What Is the Trinity?

Ask most Christians to explain the Trinity and watch them reach for an analogy.

Water, ice, steam. An egg. A three-leaf clover.

Every one of them is wrong, and the doctrine itself is simpler than the illustrations.

The word "Trinity" is not in the Bible. The doctrine is.

The term was coined later to name something Scripture kept saying.

Three statements have to be held together, and the difficulty is that all three are true at once.

First, there is only one God.

This is not negotiable, and it is where Israel started.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:

Christianity is not a religion of three gods who cooperate.

Second, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are each called God.

The Father is called God throughout Scripture, and few people dispute that one.

John identifies the Word — Jesus — as God, and then says the Word became flesh.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Thomas, looking at the risen Jesus, says it to His face.

And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.

And Peter treats lying to the Spirit as lying to God, in one breath.

But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?…

Third, the three are genuinely distinct from one another.

They are not three names for one Person wearing different masks.

At the Jordan all three are present at the same moment: Jesus stands in the water, the Spirit descends on Him, and the Father's voice speaks from heaven (Matthew 3:16-17).

The Son is not talking to Himself.

And when Jesus sends His disciples out, listen to the grammar.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:

Name, singular. Three Persons.

The analogies all break.

Water, ice, and steam is one substance in three states — which makes the Father, Son, and Spirit three modes of one Person, and that is not what Scripture describes.

The clover gives you three parts adding up to one God, so none of them is fully God.

The Trinity is not 1 + 1 + 1 = 3, and it is not one God in three costumes.

God's being is one, and three Persons eternally share that one divine nature.

No created thing works as a picture of it, because God is unlike anything He made.

Mystery is not the same thing as contradiction.

A contradiction says one God and three Gods, or one Person and three Persons.

The Trinity says neither.

It says one in one sense, three in another — which is hard to picture, but not incoherent.

You should expect the Creator to exceed your categories.

What is the Trinity?

One God.

Three Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Not three gods. Not one Person in three roles.

And it is not an abstraction. It is how God gets to you.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.

The Father sends. The Son saves. The Spirit indwells. One God, doing all three.