Jesus of the Gospels 2: His Parables

/2 Comments/in , , /by

One of the most recognizable and yet probably most misunderstood tools of Jesus Christ’s ministry was his use of parables. These were stories he told as he went from town to town, and some of them he definitely told more than once as we mentioned in the previous post on the life of a typical prophet of his day.

The fact that most of these parables had some moral underpinning seemed to have led people to simply label Jesus a “universal teacher” of timeless truths. Much as we like to find nice teaching themes from these parables for our Sunday sermons, we may be surprised that a large chunk of the parable (but not all of them) were meant not as stories of morality, but rather stories of judgment on Israel for its failure to be the light onto the world that Yawheh had called it to be, and also a means to tell Israel that he now was the means of the fulfillment of that responsibility.

Israel As a Light Onto The World

One of the callings that Israel knew and believed of itself was that God had called it to be the light onto the world. This is captured mainly by the prophet Isaiah, and was very dominant in the mindset of Jews at the time of Jesus

“Yea, He saith, ‘It is too light a thing for you to be My servant, to establish the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the scions of Israel, and I shall submit you as a light unto the nations, to be My salvation until the end of the earth’ (Isaiah, 49:6)

“I the LORD have called unto you in righteousness, and have taken hold of your hand, and submitted you as the people’s covenant, as a light unto the nations” (Isaiah, 42:6)

“And unto your light, nations shall walk, and kings unto the brightness of your rising” (Isaiah, 60:3)

This is clearly the context within which Jesus was speaking in Mt 5:14-16. Jesus Christ was not referring to the people as individuals standing before him when he spoke in the famous “Sermon on the Mount” about their light not shining for the world to see. He was talking to them as a corporate, as Israel. Our tendency to read everything with individualistic eyes (and the lack of a different word for plural “you” in English) means we’ve taken Jesus wrongly to mean Kofi as an individual is supposed to be the light of the world. But alas, the man had bigger fish to fry.

Therefore it was in Israel that salvation to the world was to be found (Jn 4:22). It was in them that the world’s hope rested. It was in them that the nations may see light. But here was a people darkened rather, having returned from exile with the prophecies of Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah etc constantly replaying in their heads about how God was going to re-establish his kingdom and judge all their enemies, yet continuously living under the yoke of the Roman empire’s hardship. Coupled with extreme economic situations, injustice and gross inequality reigned between the rich and the poor. As for the temple and its priest, there wasn’t much to be said for a priesthood which was more interested in tithing and taxing the people, than in ways of ensuring justice and mercy among God’s own people (hmm, doesn’t this sound familiar?). The fact that the high priest was appointed via politicking and bribery and not from the descendants of Aaron anymore was even more depressing. In the midst of all this were those who believed God will save Israel if the “righteous ones” bunched together and fought the enemy by the sword, and so there was a lot of tension, banditry and violence underneath the supposed calm of the day.

Enter Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ enters the fray, declaring that indeed the kingdom of God that was prophesied by the prophets has indeed arrived, but in a shape and form that was different from what they expected. He declared that it had arrived in and through him i.e. he was their Messiah, and yet he sought to expand the beneficiaries of that kingdom to include all those that society had cast away in addition e.g. those considered “sinners” like the gentiles (Mt 7:25-30) and even their Roman centurions that suppress Israel (Lk 7:1-10), the sick, tax collectors (Zacchaeus in Lk 19:1-10) , those considered poor and enslaved by poverty (Mt 18:21-35) and so on. Alongside declaring that the kingdom of God had come, he also declared that Israel had failed in its job to be the light to the world (and in whom salvation should have been found) and therefore he himself was taking up the vocation of Israel.

But he couldn’t tell this bitter truth to the Israelites straight in the face, or else his ministry would not have even lasted the 3 years that it did before he’d have gotten stoned or arrested somehow. So he had to employ parables as a means of disguising his message, so that it’s only upon further reflection would you have understood what he actually meant, by which time he’d probably moved to the next town. They were his way of planting unknown seeds in the mind of the Jewish people, until he is vindicated and those who had heard him see the wisdom and truth of it. And this is why he ended some of his sayings (not only parables) with “He who has an ear, let him hear” and why he says to his disciples

“The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them … This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand” (Mt 13:11-13)

Oh this subversive king of ours.

