Introduction⤒🔗

The Trinity is a basic, and in a sense, the basic fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith. It opens up the identity of the God we worship, His nature as a Triune being, at once wholly unified, and yet in profound and loving fellowship with Himself in three Persons. Yet it is also unifying for God’s people on earth, for this doctrine is ecumenical and unites professing Christian believers across the globe as no other doctrine can. Most importantly, this doctrine is directly connected to the believer’s hope of salvation. It is principally in His saving work that God has been revealed as Trinity, as the distinction of the Divine Persons is only meaningful to the church militant in terms of the differing functions attributed to each person in the way of salvation. At the deepest level, it may be that the glorification of Himself as the Triune Being was the essential purpose of the whole Divine decree of the creation of the Universe, and of the redemption of God’s people.

The orthodox doctrine is familiar, but requires restatement at this point. God is eternally One, a Being in complete harmony with every aspect of Himself: ‘Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD’ (Deut. 6:4). There is one Divine essence, and He is God. But God exists in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, ‘and these three are one true, eternal God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory; although distinguished by their personal properties’ (Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 9). The Triune nature of God is exhibited with great clarity in the Biblical account of the baptism of Jesus (Mt. 3:13-17), in the Apostolic benediction (2 Cor. 13:14), and above all in the church’s Great Commission from our Lord (Mt. 28:19). The ‘personal properties’ of the three Persons are, in their inherent sense, difficult to understand, referring as they do to an eternal relationship far beyond our comprehension. Again in the words of the Larger Catechism: ‘It is proper to the Father to beget the Son, and to the Son to be begotten of the Father, and to the Holy Ghost to proceed from the Father and the Son from all Eternity’ (Q. 10). In the ontological sense, that is, in the nature of being, this is all that can be said about the three Persons in their inherent distinction; and therefore, as stated earlier, it is rather through salvation that the Trinity is meaningfully revealed. We can discern the three Persons because of their differing functions within the economy of salvation: thus the Triune God is known, understood, and glorified in the praise of His creatures.

There is something profound in the Triune nature of God: to be three in one. It is curious to note the significance of the number three, even in human life: it has a natural satisfaction, a sense of completeness. Consider the classic three-point sermon: proposition A, proposition B, and proposition C: even divorcing form from content, we receive an impression of something thorough, memorable and resonant. Even in the secular world, this is recognized. The modern public-speaking coach, Carmine Gallo, refers to the ‘rule of three’, the natural ability of the human mind to receive and retain three pieces of information, which she calls ‘one of the most powerful concepts in writing and communication’ (Talk Like TED, p. 191). Moving into the sphere of relationships, we know that human beings here are designed for relationships in twos in this world, and that when this rule is breached, whether through polygamy or adultery, the consequences are grave. Yet is human marriage itself not basically a provisional institution, of which the Saviour says that ‘in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven’ (Mt. 22:30)? The relationship of two is incomplete and passing, but the relationship of the Divine Three is eternal, and our eternal hope is participation in that loving fellowship of the Triune God, a relationship both full and satisfying, world without end. Now it is not my purpose in this paper to trace the historical development of this doctrine, to prove the elements of it from Scriptural exegesis, or to counter the opponents of Trinitarian doctrine in their heretical rejection of these revealed truths. For those requiring assistance in these areas, an outstanding resource is the little book The Trinity by Edward Henry Bickersteth, which, 150 years after its publication, stands unrivalled in its field as an exegetical refutation of Unitarianism in all its forms. Bickersteth arranges the relevant Scriptural passages in parallel columns, showing how each of the truths predicated of God is also predicated of Christ, in a masterly refutation of the age-old Arian heresy. He later accomplishes the same with regard to the Holy Spirit. His work shows how wildly unbiblical are those cults that question the Deity of Christ, preeminent among them, of course, the so-called ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’. But equally, it is not my purpose to consider the believer’s relationship to God in His three Persons in His private life of prayer and communion.

