The God Who Breaks the Rules He Made

0:03 The Trinity does not make logical sense. I'll say it again. The Trinity does not make logical sense. One God, yet three persons. The Father is God, the Son is God. The Holy Spirit is also good. And yet there are no three gods. We do not serve three gods. We serve one God. There is one true God. Hi, welcome. Welcome back to Rooted with Nafemi where we explore God's word in a way that is honest, grounded, and hopefully leaves you a little more in love with God than when we started. Today's episode is about the Trinity and I want to be real with you.

0:44 This episode is not going to give you 1 smart formula that makes God fully explainable and just so many times are trying to make sense of the Trinity. If that's what you came for, you might be slightly disappointed. But what this episode is going to do is that it will open your eyes a little wide as who God is. And I genuinely believe that by the end, if you stay to them, please stay till the end, that you walk away with not just clarity on God, but you live here worshipping him more deeply, right?

1:14 So whether you're someone who just give your life to Christ or you're still figuring out the basics, if you've been in church for years, but it has been that topic that never really unpacked, I think this one is for you. So let me come back to what I said at the beginning. The Trinity does not make logical sense. And now I want to be clear, I'm not saying that Christians is irrational. I'm not saying that faith means that you should switch your brain off or things like that. Like my friends know me, I'm definitely not saying that.

1:42 What I'm saying is this. Laws of logic, the rules that govern how we reason, how we think, how we process the world, those laws were created. You are created by God. And so if God made laws of logic, why on earth would he expect to go to be bound by the same laws that he created? OK, think about it this way. The painter creates a painting. A painter paints a painting. Whatever the proper wording is, the painting exists within its own frame. So the painter is not inside the frame. The painter is outside of its his or she's beyond its greater than its.

2:24 You can't look at the painting and say, well, based on what I'm seeing in this painting, I can fully explain the painter. You can only look at the Mona Lisa and fully be able to explain Leonardo da Vinci. God created logic the same way he created everything, the heavens, the earth, time, matter, all of its. He created it, He spoke it into being, and so God, who spoke logic into existence, cannot be contained by logic. He exists outside of that frame. So when we encounter something about God that our human minds can't fully understand, the Trinity in this case, the right de correspondence is to simply acknowledge it.

3:01 It's just to acknowledge it. And that being said, what is the Trinity? It's basically the doctrine that teaches that God is 1 being eternally existing in three distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And it seems like a mouthful, But these three persons are not three separate gods. I need to make that clear. They are one God, and yet each person is fully and distinctly God. Not a third of God each, but fully God. And I know it seems like a lot more. This is what we see in Scripture right from the very first chapter of the Bible, Genesis 1.

3:40 We see something interesting. It says in I think verse 26 that God is speaking and he says, let us make man in our image, in our likeness. You see terms or words like us and our there and you can tell that's plural. In the very beginning. There's a hint of something communal, something relational within the nature of God and you need to submit. It becomes even more explicit as Jesus baptism. Matthew 3. Jesus comes out of the water, the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove, and the Father speaks from heaven, saying, this is my Son in whom I'm well pleased.

4:13 3 distinct persons, all existing at the same moment. The Father is speaking, the Son is being baptized, and the Spirit is descending. In Matthew 20 verse 19, Jesus gave what we call the Great Commission and says that everyone should be baptized in the name, not names, but in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. So it's not named, it's singular, yet we see three persons. So the change is not a doctrine of somebody invented in the backroom. It is what we see in Scripture. It's woven into the fabric of Scripture.

4:43 So we do not dictate what we want. We rather extract what we see from the word of God from the Bible. So God the Father is the first person in the Trinity, He is the Creator, He's the source of all things, the one who Jesus repeatedly points to and prays to, and we call him the first person Trinity, not because he is greater. Remember I said at the beginning that they are all free and equally good. Or because Godfather is the first person that we are introduced to, we still see Jesus Christ later, and then Jesus Christ introduces us to the Spirit.