To Some Parables

Note that most of such “subversive” parables began with “the kingdom of God/heaven is like …” . This should tell us that he was talking about something specific, not giving nice stories of “motivational speaking” or moralistic teaching.

So let’s look at some of the parables and see what we will find.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast (Mt 13:31-35; Mk 4:30-32; Lk 3:18-21)

Jesus likens his kingdom to that of a mustard seed. Though it is small, it will grow and spread across the world, and all men and women will benefit from it (signified by birds perching on its branches). Again he likens it to the yeast, where only a small amount is able to work itself into the dough unnoticed, until it takes over. In the above, Christ is showing how his kingdom will slowly but surely spread through Israel and across the world, and become a light to the world that Israel had failed to achieve.

The Parable of the Lost Son (aka the Prodigal Son) (Lk 15:11-32)

This is one of the most popular parables in Christendom, typically used to show how the God loves us in that even in our sins he’s waiting to receive us into his kingdom. Well that is all nice and good, and an appropriate use of the parable. However, I suggest to you that that’s not what the Jews would have heard Jesus talking about. Since the Reformation, our eyes have been accustomed to only see the gospel to be about how God forgives us of our sins so we can go to heaven, but that’s only half the pie (and not derived from a Jewish worldview but from a Gentile one). Could it be then that in this parable, the elder son is Israel, and the younger son is the Gentiles, and that Jesus Christ is talking about how God was willing to make the Gentiles acceptable in his kingdom so that both Jews and Gentiles may benefit from the promises of Abraham as God planned? I’ll leave you to think a bit more about this one yourself.

The Parable of the Wedding Banquet (Mt 22:1-14)

Again he starts off with “the kingdom of heaven is like …” here, and tells his story of the banquet. Knowing their belief in the kingdom to come, the Jews would hear Jesus saying that God was having a party for his son (the Messiah), and had sent out invitations to “those who had been invited to the banquet” i.e. Israel and its leaders. When Israel rejects it, Jesus shows how God intends to punish them for the disobedience and wickedness to him and his servants he has sent by his statement in verse 7 (which NT scholars point to as the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, and which “rapture” fanatics cannot simply accept in good conscience). The banquet is then open to everyone (including all the misfits as discussed before above), and yet God again filters that as well by those who are “properly dressed”.

The Parable of the Tenants (Mt 21:33-45; Mk 12:1-12; Lk 20:9-19)

This is probably the most provocative of all parables and most plain of all Jesus Christ’s parables he spoke to the people. The books of the prophets was replete with so many symbolic pictures of Israel as a vineyard (Ps 80:8–16, Isa 5:1–7, Jer 2:21, Ezek 15:1–8, 17:5–10, 19:10–14, and Hos 10:1). It was bound to be obvious this time round that the “tenants” was a reference to the priest and Pharisees, the messengers were the prophets of Israel, the son was himself and the coming judgment of the “landowner” aka God was what happened to them “in this generation” (Mt 23:34) i.e the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

More than Meets the Eye

Nicholas Thomas Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God has this to say about Jesus’s parables.

“The parables, therefore, are not simply ‘teaching’, with each parable making one and only one moral or ‘religions’ point. Such a theory is totally anachronistic … The parables were therefore essentially secretive. Jesus was not a ‘universal teacher’ of timeless truths, but the starter of a movement which was to grow like an unobserved seed turning into a plant before anyone realized.” (N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God)

And of the more overt Parable of the Tenants, this is what he says

“The parable which breaks this rule is Mt 21:33-46, but Jesus told it plainly because the time had come to abandon the earlier secrecy and force a showdown. Historically speaking, the parable belongs precisely with the action in the Temple, the moment when Jesus at last acted in a way that the authorities could not ignore.” (N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God).

