The Trinity

Good morning, everyone. As you know, we've been going through the doctrinal statement that we thought it would be good to, since we just updated the doctrinal statement, and there's lots of new people in the fellowship, and to introduce the doctrinal statement in terms of, you know, what do we, what do we believe here at Holly Hills Bible Church?

So the first doctrine that we're looking at is the Bible, and as we indicated, there's 11 doctrinal themes in the doctrinal statement. Now, if you haven't received one, we handed one out last week. They're back in the lobby there on top of the box as you go out the door, so you can pick one up on the way out. Well, we've been looking first at the Bible.

As you think about this, this is probably the most critical doctrine. And the reason is this, is that all other doctrines, whether it be God, the Holy Spirit, man, salvation, depend upon what you believe the Bible is. Do you believe it is the word of God? Do you believe that it or do you believe it just contains the word of God or it's the word of man. So depending upon what you believe the Bible is depends upon all of the other doctrines that follow. Not only not only what the Bible is but how do you interpret the Bible.

Do you interpret it literally or in plainly. Or do you interpret it, do you have a spiritualized interpretation, where the interpretation is left to each individual, and each individual says, this is what I think the Bible says. And if you've participated in some Bible study groups, you'll find that a lot of Bible study groups do exactly that, as opposed to saying, this is what the Word of God says. It's not of its own interpretation. The Bible is of its own interpretation. You have to interpret Scripture with Scripture. So let's preside in terms of, as we had on the overhead before, here's a key verse. with respect to the Bible being the inspired word of God.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God as profitable for doctrine, teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Now, the key word, which I highlighted in blue, is given by inspiration of God. What does inspiration mean? When you see the word inspiration, what does it mean? Well, the Greek word Theopneustas is the Greek word for inspiration.

Now, as you can see, it consists of two parts. You see the first part, T-H-E-O? What does T-H-E-O stand for? I hit the wrong button. But it's theos, which is God, and noueo, which means to breathe. So, inspiration means God breathed. So you can interpret it, this passage of scripture, meaning that every passage of scripture is God breathed, out from the breath of God. When you think about that, out from the breath of God, you think of verbal inspiration. Every word is inspired by God. Now, as we look at the Bible being inspired by God, there are many different views on inspiration. And Dr. Lewis Perry Chaffer has listed several views of inspiration in major Bible themes.

And what I've done is depicted them in a picture. And you see that I've depicted it as a pendulum. So you go all the way over to the right of the pendulum and where people believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, all the way over to the other side of the swing of the pendulum, where people say that the Bible is not the Word of God. It's just wonderful stories, but not the Word of God.

It's interesting. As you look at and see what some of the seminaries and Christian colleges are doing today, They're moving away from the Bible being the inspired Word of God to saying that the Bible contains the Word of God. Baylor University in Waco, Texas is one. It's the largest Baptist university in the world. And they have a course, and it's called Christian Scriptures.

And this is what they teach. that number one, Moses did not write Genesis, that authors J-E-D-P were the ones who wrote Genesis. Now that whole what is called documentary hypothesis has been discredited, but yet it's being taught. And they teach that there are two contradictory accounts of creation. They also teach that the Jews borrowed their creation accounts from other cultures. And the teaching goes on and on and on, in terms of the Bible not being the inspired Word of God.

When you young people get ready and you save a lot of money to put your kids through college, you better check. where they're going. You've got to visit the college. You've got to check into every course that they're taking with respect to the Bible. Otherwise, my recommendation, just send them to a regular university.

But that's a whole new story. But we need the Martin Luthers of the world to stand up. When the bishop demanded him to recant all his writings about biblical authority and justification by faith, it's reported that Martin Luther said, here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.

That's where we need to stand, that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. What we'll do is just take a look at this briefly, with what do we mean when we say that scripture, that here we have scripture in it, and it's the inspired Word of God. And you notice that we've got some additional words there, like verbal, plenary, inspiration, view. In today's circles, it's not enough to say that you believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, because it means different things to different people. So you have to further explain what you mean by the Bible being the inspired Word of God. First of all, you have to also add the fact that it's verbal inspiration, that the Holy Spirit guided the choice of the words to the original scriptures.

And they're not the writer's words, but they come out from, if you will, the breath of God. Then you have to add that they're plenary, because some will say, well, some of the words are not the word of God. So in order to say no, every single word in scripture is out from the breath of God.

It's all it's all inspired. You have to add plenary to say it's complete from one end to the other. There are other words you have to also add that it's inerrant, that it's the inerrant word of God. It's infallible. So all of these are descriptions today. When you say the inspired word of God, you have to say it's the verbal, plenary, inerrant, inspired word of God to define it.