5:13 But they were always present. If you look through your testament, they actually signs, but they were always present. So God the Father, as we see in the Lord's Prayer, our Father in heaven, it gives us a sort of intimacy. The father is not distant or is not cold. He's a father. Paul says that the Spirit of God within us helps us to cry. ABBA Father gives us that intimate vibe, you know, for lack of better things. Daddy, Dada, I don't know if you watch like movies, you know, when he's like that strict British dad, he's like, father, would you help me with this?

5:45 But in almost he's like daddy, please help me daddy Daddy seems you know more intimate right point is God the father and then we have God the Son, Jesus Christ. He's fully good and fully human, fully good and fully human. It's necessary for you to know and remember that it's what we believe in this faith. I know there's probably a lot more to not probably there's a lot more to unpacking that, but another episode but John one verse one it opens, you know, very popular verse in the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was God and no longer after he says the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

6:25 So Jesus is not just a great teacher. A prophet like some religions might see or propose. He's God who stepped into skin, walked among us, died for us, and rose again. So if you've ever thought how would God look like as a human being, the answer is seen in the person of Jesus Christ. He's the visible image of the invisible God. And the third person in Trinity, again, not indicating that he is less than the first in Trinity, but the third person that we are aware of or that we become aware of is the Holy Spirit.

7:02 I think sometimes we misunderstand the Holy Spirit. He's not a force, he's not energy, He's a person. He teaches, he guides, he comforts, he he can convict, he can be grieved. In John 14, Jesus tells the disciples that he's going away, but that the Father will send another helper, the spirit of truth who will live in US. So that same Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead lives in US. I don't know I'm remembering this song that moments same power conquered the grave lives in me. Beautiful stuff.

7:35 But the point is 1 good three persons. Each one is distinct. Yes, each one is fully good, each a relationship with one another and this and so people have spent centuries trying to find the perfect analogy for the training. Some tried water 01 God is maybe ice, the sun is liquid, the Holy Spirit is vapor. Some people have said maybe the twins is like an egg. There's a shell, there's a white, there's a yolk. A funny 1 I had is a man who is a father, a son, and an employee at the same time. And why are the people who came up with these analogies might have been well meaning?

8:14 They all do not properly describe the Trinity. If you analyze all of them closely, you see that they are they are loose ends. We see that OK, God the Father and Son and the Spirit can exist in one place in one moment at the same time. What The same mass of water cannot be liquid ice and vapor at the same time.

8:34 Even with the egg as well saying that oh, the the shell, the white, the yolk, saying that oh the all one and everything, it doesn't work as a while these analogies are well meaning, they fall apart. In fact, some of them accidentally describe heresies, theological errors that the church has actually spent a long time correcting. Like if you do something, you find out that there are a lot of heresies that have actually been debunked. I don't want to get too nervous. I'm not going to start mentioning sometimes, but there is a lot of easing and easing and easing.

9:00 But the point is, or my point is, we don't need an analogy to describe between T. Let me give you a different picture or let me try and drive the points in a different way. So ants know some things about us. They know that we can be near to them. Like they know they can sense when we are coming to them. They can maybe sense the vibrations. They know when we've left food somewhere. Maybe you left it on the floor of your room. Or they can tell that, OK, if we step on them, they're going to die. They can tell maybe when they're under our shadows.

9:32 But do they understand our language? No. Do they understand why we build cities? Do they understand why we create arts? Do you understand why we cry or why we love? I doubt can be compared what it means for us to dream about the future or more about the past? Definitely no. So the gap between an ant's capacity to understand and the full reality of a human being is very, very large. Now, if ants cannot fully understand us, why do we think that we should be able to fully understand God? Mind you, the gap between an Anthony human is a finite gap.

10:08 It's large, but it is measurable. But the gap between a human being and God is infinite. There is no comparison. We are not slightly below God on some scale. He is categorically beyond the seas, eternally far out of our reach. So when we encountered dreams and our brain say, oh, this doesn't fully make sense, that is the correct response to be a finite mind standing at the edge of an infinite God. And we don't need to resolve that tension by shrinking God down until he fits into our mind. We can just stand there in awe, in wonder.