Therefore the parables was the means by which Jesus Christ both declared the arrival of the kingdom of God, and in addition made known the fact that in him was salvation now to be found, and not in Israel. This meant that he was replacing the position of Israel as the giver of light and telling them that loyalty to the old symbols that held Israel together (cleanliness and food laws, the Temple and its priests, the Torah etc) were no longer the basis on which one will be considered fit to inherit the kingdom any longer. And therefore when Jesus says in John 15 that he is the true vine, he is being clear in stating that the old vine (i.e. Israel) is no longer “true”, and that in him only can the Jews (and by extension the world) find their expected salvation, not in the “old vine” of Israel.

It was all subversion, subversion, subversion. But the parables was the means by which he could say what he wanted to a hostile people, and still be able to get away with it until people REALLY stopped to think further.

Rediscovering His Parables

Again, this theme of analysis doesn’t apply to each and every parable, but does indeed apply to a large majority. But  Jesus continues to amaze me as I rediscover the tools of his trade, but more importantly as I also discover my own (and I’m sure many people’s) ignorance of what these “nice” stories were all about. NT Wright himself quoted a friend thus,

“As an American friend of mine put it, most Western churchgoers treat the gospels as the optional chips and dip at the start of the evening. They are the cocktail nibbles. Only after that do we sit down at table for the red meat of Pauline theology”

Indeed our inordinate attention to Paul’s letters (which were written to explain some angles of the gospel, but not to state the gospel message itself) has blinded us to a lot. Mathew, Mark, Luke and John is where the real meat is. Let’s not drown the monumental impact of Jesus’s life, message and his kingdom with our haste to preach a Jesus that is acceptable to everyone (and that can be used to support every “personal” individualistic worldview agenda).

The man had bigger fish to fry, and his parables were his fishing line to catch the fish “who had ears to hear”, who will follow him into the deepest of waters without fear in launching his kingdom, which had come, and yet was not yet fully revealed.

The God of Wonders

/1 Comment/in , /by

I did some reading today on the concept of ‘light years’. Although I previously had a vague idea of what it was, I wanted to know a little bit more. And honestly speaking, today’s reading experience has given me a refreshing appreciation of God’s grandeur.

Prior to my reading today, I knew that light had the fastest travelling speed than any other thing but I didn’t know the nitty gritty of such a speed. Today I found out that light travels at a rate of 186,287.5 miles per second. According to the ‘Ask an Astrophysicist’ section of US National Aeronautics And Space Administration’s (NASA) Imagine the Universe website[i], a light year is the distance that light travels in one year. Question: what is the distance travelled by light in one year?

You can find out the number of seconds in a year by multiplying the number of seconds in a minute (60) by the number of minutes in an hour (60). Then multiply that by the number of hours in a day (24), and multiply that by the number of days in a year (approximately 365.25): 60seconds x 60minutes x 24 hours x 365.25 days = 31,557,600 seconds in a year. So a light year (i.e. the distance travelled by light in one year) is about 5,878,786,100,000 miles (i.e. 31,557,600 seconds x 186,287.5 miles per second).  This is approximately 6 trillion miles.  Can you even mentally picture this distance? What’s more? I found out on this NASA site that (1) the distance from the earth to the Sun is 93 million miles. (2) The distance to the nearest star is 4.3 light years. If some of the information I’ve read on the internet are right, then the Sun is bigger than the earth and most stars are much bigger than the sun so you can just imagine this picture. Mind you, one galaxy is supposed be a collection of some millions to trillions of stars that are held together by gravity.According to the NASA website, the following observation is what they have made:

 “… in 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe, and recently with the new camera HST has observed 3,000 visible galaxies, which is twice as much as they observed before with the old camera. We’re emphasizing “visible” because observations with radio telescopes, infrared cameras, x-ray cameras, etc. would detect other galaxies that are not detected by Hubble. As observations keep on going and astronomers explore more of our universe, the number of galaxies detected will increase.”

Can you imagine? One star as big as the sun or even bigger and one galaxy containing millions to trillions of stars and then having over 125 billion of such galaxies. Make no mistake, this universe is vast beyond imagination! And all these were created and are being sustained by God. This is the God who can be everywhere at the same time, who lives outside of time and who is All-powerful. What an awesome God! And this is only a little bit of the universe I am discovering.