The next one is the concept view. In this view, people believe that God gave the authors a concept. Paul, I want you to write about justification. Justification by faith. And here's the concept, and you supply the words. I want you to write about salvation. Here's the concept. and you supply the words. These are heretical views. Every one of these are. The other is a partial view where that only parts of the Bible are inspired.

So I'll never forget the time I sat down with a pastor and I just became a believer at 33 years old. And I was attending Dr. J. Verne McGee's Bible study downtown Los Angeles. And he was teaching from the Book of Galatians. And I started to understand what scripture said. And I realized that in the church I was at, they didn't believe that the Bible was inspired by the Word of God.

I sat down with the pastor and told him I was leaving and the reason why. And he could not understand it. He says, Hal, you've been a pillar in this church. How could you possibly leave? And so I asked him one question. One question I asked him is, if you were to leave here tonight, and God forbid, you get hit by a car, where would you spend eternity? And his answer was this. He says, I don't know. I said, that's why I'm leaving. That's why I'm leaving.

But then I followed up, I said, but you can know, here's what scripture says, that God so loved the world, I knew two passages of scripture, that's all I knew, that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Do you believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God? Do you believe that he came to die and pay the penalty for your sins?

Here's his response. He had a white collar. His response is, Hal, look what you're doing. You're taking the Bible as the Word of God. As soon as he said that, As soon as he said that, my whole life flashed in front of me. Going to church, I never heard that. I never heard about Jesus Christ. And so my response to him, if it isn't the Word of God, then what is it? Or, he said, well, it contains the Word of God. I said, oh. Now, how do I know which parts are the Word of God and which parts aren't the Word of God?

Obviously, John 3.16 is not the Word of God. So, how do I know? And then he readjusted his collar. He says, that's where we come in. And I said, oh boy, you know, 33 years, you know, it's incredible. But you'll find that today.

I mean, I talk to many pastors, and there's a lot of pastors that really don't believe that the Bible is the inspired, verbal, infallible Word of God. The next view is the neo-Orthodox view. And with the Neo-Orthodox view, this view says, you can't take the Bible literally. You just can't take it literally. And the way you interpret it is each one has his own interpretation. And it means something different to who's ever reading it, depends upon who's reading it, means something different to everybody. friend who has this view.

And we were driving along one day, and she says, you know, I don't like Paul. I said, really? How come? Well, Paul is really down on women. And so I said, well, how about 1 Corinthians 13? describes what love is. Oh, that part I like. That's about the only part of Paul that I'll read. So, at any rate, near-Orthodox view. Then, of course, there's the naturalistic view, where people say that the Bible is not the Word of God.

And interesting, I was at a Seder a couple of years ago, and It was wonderful celebrating the Passover. And there was about 22 people there. And it was wonderful because they were reading actually from the Old Testament and about the crossing of the Red Sea and everything else. And after it was over, I said to the guy next to me, I said his name. I said, hey, John, this was really great. I mean, you believe in terms of what scripture says about the Jews and about what God has done in terms of delivering out of Egypt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he kind of looked at me funny-like.

And he says, no, I don't believe that. I says, you don't? And the person across the table, I said, how about you? No, I don't believe that. Person to the right, no, I don't believe that. And so I'm walking out the door and talking to the hostess, and I said, it's incredible.

I just found out that three or four of the people I was sitting near didn't believe what the Bible said about the Jews and about them being down in Egypt and et cetera, et cetera. And she said, you better believe it, baby. We don't believe that. So people may be having religious kinds of things going on and be reading the Bible, but in no way that they really believe that the Bible is the Word of God.

And so my question to this gal was, well, if it isn't the Word of God, then what is it? Well, it's just a bunch of stories, and it keeps us Jewish people together. They're a bunch of myths, but it holds us together. That's the only thing that holds the Jewish people together.

Another critical verse on inspiration is in 2 Peter 1.21, and it says this, For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God.

Now, I want you to notice the word prophecy there. When we think of prophecy, what do we usually think of? Something about foretelling the future, right? You normally think about the future. Well, this word prophecy simply means to tell forth. It's to tell forth the truth, whether it's truth in the past, whether it's truth in the present, whether it's truth in the future.

So prophecy is not necessarily, nor even primarily, foretelling. It's the declaration that cannot be known by natural means. So last week we talked about general revelation, natural means, and special revelation. Special revelation, the only special revelation we have is this, is the Word of God. So, prophecy is the telling forth of the truth.

