Who is the God We Worship?

By Brenton Brown and Don Williams

As we approach the doctrine of the Trinity, we ask two questions. First, is it biblical? Second, what does it mean for us as Christians?

We preface our discussion by the fact that God is greater than our minds or any formula we construct about him. We cannot package him. He exists in unapproachable light. He is scary and fascinating at the same time. He is magnificently vast, eternal and mysterious. Yet he allures us in his love. Whatever we know of him comes by his will, his purpose, and his design. He is Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven, chasing us down the corridors of our lives. He is Jesus' “Running Father,” bringing the Prodigal Son home.

Since God is a person, and personality is self-revealing, we only know him as he discloses himself to us. Our proper response is not to speculate about his nature, but to bow down in worship. Augustine defines Christianity as faith working toward understanding. He writes, “I believe in order to understand.”

The biggest mystery is not the Trinity, but that God chooses to reveal himself to us at all. However, central and unique to the Christian faith is the belief that the one God has disclosed himself eternally as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As a result, Christians are monotheists, but complex monotheists. There is plurality within the identity of the one God. The Word of God and the Spirit of God are a part of who God is. They also function in his creating and ruling the world.

Why do Christians believe this, especially when it contradicts conventional logic (how can one be three?) and opens them up to the charge of a veiled polytheism: believing in three gods rather than one? The answer is that the earliest Christians were forced into this by the sheer weight of revelation and their accompanying experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We must remember that all of the earliest Christians were Jews.

The Jews defined themselves against the pagan world of polytheism as monotheists. The worship of only the one God was at the heart of their faith. They recited the Shema twice daily: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4) and the first commandment of the Decalogue is to have no other gods before Yahweh [God's personal name], the one God (Exodus 20:3). As they exalted Yahweh as one, they renounced the many gods and goddesses of the surrounding world and engaged in bitter confrontation with them. Any good Jew was ready to pay in blood rather than worship the pagan deities.

At the same time, the Old Testament is not centrally interested in the nature or being of the one God. (When Judaism and Christianity encountered philosophy, these issues became primary.) The Old Testament is interested in the identity of the one God as creator and ruler (King).

The Old Testament clearly reveals that Yahweh is more than the transcendent God. Within his identity there is the Spirit of God, the Word of God, the Wisdom of God and the Glory of God. All of these serve to express and execute his imminence in creation and history. In other words, there is differentiation within his unity as one. He is both the creator and at the same time the Spirit which hovers over the waters in creation (Genesis 1:2). He is the creator and at the same time speaks creation into being through his Word and Wisdom (Psalm 33:6,9; Proverbs 3:19). He is sovereign and at the same time rules through his Messiah/Son who bears the divine name (Isaiah 9:6) and through the Son of Man who receives his kingdom and is the object of worship (Daniel 7:13-14, remember that only the one God may be worshiped). He fills heaven with himself and at the same time fills the temple with the Glory of his presence (I Kings 8:10-11).

When we turn to the New Testament we find the astounding fact that this branch of Judaism (which is what the church originally was, or in its own terms, this true Israel : Galatians 6:16) sees Jesus in the identity of God: He is the Word of God through whom creation came into being (John 1:3). He is the Word of God through whom revelation is given (John 1:4-5). He is the Word of God who becomes incarnate as Jesus – fully human as well as divine, in order to save this fallen humanity (John 1:14). John calls him God, but not all of God: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1). No wonder his Gospel ends with Thomas confessing to Jesus: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28) N.T. Wright concludes that the first generation of Christians worshiped Jesus within the framework of Jewish monotheism. ( The Challenge of Jesus , p.107)