In his letter to the Christians in Rome, Apostle Paul argues that the invisible qualities of God can be seen in the visible world:  “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Romans1:20 NIV. How true! God is big and mighty. No wonder the Psalmist (8:4) asked “what are human beings, that you think of them; mere mortals, that you care for them?” The music band Third Day sing of God’s awesomeness in their song God of Wonders thus:

Lord of all creation

Of water earth and sky

The heaveans are your Tabernacle

Glory to the Lord on high

[Chorus:]

God of wonders beyond our galaxy

You are Holy, Holy

The universe declares your Majesty

And you are holy holy

Lord of Heaven and Earth

Lord of Heaven and Earth

Early in the morning

I will celebrate the light

When i stumble in the darkness

I will call your name by night

[Chorus]

Lord of heaven and earth

Lord of heaven and earth

Hallelujah to the lord of heaven and earth

Holy……holy….holy god

[Chorus]

Precious lord reveal your heart to me

Father holy..

[backround]…Lord god almighty…

The universe declares your majesty

You are holy, holy, holy, holy,

Hallelujah to the lord of heaven and earth.[ii]

Yet this is what the Lord of heaven and earth says through the prophet Isaiah (57:15): “I am the high and holy God, who lives forever. I live in a high and holy place, but I also live with people who are humble and repentant, so that I can restore their confidence and hope.” Further, He sends the prophet Ezekiel (33:11) saying, “Tell them that as surely as I, the Sovereign LORD, am the living God, I do not enjoy seeing sinners die. I would rather see them stop sinning and live. Israel, stop the evil you are doing. Why do you want to die?” His heart cries for us sinners. This same God – the creator of this awesome universe – is still calling us all, today, to come out of darkness into his own marvellous light. This is the God who humbly took on human flesh, in Jesus Christ, to redeem us from sin through that gory death on the cross at Mount Calvary. This is the God who wants to give us eternal life. This is the God before whom we go in prayer; the one who has torn the curtain in the holy of holies to allow ordinary people like you and I to have access into his holy presence daily, hourly, minute by minute, pico second by pico second – in fact His door is ever open to the meditations of our hearts and the words of our mouth. What a privilege to have the God of Wonders as a father and King. Let’s give him all our devotion.

Written on January 17, 2012.

References:

Unless otherwise stated, all scriptures are taken from the Good News Bible – Second Edition © 1994.

[i] NASA’s Imagine the Universe, Ask and Astrophysicist, http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980211a.html , Accessed on January 17, 2012.

[ii] A-Z Lyrics Universe, Third Day Lyrics, God of Wonders, http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/thirdday/godofwonders.html, Accessed on January 17, 2012.

The Human Condition: Are We Good by Nature?

/1 Comment/in , /by

“Man is essentially good but it is society that corrupts him.” This idea for many is inarguable but still for many others it evokes irony, confusion and doubt. We look around and see so much evil – from little lies to murders – yet there is also no denying that men at one time or another do acts of goodness to their fellows. But are these good deeds enough to warrant our thinking that we are good people through and through? In the ninth stanza of Steve Turner’s satirical poem, Creed,  concerning the modern mindset in the West, he says this:

 We believe that man is essentially good.

It’s only his behaviour that lets him down.

This is the fault of society.

Society is the fault of conditions.

Conditions are the fault of society.

Question: Who makes up society? Man. Who proposes those evil ideas of ethnic cleansing, lying about company profits, racial superiority and suchlike? Man. And I am immediately called to attention by the following profound statement which has been attributed to a research done many years ago by the Minnesota Crime Commission:

“Every child starts life as a little savage. He is completely selfish and self-centred. He wants what he wants when he wants it – his feeding bottle, his mother’s attention, his playmate’s toy, his uncle’s watch. Deny him these once and he seethes with rage and aggressiveness which would be murderous were he not so helpless. He is in fact dirty. He has no morals, no knowledge, no skills. Every child then is born delinquent. And if permitted to continue in this self-centred world of his infancy, given free reign over his impulsive actions, every child then would grow up a criminal; a thief, a rapist or a killer.”