Now, observe something, that man, in and of himself, could not know or understand or proclaim God's will or eternal purpose. No prophecy was ever made by an act of the human will. No one man could ever tell for the purposes, the eternal purpose of God. God has to reveal it, and he's revealed it through men who were moved by the Holy Spirit.

Now, the word moved there, for all of you who are taking Greek The first verb that you learned was pharaoh, right? It means to bear or to carry. And so the men that God chose to document his word were born along or they were moved or they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, which implies verbal inspiration.

When we talk about the Bible inspired of God, I'm going to throw up a picture here in terms of how we get our scriptures and what do we do with our scriptures. It starts with God. God makes a revelation and he chooses authors and they wrote down original manuscripts.

However, we don't have any original manuscripts today. copies were made. Then from those copies, translations are made. But as you notice, we have a barrier there in terms of language, historical, cultural. I'll talk about it in a second. Translations are made. We interpret the translation copies, try to understand things in historical, cultural, and the language, and then form doctrine.

And all doctrine points to the word Jesus Christ. Let's just take a look at this in sequence. It starts with God. God reveals who he is and his eternal purpose. And he's chosen authors. And there's about 40 authors that he's chosen over a period of 1600 years. And God used their personalities, their experiences, their vocabulary, to communicate his very word.

So God didn't go outside of the author. So when you pick up Greek manuscripts written by Paul or written by Peter or whoever, the Greek is different. And the reason is, is because the authors are different. They have different vocabularies. God used the vocabulary and the experience of those authors to communicate his work. So, inspiration then guarantees that the revelation that God has given to the authors is by words and he uses the authors to, if you will, by the Holy Spirit to guarantee that what God has revealed about himself, who he is, his eternal purpose, is correct. He reveals it through words. And the authors wrote it down on original manuscripts. As I indicated, we don't have them today. Then over time, copies were made of those manuscripts. Merriman, who was a former pastor here, did some studying on all of the Greek manuscripts.

And I remember him saying that about 5% of the manuscripts were written between 100 and about 600 AD. And that's called the minority text, or it's called the critical text. Bible that you have in the pew in front of you, the Greek interlinear, is the critical text. It's, if you will, the older manuscripts. Then the other 95% of the manuscripts were from about 400 on. And that's called the majority text, or the Byzantine text. And that's the text that the King James has come from. the minority text, or the critical text, we get our New American Standard, or NIV, from those manuscripts. So, question.

Are there differences in the copies? Or are they all the same? Answer, yes, there are differences in the manuscripts. Let me tell you a story to describe the differences. Some fellows at work invited me to some Lions Club or some one of those organizations, and they were having a speaker, and he was a Greek scholar, and he was going to be talking about the New Testament Greek manuscripts.

So I went, and I sat there for one hour. And he was going through all of the differences. The fact that in these manuscripts, when you compare these two manuscripts of the Book of Romans, that in this manuscript words are left out, in this other one words are changed, the endings of the verbs are different, the prepositions are different, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He went through myriads of these differences. I sat there looking around at the guys who I was working with, and I saw them just kind of sit back and relax.

And what he was doing is validating what they believed in the first place, that you can't trust the Bible as being the Word of God. And so it seemed to me that they were relieved that, yeah, that's what I always thought. You can't trust it. So at the end of his talk, he had question and answers. And I was the first one to raise my hand. I says, Dr. Smedley, whatever his name was, isn't it true that the differences that you went through with all of the different endings, words left out, words added, et cetera, et cetera, only pertain to a small portion of the differences of the totality, if you will, of all the manuscripts, and that as you go through them, through all the differences, it doesn't change the teaching or the doctrine one iota." And he thought, he says, that's absolutely right. And I looked at these guys and they weren't relaxed anymore. So that's the key. The key is it doesn't impact Doctrine. Now, here's the thing.

These manuscripts or the copies, if you will, are at least, you know, what, a thousand or whatever. They they they range in dates. So. But they're old and they were written a long time ago and. And they were copies of the original manuscripts, which were written from 2,000 to 3,600 years ago. So the thing is, there are these barriers in terms of language.

So the question is, when they wrote down, if you take the Greek New Testament, you take words in the Greek New Testament, what does that Greek word mean now? What did it mean, first of all, what did it mean then? So that we can understand what it means now. So, if I take one Greek word, like in Romans chapter 6, verse 11, it says what?

