What then of the “incomprehensibility” of the oneness of Father, Son and Spirit, that we are told of? Does God’s Word bring us such confusion concerning our relation to Christ, and Christ’s relation to His Father God? Remember there are two very different kinds of “incomprehensibility.” There is the incomprehensibility of a contradiction, that is, it is not to be understood because it is a falsehood, and then the incomprehensibility of eternity, that is, it is beyond the capacity of our minds to fully appreciate the infinite magnitude of that which lies outside of time. The truth is that the eternal nature and sovereignty of God is beyond our mortal comprehension. He is not bound by time, but it is He Himself who binds all of time together, and of course our present corporeal minds can’t fully appreciate what it means to exist outside of time; to see time not as a string of events, but as a whole; as a snap-shot or a sculpture. We are inside of time looking out, He is outside looking in. The Trinity operates by playing off of a partial truth. It inserts a contradiction into God’s identity, and then claims the “incomprehensibility” factor over the fabricated contradiction. When we ask, how can God be One God and three persons, intrinsically knowing this to be a contradiction, it replies, “this is the great mystery of the faith; the incomprehensibility of God Himself.” As we have said many times already, in biblical terms God never forms Himself into “father;” His very essence is Father. But if we were to try to describe God using the example of the “cloth” idea given to us by the Greek word monogenes, it would be unbiblical, and for that reason absolutely false, to say, “The cloth is like God in that it forms itself into a scarf, a robe, and a blanket. All are different and yet all are equally cloth. Just so God takes the forms “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit,” all are different and yet all are equally God.” This is the Trinity in a nutshell. But we will never once find this idea in scripture; it is unbiblical and misleading. And when we worship this ideal we are worshiping a god constructed by the minds of men rather than the God of the bible. Let us rather worship The Father, by way of The Son in Spirit and in Truth. This is how the scripture teaches us to worship. Now if we are to Biblically describe the relation of God, Son, and Spirit in terms of “the cloth,” we must say that God is the original fabric, and that the Son is the only perfect cutting of that fabric. That The Spirit of the Father that dwells in the Son is the Spirit that He “gave up” when he proclaimed “it is finished,” and “emptied himself” on the cross. And so we would call that Spirit, the Spirit that resides in the members of the Church, a perfect eternal cutting of the perfect eternal cutting: a sort of monogenes of the monogenes of God. For the body of the Son was broken so that we might also partake in the Life of God, that Life being a permeating extension of The Father Himself, flowing into us through the blood of the Son, which we must drink to survive. The Son is in The Father and the Father is in The Son and we the Church are in them and they are in us. Although, to say “cut off,” does not quite suffice because it still implies a change, as though something was taken from God. The truth is that God is more like a fractal. If you don’t know what a fractal is, it is a mathematical set that displays self-similarity when graphed (see the picture). What that means is that any one portion, or “arm,” of the original fractal is the exact representation of the original. It remains rooted in the original, and carries within itself the same infinitude that the original holds. God reaches out to us with His Right Arm, His Beloved Son, who contains within him everything his Father is. Hebrews 1:3; “He (The Son) is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at right hand of the Majesty on high.” When Jesus, after his resurrection, gave us the Spirit, it was for the purpose that we too might be, as he had prayed in Gethsemane, one with The Father God as he is one with The Father. It was as though that “fractal” of God that binds the universe together, reached out through the Son and into us, making us the Church, the bride of Christ. As my brother in Christ and a great sufferer for the gospel Watchmen Nee says, “Just as God put the first Adam to sleep and drew from within him his bride, so did God put the last Adam (Christ) to sleep (to death) on the cross and drew from within Him the Holy Spirit, by which we are presented to Christ as His bride, the Church.” Imagine God for a moment as the ocean that is itself the primary source of all life giving water, and realize that the water within the ocean is God’s Spirit. And now imagine that from the ocean flows a river, and that the river flows into a sea, and that the sea is His Son. It is wrong to think of the Comforter, God’s very Spirit, as another sea or lake or pool; the Comforter is