The Baptist Faith and Message: IIA. God the Father (Part 1)

“God as Father reigns with providential care over His universe, His creatures, and the flow of the stream of human history according to the purposes of His grace. He is all powerful, all knowing, all loving, and all wise.”

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that each of the persons of the Trinity work together, but also that each has specific areas for which they have freely chosen to be responsible. We must be careful about drawing some of these lines too firmly, for there is what we might see as overlap between these responsibilities. Theologians use the term “economy” to describe the relation between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God the Father is the primary mover in creation and providence. While both the Son and the Holy Spirit have roles in this, the Bible depicts the Father as the prime mover and initiator. The entire universe, our own world, and every creature is the product of God’s creation. The early chapters of Genesis describe God’s creative word, and throughout both the Old and New Testaments we see many references to God as the Creator and the world and humanity as His creation. We see in Romans 1 that creation serves as a visible evidence of the reality of God.

God did not simply create the universe and leave it to run on its own. He also watches over His creation, sustaining it and both keeping watch over it and intervening in the flow of history. We call this care “providence.” This general care is provided for all, both those who follow God and those who do not. Providence is the product of the grace of God, given to humanity to show us His love and compassion.

The flow of history, particularly human history, is also cared for by God. The Father knows every event that happens. We must not think of this as God moving through time with us. As part of His creation, God created time, so He isn’t bound by what we perceive as the movement of time. This is another one of those teachings that we, as humans, can’t fully grasp since we are ourselves “stuck” in time. It does remind us that God is beyond our human comprehension, and that He is greater than anything we can comprehend or control.

God’s creation, providence, and oversight of history are enabled by His attributes. We looked at some of the attributes of God in a previous post. Here in this article His power, knowledge, love, and wisdom are mentioned. These affect the specific works of the Father mentioned here. It is important for us to remember that the attributes of God are not just theological constructs, but elements of His person that help us understand who He is and how is able to do all that He does.

Knowing that God is the initiator of creation, watches over us with providential care, and is involved in the flow of our history should provide comfort for us, since this shows us we are not alone in the universe. It also serves as a caution for us, since it reminds us that God sees and knows everything we do, say, and think. The power of God, revealed through His creation and care, keeps and sustains us through our lives.

The Baptist Faith and Message: II. God (Part 4)

“The eternal triune God reveals Himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with distinct personal attributes, but without division of nature, essence, or being.”

If you asked most Christians, maybe even most people who have heard of Christianity, what the single most difficult teaching to understand is, you’d probably get an overwhelming consensus that it is the doctrine of the Trinity. The statement of the doctrine is simple, and this article gives it in a clear and concise form. What is hard to understand is what it means to worship one God who is three distinct Persons but only one essence. Was human beings, we have no mental category for such an idea.

The doctrine of the Trinity has been such a vexing issue for some throughout the history of the church that it has led to many teachings that deny its reality. Some think the three Persons are just different modes of God revealing Himself, not fully distinct persons. Others teach that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are actually subordinate gods, not one in essence with the Father. Still others simply deny the doctrine altogether, and believe that Jesus was a man adopted by God as the Son and that the Holy Spirit is just the power of God in action. Each of these ideas come from attempts to grasp the doctrine of God and of the Trinity in a way that makes sense to humanity.

The divine Trinity stands in contrast to the teachings about God or the gods in other religions. Judaism and Islam teach the absolute unity of God; they do not see any way that God can be “divided” into three Persons and still be one God. Religions like Hinduism have no problem with the concept of more than one god, but each of these gods is a fully separate and distinct essence as well as person. Many Eastern religions have a very impersonal conception of the ultimate One, which may emanate in a number of distinct forms in our current world, but which will ultimately reclaim its absolute oneness. None of these religions can accept the Christian formulation of the Trinity.

Many point out that the term “Trinity” is not found in the Bible, and they are right. However, the concept is found in a number of passages (such as Matthew 3: 16-17; 28:19-20; 2 Corinthians 13:14; 1 Peter 1:2). There is a sense in which the doctrine could be said to have developed from the understanding of the apostles and the Biblical writers, who understood the Jewish concept of God yet accepted both Jesus and the Holy Spirit as God. The lack of a specific term does not make a doctrine unbiblical; other terms not found in the Bible, such as inerrancy, sacrament/ordinance, omnipotence, and omniscience, are also used by theologians to describe Biblical teachings.

As a seminary student, I searched, studied, and thought hard and often of how to understand the Trinity and explain it to people. As an older minister now, I am not only comfortable with the idea of mysteriousness of the Trinity, but I actually have come to believe that it is necessary that God be beyond our human understanding in order for Him to be God. If we could grasp the essence of God, that would make Him like us, only with more power. We would believe God to be the ultimate expression of everything we as humans hope to be, but not as someone far beyond our conception. In a real sense, only a God who is beyond our human understanding is worthy of acceptance as God.

The fact that God is beyond our ability to fully grasp does not mean that God is totally inexplicable or impossible to understand at any level. The Bible gives us His own revelation of Himself, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is, of course, something we can state and believe, drawing from the teaching of Scripture, even if we can’t figure out just exactly how all of that works. (I’ll even go further for myself-I don’t believe that we’ll ever fully grasp the essence of God, even in Heaven, and that’s a good thing.) We are called on to believe in God as He is revealed in His Word, and to have faith that goes beyond what we as limited, finite humans can grasp with our limited, finite minds.

The doctrine of the Trinity is truly a mystery taught to us in Scripture, but that very teaching reveals a God who is beyond us and worthy of our worship. At the same time, as we will see, the Bible teaches us that this immense, infinite God is also involved in our world and in our lives, and wants us to be a part of His eternal family. Far from being a hindrance to our faith, the doctrine of the Trinity should encourage us that our God is indeed One worthy of our faith, our praise, and our obedience.