Reckon yourselves, therefore, indeed dead unto sin, but alive unto God. The word reckon, legitimi, scholars did not have a good handle on what that word meant up until the 19th century, and they dug up these bills of lading. And in these bills of lading, there was this word with kids and I kept coming up where somebody would be checking the crates that were being unloaded off a ship and they would put it down as true. There were six of these crates and two of these and nine of these, et cetera. So we found. You know, we found out that logisima means that you can put it down as true. You can count it absolutely true. So you can count it absolutely true that you're dead, dead unto the sin nature. We can count that as true. So that's just one example of understanding the words in terms of what it meant then. Then there's the whole historical and cultural background that it was written.

So when we approach a translation or when the translators do a translation, they've got to look at the language, the historical back, the culture, and they have to take a look at the copies. And then they come up with translations. So whatever translation you're using, This one happens to be a King James, you have a numeric stator, an IV, and there's myriads of translations today. But that's the process that you have to go through coming up with a translation. Now, here we are, and we have the translations, we have the copies, we have at least the different Greek texts, and we somewhat understand the cultural background, historical background, and then we can come up with an interpretation. We can interpret scripture, but the only way to interpret scripture is in that context.

Then from our interpretation, we come up with doctrine. So that's the process that has to go through. We have to go through when we come up with doctrine in terms of what what the Bible teaches. Okay. I'm going to press on here to the next doctrine. You can see that we're not going to get through today, right? But I felt it more important to set the stage last week and to give you just a good background and basis of all these doctrines, as opposed to just flipping through a whole bunch of verses.

Now we come to the subject of, or the doctrine of God, in terms of what does the Bible teach about the doctrine of God. And there's an amazing revelation in Genesis chapter 1, in fact it's Genesis 1-1, It says, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

And if you take a look in Hebrew at that particular word, God, it's Elohim. Now, Elohim, notice the im ending, the I am ending. Anytime you have a Hebrew noun ending in im, or I am, it's plural. It's a plural noun. You could translate this. In the beginning, gods created the heaven and the earth. Would that be a correct interpretation? Answer? No. Why? Well, this particular word Elohim is a uniplural noun. Now, if you go into the dictionary, you're not going to find the word uniplural.

This is for teaching's sake that you think of Elohim as both uni and plural. Both one and plural. So, it's plural in form, but singular in function. And it's only singular in function when it's referring to the true God. Now, if it were referring to pagan gods and was Elohim used for pagan gods, the same word is used for pagan gods. It would be translated in the plural gods, the gods of the Gentile. It would always be translated in the plural. But when it's referring to the true God, it's it's always translated in the singular.

Give you another example. In Genesis 2, 7, it says that God formed man, Yatsar, formed man out of the dust of the ground. And that word means he took the dust of the ground and he sculpted, he sculpted man. And then it goes on to say, and he breathed the breath of life into man and man became what? a living soul. When it says that he breathed the breath of life, the word life there is kayin.

What kind of ending? It's a plural noun. So God breathed the breath of lives into Adam. You can translate that literally as lives. So now, what does that mean? What lives are we talking about? Well, it's life of the body, physiological life. its soulish life, and its spiritual life. So, it's those three lives that God breathed into Adam.

So, you need plural noun. So, you can come away from this and say, hey, there is a Godhead, and there's a unity of a Godhead, and there's the plurality of a Godhead. Now, from Genesis 1-1, you don't see that it's the Trinity yet, but as you go through the book of Genesis and you go through the Old Testament books and come to the New Testament, with the rest of Scripture, you know that this plurality is the Trinity. So there's one God existing in three persons. Now, what do we mean when we say that the Lord is one, or that there's the unity of a Godhead. What do we mean? When we say Trinity, we understand that to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, right? But when we say that God is one, what do we mean?

Well, we mean that he's one in an essential essence. And what's his essential essence? Well, it's his essential character. It's who he is. And you can also interpret that as his glory. It's the very glory of the Lord. What does his essential essence look like? And what does his glory look like? Well, I always say you can't box in God because he's infinite. But I put a box around him.

But here are just some of the attributes or some of who God is. The fact that he's holy, he's set apart from everything, from all unrighteousness. He's righteous. And as you go through the New Testament, Old Testament, you'll find all of these characters or the essence of God. He's just. He's absolutely fair. He's infinite. He's all-knowing. He's all-powerful. He's all-present everywhere. He's self-existent. He doesn't need anything outside of himself to exist. We need water, and we need food, and we need air, and we need all of those things to exist. God needs nothing outside of himself to exist.

He's love, and out from his love flows his grace and his mercy, and his grace is his just His infinite passion to bestow all of His goodness upon you and upon me. And His mercy is His tender compassion. As you go through the Old Testament and you look at the word mercy and you go through, say, Psalms, you'll always see mercy with compassion, mercy with tender compassion. Someone has described it this way, that Grace in grace, God withholds everything that we deserve, and His mercy is that He withholds everything that we deserve.

