Trinity Sunday 2018
John 3:1-17
May 27, 2018
Zion Lutheran Church + Nampa, ID
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Probably one of the most confused, and confusing, beliefs within Christianity is that of the Trinity. The question, basically, is: who is God? How does God relate to Himself. And then, a follow-up question that is closely related, is “what is the will of God” or how does God then relate to us.
Knowledge of God is incomplete without knowledge of God’s will and vice versa. When a person correctly understands one of these, will understand the other. And also if you don’t understand one, you don’t understand the other. Christians have long answered these questions by means of the creeds, the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian, which are simply statements of belief concerning God and His will in relationship to us. We confess in the Nicene Creed, “who for us men and for our salvation…” Through His Son, God restored us. By the Spirit, we are given that restoration, earned by the Son’s death upon the cross, delivered by the means of grace and received by faith.
Let us look at how our Gospel reading for this morning reveals this to us. Nicodemus says to the Lord, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him” (John 3:2). Nicodemus acknowledges God, and without a doubt, this is how it should be for every Christian: that there really is a God. In an age where even the existence of God, of anything greater than ourselves, is questioned, this is extremely important. The evidence of a creation is built into all creation. This is how St. Paul can write in Romans 1:19 “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, even since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Creation itself demonstrates that God exists, and those who deny this revelation from God do so without excuse.
But this knowledge of God is not complete. Looking at nature, at the beauty of creation, might tell you some of the first part of the Creed, that there is a Creator, but it does not tell us anything else about who God is or His attitude toward His creation. Nicodemus recognizes this as well, which is why he approaches Jesus in the first place. He had heard about Jesus, and acknowledges that He is sent from God and that He is a teacher come from God and that God is with Him.
By this we understand the first person of the Godhead, that is God the Father, has sent His Son into the world. This Son of God teaches Nicodemus about eternal life, life that comes only through faith in Christ, who must be lifted up upon the cross. This is how God shows His love, and His will, for His creation: in sending His Son into the world, to bring life, true life, divine life, eternal life. In the High Priestly Prayer, Jesus says, “And this is eternal life, that they know You the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” (John 17:3)
Scripture also tell us that Jesus is the mediator, He is the advocate. We are to know God only through knowing the second person of the Trinity, Jesus. For as Jesus says in John 12 “Whoever believes in Me, believes not in Me, but in Him who sent me. And whoever sees Me sees Him who sent me.” (John 12:44-45) And again Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known Me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.” (John 14:6-7)
And Jesus continues to teach, “unless one is born again, that is born of water and Spirit, one cannot see or enter the kingdom of God. (John 3:3, 5). Here we see the third person of the Godhead, the Spirit, who as we confess, is the Lord and giver of life, who uses the tools of the Word and the Sacraments to create and sustain this spiritual life. We live in Christ by the Holy Spirit to the delight of the Father (Beckwith, The Holy Trinity, 5).
So when we are baptized, we believe; when we believe, we confess our faith; when we confess our faith we speak of one God in three persons. The relationships to the persons is what defines them. The Father begets the Son. The Son is begotten by the Father. The Spirit is preceding. This is what the Athanasian Creed spends so much time confessing. This is how God self identifies, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” Three persons, one God. It is not for us to alter the name of God, it is not for us to speak in any other way about who God is, it is not for us to confuse the persons nor divide the substance of one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.
At the end of the day, when we’re honest, we are often left puzzled by all this, just as Nicodemus was. Nicodemus doesn’t fully understand what Jesus is saying about the Spirit’s miraculous work of new birth through Baptism. He doesn’t fully understand the Divine Sonship of Jesus and the atoning sacrifice He would make upon the cross. Human reason, corrupted by sin, cannot accept many things about God, but as St. Paul writes, it is only by the Spirit of God that we can believe in spiritual things. That is the work of the Spirit, whom Jesus sends from the Father, who bears witness about Christ (John 15:26), as we heard about last Sunday on Pentecost.
And therein lies the key. It is a Spirit wrought faith in God, not just any god or every god, but in the Triune God – God the Father who sends God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit to save those lost in sin and death. That’s why John 3:16-18 is so important, so powerful, so well known, so often confessed: “For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might saved through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”