The Son is the Lord Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is a spiritual body. They are three different persons and together they are called the Trinity of the one true God.” I still felt a bit bewildered after hearing the pastor’s explanation, but I knew that there is definitely just one God. Later on I switched to a new job, which was too far from the church, so I couldn’t attend services anymore. I never asked the pastor about that again, but the God Who is a Trinity, and the relationship between the Father and the Son, remained a mystery for me.
Attending Online Gatherings and Exploring the Mystery of the Trinity
I started feeling anxious because I couldn’t always attend services on the Lord’s day, so a sister from my old church recommended a small group online gathering to me. I was so happy. Even though Sister Keke who led the group was pretty young, her fellowship on the Bible was really full of light. After we had met a few times I understood God’s will in creating mankind, the parable of the ten virgins and differences between faithful and evil servants, as well as the root cause of the Pharisees’ failure in their faith. Plus, Sister Keke had really clear explanations for every question I asked, and I always gained something, so I asked her about this confusion that was within my heart. I said, “Sister, there’s a question that has been confounding me for quite some time. The pastor said that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the God of the Trinity. But I don’t understand, since there’s just one God, how could there be a Father and a Son? Could you explain this to me?”
Sister Keke replied, “Thanks be to God! Sister, you’ve asked a great question. To understand the God of the Trinity, you must first know the root of this expression. In the Council of Nicaea in AD 300s, religious leaders from a number of countries began debating over God’s unicity and multiplicity. They finally proposed that God is a Trinity — this was based on human notions, imaginings and logic. From then on people have believed that God is made up of three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But in fact, the idea of the Trinity doesn’t appear in the Bible. God never mentioned it, nor did the prophets or disciples, and the Holy Spirit particularly hasn’t borne witness to it. So we can be certain that the idea of the Trinity is man-made, and it’s something that people have dreamed up from their own heads, something they thought of with their own logic. It’s not in line with the truth.
The reality is that there’s just one God — the Creator, the one and only true God — who created heaven, earth, and all things. There are no separate persons of God. Genesis 1:2 tells us that in the beginning, God’s Spirit was hovering over the waters. We can see that God was originally a Spirit and He was also called the Holy Spirit, the Spirit, and the sevenfold Spirit, without shape or form yet encompassing all things, full of the universe and the world. In heaven, God is a Spirit without shape or form, but He can also become flesh to become the Son of man with shape and form, to live among us. God’s Spirit is everywhere and there is nothing He cannot do. There’s a passage of words that explains this very clearly. I’ll send it to you — please read it for us!”
I read, “There is only one God, only one person in this God, and only one Spirit of God, much as it is written down in the Bible that ‘There is only one Holy Spirit and only one God.’ Regardless of whether the Father and the Son of which you speak exist, there is only one God after all, and the substance of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit you believe in is the substance of the Holy Spirit. In other words, God is a Spirit, but He is able to become flesh and live among men, as well as to be above all things. His Spirit is all-inclusive and omnipresent. He can simultaneously be in the flesh and throughout the universe. Since all people say that God is the only one true God, then there is a single God, divisible at will by none! God is only one Spirit, and only one person; and that is the Spirit of God” (“Does the Trinity Exist?”). After reading that, I thought, “So it turns out that the idea of the God of the Trinity didn’t come from God. God is a Spirit and is only one person! So then why did the pastor say that there are three?”
Sister Keke went on in fellowship, “We can learn from these words that there is just one God, that there is just one person, which is the Spirit. God’s Spirit surpasses all things and is in all places. He can be in the heavens, appearing to mankind in forms such as lightning, thunder, and fire. He can also incarnate on the earth and become a regular person, just like the Lord Jesus did. Even though He looked just like us, like a regular person on the outside, He was able to do the work of redeeming all of mankind because He was the incarnation of God’s Spirit, so in essence it was still God working. Just like the Lord Jesus said to Philip, ‘Have I been so long time with you, and yet have you not known Me, Philip? he that has seen Me has seen the Father; and how say you then, Show us the Father? Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? the words that I speak to you I speak not of Myself: but the Father that dwells in Me, He does the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works’ sake’ (John 14:9–11). The Lord put it very clearly: ‘he that has seen Me has seen the Father;’ ‘I am in the Father, and the Father in Me’. And in John 10:30, the Lord said, ‘I and My Father are one.’ We can see from this that Jehovah God and the Lord Jesus incarnate are essentially One — whether God works through the Spirit or through the flesh, in essence it is God’s Spirit doing His own work. The reason the religious world divides God into three separate persons is that they believe that the Lord Jesus was the beloved Son of the heavenly Father; this is because they don’t understand the truth surrounding the incarnation. If we understand this aspect of the truth and know what the incarnation is, then we can understand the relationship between the Father and the Son. Let’s read a couple more passages.”
Realizing the Lord Jesus Was God’s Spirit in the Flesh
I heard her out and then thought to myself, “‘Incarnation’ is another new word for me. What does it mean?” I looked at my phone and found the text she had sent, then earnestly read this out: “The meaning of incarnation is that God appears in the flesh, and He comes to work among man of His creation in the image of a flesh. So, for God to be incarnated, He must first be flesh, flesh with normal humanity; this, at the very least, must be true. In fact, the implication of God’s incarnation is that God lives and works in the flesh, God in His very essence becomes flesh, becomes a man.” “The Christ with normal humanity is a flesh in which the Spirit is realized, possessing normal humanity, normal sense, and human thought. ‘Being realized’ means God becoming man, the Spirit becoming flesh; to put it plainly, it is when God Himself inhabits a flesh with normal humanity, and through it expresses His divine work — this is what it means to be realized, or incarnated.”
Sister Keke shared this fellowship: “These passages explain the mystery of the incarnation. It is God’s Spirit clothed with the flesh of a regular person to appear and work. To put it simply, it’s God become human, Spirit become flesh. From the outside, the fleshly body looks no different from a regular person — He eats, dresses, lives, and walks just totally normally and has a gamut of emotions — but God’s Spirit is within Him. He can express God’s own disposition and do God’s own work. Take the Lord Jesus, for example. From the outside He looked like an average person, but He expressed many truths, He provided mankind with the way of repentance, He absolved mankind’s sins, and expressed a disposition of love and mercy. He also displayed a great number of miracles such as calming the storm, feeding five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes, and resurrecting the dead. He fully revealed the authority and power of God, and was ultimately nailed to the cross for human beings. This completed the work of redemption. From all that we can see that the Lord Jesus’ work and words were the work and words of God Himself, and that the Lord Jesus was God incarnate Himself. He was one with Jehovah God.”
Sister Keke’s fellowship was really enlightening for me. I realized that the Lord Jesus was Jehovah God’s Spirit in the flesh, and in essence was still God’s Spirit, the same God. I said happily, “Sister Keke, I finally understand. God’s essence is Spirit and when He incarnates He becomes a person with His Spirit hidden within human flesh. Just like the Lord Jesus who looked like a person on the outside, but He was the Spirit of God clothed in the flesh with God’s essence, and He could do divine work. God in the flesh is actually the same Spirit, it’s just that He appears to mankind in a different way.”
Sister Keke responded happily, “Thanks be to God! This is a pretty profound aspect of the truth. Your ability to understand it is certainly God’s enlightenment and guidance!”
How should we be wise virgins to recognize God’s voice? The following content will help you become a wise virgin and welcome the Lord’s return.