Rather, I intend to address the subject of ‘The Trinity in Christian Practice’, having regard to the public walk of the Christian believer in relationship with the Triune God. This I will sub-divide into three principal heads: first, and at greatest length, ‘The Trinity in Christian Worship’; then ‘The Trinity in Christian Preaching’; and, finally, ‘The Trinity in Christian Service’. With such a subject, it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that we do not suggest or countenance the notion that we have a relationship with three different gods, which would be to stray into the heresy of polytheism. Nor can we consider God as merely revealing Himself to us in three modes, as though to condescend to our limitations by appearing in differing forms: for this would be to revive the ancient heresy of modalism. Rather, we have a revelation of God in Scripture as objectively, meaningfully, and originally the Triune Being, in three Persons. Thus in each of the specified areas, we have a public walk with the One God, but we may also consider ourselves, without contradiction, as having a public relationship with each Person of the Godhead.

1. The Trinity in Christian Worship←⤒🔗

In the worship of God, we as the people of God undertake the highest and most solemn duty of our lives. This is the very purpose of our existence, as Isaiah records for us, speaking the word of the Lord: ‘This people have I formed for myself; they shall shew forth my praise’ (Is. 43:21). And in the various forms of worship, the public worship of God is the highest, for there we join in fellowship with others to praise God, eternally in fellowship with Himself. To worship Him is to enter fellowship with Him in His delight in His own excellences, and fellowship with the angels and saints in Glory eternally singing His praises for His inherent attributes, and for His eternal purpose and temporal achievement of the salvation of His own people. We praise Him as the God who is Love (1 Jn. 4:8): in His inherent nature in the mutual love of the three Persons of the Godhead, and in the manifold expressions of His love towards His chosen people. Our worship is but the pale and inadequate reciprocation of what we have enjoyed, an expression of love to Him that would truly be a fragile and transient emotion, were it not wrought in us by the power of the Spirit of God. And thus, though limited in scope and scale, it is permanent in duration, and an earnest of the vastly greater love, and vastly greater capacity to love, yet to come into our hearts. The Father is perhaps the easiest of the Persons of the Trinity to hold before our minds in worship. He is the Person most directly associated with the creation, and thus with our origin as reasoning beings. Our very existence therefore demands praise for the Father, as the universal generative parent of all creation: the ‘One God and Father of all’ (Eph. 4:6). But beyond that, He is the One who desires, and expects, and commands our worship; as our Lord remarked to the woman of Samaria: ‘The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him’ (Jn. 4:23). The reason for this expectation is rooted in the work of election, whereby the Father has made special choice of us for Himself (Eph. 1:4), and in the work of adoption, whereby the Father has become our Father, in a special and particular sense, beyond that implied in creation (Eph. 1:5). He has expressed Fatherly love in taking on, of His own free will, the responsibility of securing our salvation, and thus it is the Father who is responsible for originating the plan of salvation. This assertion may be rooted in the general association of the Father with all the providential acts of God, as stated by James: ‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights’ (Jas. 1:17). But more precisely, the point may be proved by our Lord’s words in His agony in the Garden: ‘Not my will, but thine, be done’ (Lk. 22:42), revealing a decisive will, distinct from, but in harmony with, the Son’s human will, originative of the plan and execution of redemption. And equally, it is to the Father that the gift of the Son to secure salvation is directly attributed, in the famous words of John 3:16, where ‘God’ must be taken for ‘the Father’ to comprehend the meaning of the text: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’.

Therefore it is both meaningful and necessary to give worship to the Father, both in His own excellences, as possessing the whole of the Divine essence in equal measure with the other Persons of the Trinity, but more specifically for His creative, originative, elective and adoptive functions within the economy of salvation. He is indeed worthy of all praise, because He has thus secured our salvation by these acts of His own will, and the praise for it must be to Him. In Him we have a sure and everlasting hope, as Paul writes: ‘He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?’ (Rom. 8:32). Do we not therefore owe to Him our worship and adoration? Can we not praise Him in public worship as we read the account of Abraham going to sacrifice his only son (Gen. 22:1-19), and halted by the blessed Providence of God, and realize that the Father did not halt, but completed this sacrifice for His beloved people? Can we not wonder as we read of the new relationship forged in the fires of Calvary, the adoptive fatherhood whereby the Father becomes ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven’ (Mt. 6:9), whereby we become ‘heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ’ (Rom. 8:17)? Must we not hold Him before our minds in adoration, as we sing with the people of God in Psalm 27:10 that ‘Though me my parents both should leave, the Lord will me up take’; when we compare Jehovah’s love to a father’s (Ps. 103:13); or when we worship Him as ‘A father of the fatherless’ (Ps. 68:5)? And when we take our Lord’s words on our lips: ‘Thou art my Father, he shall cry, thou art my God alone’ (Ps. 89:26), shall we not marvel that we can sing them of ourselves as well, as a fruit of adoptive love, and praise God as our Father in our public worship?

