The God Who Breaks the Rules He Made
The Trinity doesn't make logical sense. And in this episode, I explain why that's actually okay, and why it should lead us to worship. We talk about who God really is, why our analogies always fall short, and what it means to stand at the edge of something truly infinite.
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. 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? 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. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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? 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. 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.
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.
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?
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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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?
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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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,
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.
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.
Apple Podcasts
Castbox
Castro
Goodpods
Moon FM
Overcast
Pocket Casts
Podbean
Podcast Addict
Podcast Republic
Spotify