The Christian scripture is even more to the point when it says that the human heart is wicked and only God can understand it (Jeremiah 17:9). One author, describing his visit to the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland, where Adolf Hitler sought to exterminate the Jews, recalls seeing Hitler’s words that hung on a wall saying: “I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality … We will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence – imperious, relentless and cruel.” Quite ruthless!

Admittedly for many of us, Hitler is an exceptionally evil man. But we are also reminded of the tragedies in Kosovo and Rwanda, Sierra Leone (where even babies’ arms were chopped off) and Liberia; in these places the world witnessed unimaginable human cruelty – mass killings mingled with rape cases. But let us come home to Ghana and to less gruesome pictures of evil, albeit still symptoms of human depravity. Recent atmosphere in the political arena has given most Ghanaians reason to protest against the coarse verbiage that politicians use against each other. Most of these politicians are educated and they also know our culture’s sense of right and wrong but this has not stopped them from being insulting to each other. Further, let us look at some of the things which we consider normal in our society today: In business circles, a promise is not enough we need a contract. (We may argue that this is necessary because of forgetfulness but it is also often the case that we want to insure against any sneaky behaviour from the other party). We build houses and make doors but they are not enough, we need to lock and bolt them, and sometimes even employ security men in addition. When travelling on long journey buses and aeroplanes, we buy tickets but this is not enough, the tickets must be inspected and collected before we board. Making laws is not enough, we need the police to enforce them (and in some cases even the police need to be policed). All these things, although so familiar to us, are due to our sinful nature. We cannot trust each other. We need protection from one another. So going back to my initial observation that society consist of man, the following question becomes vital: if man makes up society and society corrupts man then where are we getting this idea that man is by nature good?

There is sometimes the idea that, “Oh if only we educate people and give them employable skills and also educate them in ethics and moral values, our social vices will be curbed.” But this misses the point! D. L. Moody, the famed American preacher (1837 – 1899) is credited with the humorous observation that if a man is stealing nuts and bolts from a railway track and you send him to school for formal education, at the end of his education he will steal the whole railway track. The point is this: man’s fundamental problem is not a lack of information or education on how to be ethical or moral. The problem is that our hearts are diseased, if not twisted. Thus, giving a man the best education that money can buy while his sick heart, with all its twisted desires, has not been healed is at best a joke. Fundamentally, we lack the power to do what we know to be right and to do this consistently.

Admittedly we sometimes do good deeds and also find others doing good in our society. Thus there is the question: how is this possible if we indeed are not good people by nature? Since man is the creature of an infinitely good and holy God, there are times when his ways and culture may mirror the beautiful and good attributes of God – such as mercy, charity, honesty, unity etc. But because man is fallen (resulting from the sin in the garden of Eden), all of our ways are tainted with sin. The Bible tells us that man was created in God’s image. Think of man’s condition as a mirror that has fallen and been cracked all over. The image you would see of yourself in such a mirror will be a distorted one. God’s image in man‘s current state is a distorted one . So yes, men do good deeds but this is not because they are naturally pure at heart.  We are like clocks that do not work. Yet even a clock that is not working will show the correct time twice a day, won’t it? But this does not mean it is keeping time. Thus our doing good deeds is not evidence that we are good (i.e. our clocks are functioning well). Rather we are dead spiritually. In theological verbiage, we are fallen – we are separated from God. It is often the case that even what seems like a pure gesture of goodness has some selfish goals – self validation, or emotional satisfaction – rather than for the sake of pure goodness. We often lack that sense of transcendent goodness (the goodness from God’s own person and character) – that something is good, whether or not I or those around me approve of it.

Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, who described to himself as the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15) also explained our human struggle of knowing what is good and yet not being able to do it in these words:

“I know that good does not live in me – that is in my human nature. For even though the desire to do good is in me, I am not able to do it. I don’t do the good I want to do; instead, I do the evil that I do not want to do. … My inner being delights in the law of God. But I see a different law at work in my body – a law that fights against the law which my mind approves of. It makes me a prisoner to the law of sin which is at work in my body. What an unhappy man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is taking me to death? Thanks be to God who does this through our Lord Jesus Christ!” Romans 7: 18-19, 22-25

In a day when the prevailing mindset says that man is good at heart but society is to blame for his flaws, the words of Jesus Christ come echoing through the centuries in sharp contrast: “… from your heart”, says Jesus Christ, “come the evil ideas which lead you to kill, commit adultery, and do other immoral things; to rob, lie, and slander others…” Matthew 15:19. But Jesus comes to us not just with wise teachings and profound observations about human nature; he also gives us new hearts – hearts that beat after God’s own heart –  a new view of God, the world and ourselves and also through his Holy Spirit he gives us the enabling power to do what we know to be right. This is where Jesus Christ stands unrivalled among the founders of all the world religions. Rather than only pointing you to some enlightening teachings and deep truths, He, by his power transforms selfish lives into selfless ones. This is what Christians call the new birth (i.e. born again) – our natural desires and inclinations begin on a journey of transformation: Our desire for power turns into a love for humility and service. We begin to exalt commitment over feelings, forgiveness over anger, patience over shortcuts, confession over cover-up and sacrifice over comfort. And a powerful example is given us in the life of the one who called himself ‘the chief of sinners’; he once persecuted Jesus’ followers, but after having bowed to the Lordship of Jesus, Paul declares to the Church in Philipi that, “All I want is to know Christ and to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings and become like him in his death, in the hope that I myself will be raised from death to life.” Philippians 3:10-11. Not only did he confess it, he lived it and it ultimately led to his execution.

In the Christian worldview being good or doing all the good things is not what will earn you a place in God’s eternal Kingdom. It is your acting faith in the finished work of Jesus on the Cross – that his death pays for your sins and where your life into the future manifests this belief. Indeed, when a Jew once came to Jesus saying “Good Teacher, what must I do to receive eternal life?” Jesus responds saying, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” – Mark 10:17-18. So, if no one is good except God and the situation is such that only good people will be going to heaven then who really is qualified for heaven? No one! But thanks be to God who makes entry into heaven possible for us by means of our faith in Jesus Christ . This is why all the religions and belief systems where one has to do good things to earn a place in heaven miss the real issue. Man cannot be transcendently good on his own to please God. At best a man may be able to abide by his own definitions of goodness (and ofcourse these definitions often change to suit him) but this is not the goodness God seems interested in. Without Jesus Christ, there is really no hope for mankind in having our hearts changed and in pleasing God.

** All Bible quotations have been taken from the Good News Bible – Second edition © 1994.

Is ‘Trinity’ An Unwarranted Complication On The Christian Message?

/1 Comment/in , , /by

“… no doctrine more effectively demarcates biblical Christianity from a variety of modern cults.  Given the historical and contemporary significance of the doctrine, it is lamentable that many Christians today are unable to provide an account of the doctrine’s historical development and its present formulation…” –  John Y. Kwak & Douglas Geivett.

I, like many others in the Christian faith, do believe in the Trinity. But like someone humorously observed, “we often pray to the Trinity that nobody would question us about the Trinity”. Indeed the doctrine is felt by some to be an unnecessary complication imposed on the simple belief in the God. It is understandable but this does not warrant its dismissal by Christians. The fact that we do not understand something does not mean it is not true or real. But to be frank, it is hard to grasp a total understanding of it, isn’t it?  That notwithstanding, I still think we can get a rough idea which can go to strengthen our faith and also help us explain the Christian faith better to those seeking some answers.

In their article Trinity: A Historical and Theological Analysis John Y. Kwak and Douglas Geivett  note that key texts in the Bible about God’s nature fall into three groups:

“(1) those that stress continuity with Jewish monotheism in affirming that there is only one God (Mk 12:29; Rom 3:29-30; 1 Cor 8:4; 1 Tim 2:5; Jas 2:19), (2) those that represent the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three distinct individuals or persons (Mt 11:27; 26:39; 28:19; Mk 1:9-12; Lk 11:13; Jn 14:16-17, 26), and (3) those that variously refer to God in the person of the Father (Mt 6:9; cf. Is 63:16), the Son (Jn 1:1-3, 18; 20:28; Rom 9:5; Col 1:15-20; Tit 2:13; Heb 1:1-4, 8-12; 1 Jn 5:20), or the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:3-4).  From these texts it is clear that the New Testament church, without yet formulating with precision the doctrine of the Trinity, fully endorsed the three key theological strands that would later be woven into a tight doctrinal cord: only one God exists; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct persons; and the title “God” befits each of them.”