10:43 We don't need to find an analogy that perfectly captures God. We don't need to reduce him to something we can hold in our hands. We don't need a definition that fully contains him because a God that you can fully define is a God that you have strung down to the size of your own understanding, and that is not the God of the Bible as I have 14 verse 20 it says, do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary and his understanding no one can fathom.

11:16 Paul in Romans says the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his ways. His parts are beyond beyond understanding and paraphrasing. There's a quote I love so much. It says if God is small enough to be understood, he wouldn't be big enough to be worshipped. And I'm like, this makes so much sense. If I could put God in a box and explain every corner of him, would that be a God worth nearly before? Would that be a God deserving of my awe and my reverence? Would that be the God that we see described in scripture?

11:54 No. So the fact that God is beyond our full comprehension is not a flow in our faith like a lot of people from other religions might point out. It is evidence of his magnitude. Yes. The God that we serve is far beyond our logic. He's that great. So it's not a mystery. Rather deduction of Gentry is something that contributes or pushes the majesty of God. So the question now is, how does this matter to me? What am I going to do with the doctor of the Trinity on a Monday, on a very hot Thursday? And the answer is everything the Trinity tells us about the very core of God's nature, which is relationship.

12:34 Before the world existed, before any of us were born, you and I, God was not alone. The Father, the Son and the Spirit existed in perfect communion, in love, in fellowship, in unity. God didn't create us because he was newly just to clarify, he created us out of the overflow of a love that already existed within him. And what it means is that we're made in the image of God. And so because that we are made for relationship. I listen to a teaching this Thursday and I was reminded of that. I think it's such a beautiful thing.

13:08 We're not made to be alone, right? There's a deep longing in each and everyone of us for connection, for community, for a love that actually lasts, for a love that is not random. So you might try to form that hard guy who I don't really do people, I want to be alone, but deep down you do. You might deny it, but deep down you do and you know. And so that's longing is a reflection of something written into your DNA because you bear the image of God who at his core is relational. Another thing is the dream thing is that when you come to God, you're not coming to a stranger, you're coming to a Father who loves you one through a son who died for you 2.

13:45 By the power of his Spirit who lives in you. 3 God is 1/3 in person. So that is the full weight of what he means. To know God. Not as a vague figure up there, but three persons, all intimately involved in your life, all working for your good. So the God of Scripture, the God who spoke light Into Darkness, the one who parted the sea, is vast. He is unsearchable. He is beyond what any language can fully capture, beyond what any analogy can fully represents, beyond what any mind can properly contain.

14:20 And the crazy thing now is that that same God knows your name. He sees you, he loves you, He sent his Son for you, and his spade is with you right now, even as you're listening to this. And that should be a reason for you to warn burst out in worship. It's supposed to be something that should get you on your knees and be like, God, you're great, God, you're awesome. So next time, maybe any time of worship, and you lift your hands up, I want this to actually be part of what stirs you. But here's another thing, He sees you.

14:45 So this same great God, this God who stands out of time always sees you. So even the means when you think, oh, other human beings might not see you, he also sees you when you might have those thoughts, He knows those thoughts. And so while this teaching should help you to step more into the awe of God, should help you realise God's love for you, it should also push you towards a fear for him, right? And I'm talking about the fear of God today. There is a dimension to the fear of God that actually requires that you actually fear him, that you actually tremble in his presence, just like Isaiah did or John did in Revelations,

15:23 right? They did. You should be able to understand that he is such a powerful God that He pushes you to stand in all of Him. He pushes you to stand in reverence of Him. This is the Trinity. It's not a puzzle to be solved, rather a God to be worshipped, to be revered, to be hallowed. So I hope this episode leaves you a little more in awe of who he is. I hope that that all doesn't just stay in your mind by hope. I remember I was praying before I recorded this, and I really hope that it translates into something real in your prayer, in your worship, in the way you walk through the rest of this week and beyond.

15:58 I pray that all effects that. And that's a wrap. So yeah, if this episode meant something to you, please share it with someone. You never know who needs to hear it. Please. And please, like Jenny, just share this arm with someone. And as always, stay with it. Bye. I love you.