Equally, we worship and adore the Son in public worship, and must do so consciously. The wise men came from the East with this intention, ‘Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him’ (Mt. 2:2), and His people owe Him the same. When we understand the blessed identity of the Son, we will respond as did the women faced with the risen Lord Jesus: ‘They came and held him by the feet, and worshipped him’ (Mt. 28:9). The Son is the co-equal of the Father, possessor of the entirety of the Divine essence, and our emphasis on the real and true human nature that He took to Himself must never obscure His absolute right to our worship. His claims are beyond question, as He said: ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (Jn. 8:58). He is the same blessed and eternal Jehovah known and loved by the Old Testament fathers.

Yet He is also entitled to a particular worship for His own specified functions within the economy of the Trinity. He is the Person to whom is ascribed the mediatorial relationship with the people of God, in His revelatory, redemptive and monarchical functions, or, as the Westminster standards express it, in his offices as prophet, priest and king. Again, let us note the law of threes in operation! He is the Divine Word (Jn. 1:1), revealing the will of God to man. He is the priest and the offering foretold in the countless sacrificial types of the Old Testament. He is the protector and guide of His people, seen in His theonomic revelations throughout that dispensation, so that, as described by Micah, He is the ‘ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting’ (5:2). Yet this mediatorial relationship in three functions or offices continues in the New Testament dispensation (1 Tim. 2:5), so that we His people have ourselves good reason to give Him worship.

He brought the revelation of God to man in His own incarnation, when He ‘made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men’ (Phil. 2:7). And He ‘came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many’ (Mk. 10:45), in the great antitypical sacrifice at Calvary. He has paid the purchase price for us, required by our sin, and so we share the testimony of the aged Jacob, that He is ‘The Angel which redeemed me from all evil’ (Gen. 48:16). Now exalted at God’s right hand, ‘the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God,’ (1 Tim. 1:17), He ‘ever liveth to make intercession’ (Heb. 7:25) for us, His purchased people.

So the Son deserves and requires our worship as the Mediator who has revealed to us, purchased for us, and sovereignly imparted to us an everlasting salvation. It is His achievement, and to Him be the glory and the praise of it. Thus in the Lord Jesus Christ, we worship God the Son who lived among us, and who died for us, and who is risen again to reign over us for all Eternity. How can there be any response when we reflect on such things, but true heartfelt worship? When we read with the assembled people of God of the Messiah promised, prophesied, typified, let us adore in our hearts the glorious fulfillment of these passages. When we read of the Lord Jesus in His life, death and resurrection, when we consider the theological explanations of these events in the inspired epistles, and the revelation of His consummated eternal glory, let us render praise to our Saviour-King. When we sing of His appointment in God’s covenant in Psalm 89:20, let us rejoice at the love that made Him take on human flesh to become our Messiah:

‘Ev’n David, I have found him out a servant unto me;
And with my holy oil my King anointed him to be.

When we sing of Him as ‘a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek’ (Ps. 110:4), and when we call on God to ‘bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar’ (Ps. 118:27), let us reflect on Christ the redeemer, our priest and our atoning offering. And when we sing in Psalms 2, 45, 68, 72, and many other places, of the wonder of our Divinely appointed King, let us give public worship to the Son, who is now, in the Person of Jesus Christ, our everlasting Sovereign.

And just in the same manner, we must also give public worship to the Holy Spirit. He is the blessed third Person of the Trinity, co-equal and co-eternal with Father and Son, possessing the entirety of the Divine essence, truly God. To Him belongs worship and praise, and though perhaps not so naturally at the forefront of our minds as either the worship of the Father or the worship of the Son, the adoration of the Spirit specifically is a proper and necessary element of our public worship of God. As the Apostle Peter writes to the church of his day:

Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. 1 Pet. 2:9

And in the economy of salvation, the immediate application of the work of God to the believer, in effectual calling, regeneration, justification, adoption and sanctification, is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. Therefore it is Him we must praise when we consider the immediacy of the work of God in our own souls. To Him belongs the praise and the glory of this achievement.

