Today’s reading: Isaiah 34-35; Revelation 1
I don’t think there is any Christian doctrine I struggle to wrap my head around more than the Trinity. It is very clear from Scripture that the one true God exists eternally as the three persons of the Trinity; the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. All three are fully God, and yet each is distinct with separate roles and functions in their relationship. I have read multiple books on the Trinity, trying to understand how better to think about it, but every time I think I am starting to understand more clearly, I run across a passage that just reminds me that there are some things God simply has not revealed to us this side of Heaven, and I need to be okay with that.
The very first verse of the book of Revelation is the verse that is messing with me this morning. John opens the Revelation with, “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place.” On the one hand, this fits really well with what Jesus told his disciples the first time He was alive when, talking about the last days in Matthew 24, He said, “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” What I have generally heard taught about this is that the reason Jesus doesn’t know Himself is that He set aside the use of His Godly attributes during the incarnation. So it’s not that the Son, in His omniscience as God, couldn’t know the day or hour, but only that He didn’t know it at that time when He was speaking to His disciples, but that once He rose from the dead, He knew everything fully. But if that’s the case, then why does the Father have to give Jesus this revelation to pass on to His servants?? Shouldn’t Jesus have known all that the Father knew such that there would be nothing of the sort for the Father to give to the Son?
The Trinity, for me at least, goes into that bucket of things that are super simple and straightforward as long as you don't think too deeply about them. At a high level, if God says this is how it works, it's easy enough to say, "Oh, okay, sure," and move on, but then when you start trying to work out the mechanics of it, you just end up like a deer in the headlights.
One important point I feel like I should make though is that our inability to understand something does not necessarily make that thing untrue. If someone makes a claim about the natural world, and practically or philosophically it just doesn't work, we may very well be safe to dismiss it as false or incorrect, but we have to realize we aren't dealing with the natural world here. We are created physical beings, but the God we are talking about exists entirely distinct from the universe that bounds our existence and perceptions. So when aspects of the nature of the transcendent God defy my understanding, that doesn't mean the Bible is wrong in what it claims about Him. We have to have a category for the fact that we have no ability whatsoever to comprehend a spiritual being that exists apart from the created universe, other than by what that being explicitly reveals to us about itself. And what God has revealed to us is that He exists eternally as one God in the three persons of the Trinity who are all fully God 🤷♂️
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