I'm getting the two mixed up. His mercy is that he withholds everything that we deserve. His grace is that he gives us everything that we don't deserve. Don't ask me for that definition again. He's immutable simply means that he cannot change, so he's faithful. He's faithful in your life, in my life, in every aspect of our lives. And He's truth. He's spirit, and He's sovereign. He's over all.

So, if we take one of these as an example, one aspect of His character, God is truth. And we find that in scripture it says that the Father is truth. When the word Jesus Christ said in John 7, 28, he who sent me is true, talking about the Father who sent him. And then the word Jesus Christ, which you know by heart, John 14, 6, I am the way, the truth, the life. No man comes into the Father but by me. So the Son is the truth.

And then over in 1 John 5, 7, it talks about the Spirit. of being the truth, it's the spirit who bears witness because the spirit is truth. So when we talk about the unity of God, we're talking about his essence, and the Father and the Son and the Spirit possess the identical, the same, essential essence. When we talk about the Trinity of God, we go back to Genesis 1, and it's incredible in terms of what the first book in the Bible tells us. In Genesis 1, verse 26, it says this, God said, and it's God's Elohim again, said, let us make man in our image and in our likeness. Notice the plurality of the Godhead here. And so as you go through the rest of scripture, you find that God is in three persons of the Trinity.

How does this look? I don't know of any way how in our finite mind that we can comprehend this infinite truth. It's an infinite truth and how do you comprehend this? And you know me, I like to put things down in a picture so you can see it and what it looks like. So this is, I'm not there yet, I'm sorry. I'm ahead of myself.

But just back to God and three persons. The scripture teaches us the Father is God, Ephesians 1, 3, and Vernon's been going through Ephesians now. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And not to go through the Greek here, but God and Father are one and the same.

And then God the Son is, or the Son is God. in John 1.1, the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God, and then when we get down to verse 14, and the Word became what? Flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father. So the Son is God.

And then we also know that the Holy Spirit is God from Acts 5, and you remember the story where Ananias and Sapphira sold this land that they had for a million bucks, right? And then they came to the apostles with $750,000 and said, this is what we sold the land for. And now the numbers are not in there. But you get the picture. And Peter says, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit? You sold it for a million. You're giving $750,000. You have not lied to men, but you've lied to who? To God.

So we know that the Holy Spirit is God. Alright. How do you picture that in your mind? In terms of the Father being God, the Son being God, the Holy Spirit being God. This is my picture in terms of God the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. But then there's the unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit, and the unity is that they're one in heart, they're one in mind, they're one in their essential essence. They have the same nature, the very same nature.

And, you know, as you think about this, Just think what God in his grace has bestowed on you and me. Scripture says that we have the mind of Christ. Isn't that incredible? That we have the mind of Christ and that we share his very glory in the word Jesus Christ said, Father, the glory that you have given me, I have given them. That is, everybody who believes in the person and the work of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so that's why Paul could say in Colossians 127, Christ in you, the hope of glory. Christ in you, the absolute certainty of glory. In you. Learn this teaching on Ephesians 4.

And as he went through the One Body, One Spirit, the Seven Ones, he saw that there was One Spirit, One Lord, One God, and Father. I don't know where he gets that noise from, but there's the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Son, and the Father. And he talked about that being the Trinity.

So then if you go over to last week, we looked at 2 Corinthians 1 verses 21 and 22, and we looked at this from a different perspective. We looked at this, why is it important to study or to understand doctrine? And we looked at it from the fact that God is establishing us. fixing us, securing us, and securing us in Christ, in the person of Christ. Now, I highlighted it different this week, because now He, that is God, and the Father, secures us with you in Christ, and anointed us as God, who also sealed us and gave us the Spirit. So you see the Father and the Son and the Spirit in this one passage of Scripture. And, you know, when you look at all of this, we can be thankful that we do have the verbal, plenary, infallible, inerrant, inspired Word of God. where God reveals his Son and who we are in Christ. And he reveals his purpose to establish us, to fix us, to secure us conditionally in our glorious position in Christ. And the reason is this, that Christ may be personified in your life and in mine. Amen?

Let's thank him. Our Father, we do stand in awe. And stand in awe in terms of who you are and what you've done. And Father, we thank you for your matchless and marvelous grace. The fact that you would take us and put us in the one who knew no sin. that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Father, we are ever so thankful in thanking you for your wonderful purpose of establishing us in the Lord Jesus Christ and growing us in the grace and knowledge of him, that we may be an epistle of Christ to the world, that the world may see him through us. We give you thanks in Christ's precious name.