The Trinity does present a mystery, but as one of the great philosophers and legal scholars of our time, Mortimer Adler, noted, “Any knowledge of God would be expected to bring both rudimentary clarity and legitimate mystery”. God is the basis of all reality and so his nature and his activity should provide an adequate explanation for what we see and experience in life.

There is a disturbing realization one gets from studying the Bible, on the issue of God’s nature. It becomes unambiguously clear that the God found in the biblical pages is not one that would fit our normal understanding of a ‘person’ as in an individual – one who can only be in one place at a time, is bound by space and changes over time through growth. For we see three persons, all portrayed as being One God together – eternal and infinite in all attributes possessed and also changeless in nature; they do not do things independent of the other. There is obviously a plurality going on in that one word ‘God’. Now some believers, I suspect, believe that we have a singular God who manifested himself over the cause of history in three forms – initially as the Father, then later as the Son and currently he is manifesting as Holy Spirit. But the Bible itself does not postulate a theory of a singular God revealing himself as three persons, each one coming into being after the last one has finished his job. From Genesis to Revelation it is demonstrated that these three persons are eternally co-existing and they work together. So it is not one God manifesting in three different forms over time, one after the other, but rather three persons manifesting their indivisible Oneness of being. “Us” is the word God uses in the creation story at the point when man is about to be created (Genesis 1:26). Yet in the rest of the Old Testament we mostly see God using “I”.

The Theory in Practice

As suggested earlier, what God is like in his being and activity ought to provide an adequate explanation for all that we see and experience. Let us look at a concept which we are all too familiar with – LOVE. Love is the embodiment of all virtue and the highest expression of godliness (indeed the greatest commandment of God tells us to love). God, being God, should not have to depend upon his creation to actualize his capacity to love, for that would make creation as important as the Creator since the Creator would be incomplete without his creation. But the Bible introduces love as an interpersonal quality requiring a subject-object relationship and this is what is shown in the Triune relationship of Father-Son- Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian God (which is the God preached by Christianity) is complete in his love relationship without reference to his creation. The Father loved the Son before the creation of the world (John 17:24). “Beloved let us love for God is love”, admonishes the Apostles John (1 John 4:7-8). I am convinced that the very concept of Love is explained satisfactorily only in the Christian worldview for it is embodied in God himself, the first cause of everything in the created world. On this score alone Christianity stands unrivalled and is therefore a serious contender in the world of ideas.

Looking through John 5:19-27; 16:13-15 is just fascinating. The Father entrusts all things to the Son: his authority, his power over life and judgment. But the Son will not do anything by himself; he will only do what he sees the Father doing. The Spirit will not speak of himself nor seek his own glory. He will bring glory to Jesus by taking what belongs to Jesus and showing them to us. Three self-giving, self-effacing persons constitute the amazing God whom Christians worship! Like the noted Christian Apologist, Dr. Ravi Zacharias often says, it is only in the Christian worldview that the concept of Unity in diversity can be explained in the very first cause – God Himself; we find unity in diversity in the community of the Trinity. It is this aspect of God’s character that we seek to reflect in our life and walk as the Church of Jesus Christ. Indeed Jesus, the head of the Church prayed to the father saying “I gave them the same glory you gave me, so that they may be one, just as you and I are one …” – John 17:22.

I still cannot claim a full understanding of the concept of Trinity but I do find comfort in the words of Mortimer Adler that any knowledge of God would be expected to bring both rudimentary clarity as well as legitimate mystery. God has given enough information to the world that makes having faith in him reasonable. A Christian thus has reason to confidently proclaim and defend the Christian faith in the market place of ideas.