the living, breathing, moving waters that flow from God. But we should think of ourselves as dry and barren pools that might be filled with the Oceans flowing waters by rivulets that extend from the Sea. Or rather, that when we are drawn to the Sea in order that we might drown in the Son, we will find that the rushing Spirit has washed us up into the Ocean that is our God and Father. By the Son we are in The Father and The Father is in us, hence, His spirit flows like Living waters through us. This oneness is mysterious, but it is a mystery that has been revealed beautifully to Gods children as simply the oneness between Father and child. It is by no means incomprehensible, and if we make it out to be so we are placing an insurmountable void between ourselves and God, for the oneness of Father and Son is the very thing upon which our relationship with our God is founded. This oneness is described to us time and again in the New Testament, elegantly, and clearly. We need no clever words or new doctrines to describe it, we need only to trust His Word that the oneness the Son shares with the Father is the oneness that we also, through the Spirit, share with the Father as His children. “That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17:21-23 One as we are one. It is no incomprehensible matter how the Church is one, many members making up the greater whole, many components, having the same will, the same purpose, the same binding Spirit. It is the Spirit of God that makes the church one; and just as the Son is one with the Father in the Spirit, so are we, the church, one in the Spirit. His Life is the Spirit that moves as that eternal “fractal” and stream, pouring out from God into His Son; containing and preserving its wholeness and eternity as it reaches from the Father, through the Son, and into us. The Father Loved us so much, that He sent us His most precious thing, His very best, His heart: His Only Son, for the purpose that we might be one with God as Christ is one with God. If we call that relationship incomprehensible, we are denying the beautiful simplicity of the relationship that He calls us into. To the learned mind, and to those who possess the wisdom of this world, the relation between father and child must be an utterly incomprehensible concept, just as love is an incomprehensible thing to worldly reason. But the relationship that is itself our salvation is a relationship so profoundly simple, that it is not only completely understood by the child’s mind, but requires a childlike mind to truly understand it in all its wonderful, immovable reality. It is the relation of child to “Abba;” to Daddy. “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, Abba, Father.” Romans 8:15 This is the beautiful truth of the gospel: that though the Spirit of that resides in the Son of God we can be children again, reaching up with open arms to our true Daddy. This is why there can be no deeper understanding of the nature of God than to realize him as The Father, and no deeper understanding of Christ than to realize him as God’s One True Son. The only perfect Son of the only perfect Father. And wonder of wonders, He has called those who believe on His first born, sons and daughters, members of His eternal family. That is the ultimate truth of the universe. Any “truth” claiming to go deeper than that glorious fact, is a deception. Imagine how a child would stumble in the dark the moment he began to believe that there was something more essential, more profound, more fundamental to understanding his father, other than simply knowing him to be his “daddy.” Imagine how the father’s heart would break when his child began to primarily understand him as “the plumber,” or “manager of such and such plumbing company,” or even worse, if the child decided the bond between them, the oneness between father and son, was an incomprehensible thing. The father would say, “No! I am not those things to you, because you are my beloved! To you, my precious child, I am simply daddy.” There is nothing greater that the God of the universe could ask us to call him, no deeper or more profound way to understand Him than as our Abba. You see, for that little boy it was behind the titles “plumber,” and “manager” that the child found the real thing to understand his father by, not the other way around. As soon as he says, “oh, my dad is really “Manager,” now I know him,” or, “what my dad is to me is really unintelligible, now I see,” a tragic thing has happened, and the fathers heart is broken until the understanding is reversed. What if no matter how hard the father tried, the child would not accept that “father,” or “daddy,” was the deepest understanding of who his dad was to him? There would open up between the father and his child an insurmountable chasm; a chasm that could never be crossed until the child chose to believe his father that there really was nothing deeper to discover there than the simple truth of father to son. Oh, how the fathers heart