Seventeen hundred years ago in 325AD the Roman Emperor Constantine convened a council of the bishops and other leaders of the church in the small town of Nicaea (renamed Iznik in modern-day Turkey). What we now call the Nicene Creed is the enduring fruit of their several months of discussion, debate and prayer.
The Nicene Creed is preserved in the constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia as a summary of the faith consistent with Scripture, along with the Apostles’ Creed. The Nicene Creed is structured around the three persons of the Godhead – God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Not three gods, but one God in three persons, of one essence, distinct yet inseparable in personhood.
Human language is stretched to the limits by the attempt to give expression to what God reveals of himself and his “inner relations” in Scripture. Yet, this truth is fundamental not only to Christian doctrine, but to our whole experience of God.
Let me point to just three ways (seems appropriate!) in which this is true.
God is love, says the Apostle John (1 John 4:8). Surely this is one of the most treasured and precious truths to which Christians lay claim. But if God were not three-in-one, we could not say, “God is love”.
If God were not triune, we could say that God is loving. We could say that God expresses love towards others – and indeed, this is true. It is a statement about God’s relation to others; and it is wonderful. But when Scripture says that God is love we are learning something even more wonderful than that God is loving.
Love inheres in God. Love is the description of the internal personal relations of the three persons of the Godhead. The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, the Spirit loves the Father and the Son. God is in himself love. At the heart of the universe is a God who is love, within himself. When God unites us to himself – through faith in his Son in the power of the Spirit – we share in the love that God has in himself. This is what we mean when we say “we have fellowship with God”!
A second precious truth that is rooted in the triune nature of God is the divinity of Jesus. Jesus says in John 10, “I and the Father are one” and, in response, his opponents pick up stones to stone him, “because you, a mere man, claim to be God” (v33). Likewise in John 14, Jesus says to his disciples, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father… Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (v9, 11). Jesus speaks the words of God (v10) and does the works of God (v11).
The famous prologue of John’s gospel introduces us to the Word who becomes flesh when Jesus is born into the world. Likewise, Jesus in his words and works shows himself to be fully God, as well as fully human. This means that what we learn of Jesus is true of God. He is the “exact representation of [God’s] being” (Hebrews 1:3). Mere sinful human beings may truly know who God is and what he is like because of Jesus.
Jesus says, “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well” (John 14:7). This is remarkable, and glorious.
In Jesus the Son of God, we not only know God as he truly is (though we cannot know him completely), but it is also true that what Jesus does, he does as God and human. The work of saving humanity from God’s just judgement on our sin through the death of Jesus on the Cross, is the work of Father and Son for the redemption of the world.
The Father sends the Son, the Son bears the sin of the world. The Father and the Son are united in the Spirit working salvation for humankind: “the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God” (Hebrews 9:14). The Cross is the self-offering of God to God, for our sakes. “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
Finally, because we confess one God in three persons, we may say that God is with us – by his Spirit, who is God. As Jesus prepares his disciples for his coming passion and death, he assures them with these words, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever – the Spirit of Truth… he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:16-18).
Jesus promises that the Father will send another advocate, meaning another who is like him. This Spirit of Truth will be with the disciples and in the disciples. Jesus will come to those who are his by the Spirit who is sent from the Father in the name of the Son (John 14:26).
But the presence of the Spirit with us and in us is nothing less than the presence of God. He is a reminder that we are never alone; that while Jesus is in heaven, God is with us still, by his Spirit. The presence of the Spirit is not only a comfort but provides God’s own power to work in us to transform, equip and keep us, all the while assuring us inwardly that we are children of God (Romans 8:16).
Though we may at times be tempted to think that the doctrine of the Trinity is an abstract and theoretical matter, our belief in one God in three persons lies at the heart of some of the most treasured and precious realities of the Christian life. We rejoice in the presence of God with his people by his Spirit, knowledge of God through his Son and our personal experience of the God who is love.