would break if his child were to believe the lie that the bond between father and son was fundamentally incomprehensible! It is a simple matter how the Son is one with the Father, just as it is a simple matter how a body of believers that meets in a jungle hut in Guatemala is one with a body of believers that meets in a basement in Shanghai. The Father, the Son, the Church; we are all one in the Spirit, which binds us together in will, and in purpose, and in love. The true mystery of God is not how The Father, His Son and His Church are one in His Spirit, no, the scriptures reveal that to us very clearly. The incomprehensible thing is that He loves a wretched sinner like me. That when the grinding insanity of my pride is muted or drowned out by some sweet song, or even sweeter silence, He finds me, and whispers, “I am your Abba, and you; you are my son.” It is not something I can grasp, or get on top of; it is not a mountain to be climbed, or a phenomenon to be observed in a laboratory; it is a hurricane I must let tear me from my patch of earth, a whirlpool I cannot swim against, a blazing sun, consuming me, burning a stone’s throw away. It is there, within the eternal, uncontainable magnitude of His love where the wondrous mystery lies. It is that His love is so wide and so deep and so long and so wide, that He would give up His only Son for me. That love that God is, that love that contains more than the sum of space and time, and that extends far, far beyond our three dimensions, that is the great mystery of the faith; the thing that my mind cannot encompass, but that rather encompasses my mind, sweeping me up, calling me into ever increasing depths of wonder and revelation. It is reality itself. And it is the mystery that I will spend eternity discovering. I have said once that the my entire reason for writing is to remind us that there is no foundation deeper, no understanding more profound or easier to grasp than to realize that the God of the universe is simply our Daddy. And now I am telling you that all I am trying to say here is that complex and extra doctrines like the Trinity take us further from, rather than bring us closer to our God. Ephesians 4 tells us that the work of Gods Kingdom here on this earth is to bring the bride of Christ into completion “In the knowledge of The Son of God;” As soon as this completion takes place, The Son will return in the glory and splendor of God his Father, and the world will mourn. When Paul said that, he did not mean that we have to invent more doctrines. He meant that the completion of the body consists of all its members being rooted firmly in the Gospel of God’s Son, having nothing else as their doctrinal core. While man made doctrines still cause the body to dispute about that core issue of the nature and identity of God’s Son, we are giving Satan the pleasure of seeing that he has caused some delay in the return of Christ. Of course, God knows the exact hour of Jesus’ return, but even so, for God to witness such stagnancy in His church causes Him great heart ache. And so brothers, let us no longer allow the enemy such pleasure! Let us draw closer to God through trust in His Word, rather than drift further away from Him through reliance on the fallible word of man! Brothers, I plead with you now to return to the simple truth of The Son of God. Stand firm on that Rock, and dispense with any and every doctrine of man. We have One God and Father, and One Lord, who is His Son Jesus Christ. It is essential to the preparation of the Bride of Christ that we, the church, are One Body in this One Faith. It is Satan’s goal to delay the preparation of the Bride as much as possible, by creating dissentions, by inserting confusion into the faith of her members, and by coaxing us away from the full knowledge of The One True God who is Our Father and of His Son, The One Lord who is Christ; the knowledge that is clearly laid out for us in The New Testament. It is only in the Word of God, the testimony that is in His Son, that we, Gods people, are one. Apart from The Son we can do nothing. The Bride cannot be fully prepared while there is still even a speck of confusion within about the identity of God’s Son. Paul says that the work of God in His Church is to bring us into unity and completion in the knowledge of The Son of God. The day the Bride has been made truly one, rooted and grounded and completed in the One Faith, which is of One Lord, One Hope, and One God who is our Father, will be a glorious day indeed. Father, in the name of your Son hasten the coming of that day, and may we your people be delivered from the schemes of the evil one by the name of your Son, leaning not on our own understanding, but in all our ways trusting in Your Word alone. Amen. “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all… So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.” – The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 07:48:15 +0000
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