The Spirit may be worshipped as the Divine Person especially present within us, as Jesus promised: ‘I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; Even the Spirit of truth; ... he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you’ (Jn. 14:16-17). His power is active in the worship of God: when we pray, His power permits such prayer to be effectual, so that, as Paul teaches, we ‘have access by one Spirit unto the Father’ (Eph. 2:18). Indeed, He sovereignly aids our prayers, Himself making ‘intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered’ (Rom. 8:26). The Spirit Himself equips with the diversity of spiritual gifts necessary for worship (1 Cor. 12:8-12), and thus enables our worship. Crucially, it is He who builds the church, as Paul writes, ‘for an habitation of God through the Spirit’ (Eph. 2:22); and, as Peter adds, the purpose of this building is to bring forth worship: ‘Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ’ (1 Pet. 2:5). Therefore, in public worship, the Spirit is both the sovereign Enabler of worship — its very source — and also its legitimate and appropriate Object. So as we read with the assembled people of God in Scripture of the evidences of sanctification in the lives of believers, of the outpouring of His presence at Pentecost, and of the spiritual gifts He imparts, we must bring forth adoration to the Spirit of God for His work, which we see all around us in the assembly of worshippers. As we pray in the power of the Spirit for His light on the Word, and for His power to accompany it, we glorify God who alone gives the increase, in the Holy Spirit. As we sing of the power of the Spirit and our desire for His presence, we worship Him, as in Psalm 51:11-12:

Cast me not from thy sight, nor take thy Holy Spirit away.
Restore me thy salvation’s joy; with thy free Spirit me stay.

Equally we acknowledge His work of teaching us, and appeal to Him to guide us, in the words of Psalm 143:10:

Because thou art my God, to do thy will do me instruct:
Thy Spirit is good, me to the land of uprightness conduct.

In such passages, we must bring forth not just worship accompanied and enabled by the Spirit, but worship truly directed towards Him.

2. The Trinity in Christian Preaching←⤒🔗

We are, of course, all aware that preaching is an element, indeed the single most essential element, of Christian worship, and it is precisely because of its importance that we will consider it, albeit more briefly, under a separate head. At its most fundamental level, preaching is the proclamation of the Triune God, and of His message to His creatures. The message of the Trinity is central to the Great Commission that the Lord Jesus Christ gave to His church: ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ (Mt. 28:19). This implies that the message of God as Trinity must be central to the message that is taught: how else could a Trinitarian baptismal formula be meaningful to a new believer admitted to the visible church by the visible sacramental seal? But if this message is implicit in the Commission, it becomes explicit in the Pentecostal preaching of the Apostle Peter: ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost’ (Acts 2:38). In this text, we find God as the Father willing to receive the prodigal in repentance, the Son as the One who has objectively atoned for sins, and thus in whose Name we may be baptized as a symbol or seal of this forgiveness, and the Spirit as the earnest of the inheritance of salvation yet to be received.

Some accuse Evangelicals of Christomonism in preaching, but if we commence from the position that the Apostolic preaching is normative for us, then this quotation from Acts gives a clear example of how the Gospel message may be, and indeed must be, a thoroughly Trinitarian proclamation. Consider the classic structure of the Evangelical sermon, the ‘three Rs’: ruin, redemption and regeneration. This structure has served for countless Evangelical sermons, and probably every preacher here has used this framework with great variety, and for many different texts. Yet this is a Trinitarian structure! ‘Ruin’ refers us to the Father as the Person associated with origins, the creation, the covenant of works and the justice of an offended God; and the application is repentance to the Father. ‘Redemption’ leads us to the objective achievement of the Son in the Lord Jesus Christ’s life, death and eternal resurrected life at the Father’s right hand, having paid the ransom payment of the souls of His people; and the application is the call to embrace Him in faith. ‘Regeneration’ proclaims the Spirit as the One Who must sovereignly work to empower God’s people to overcome the depravity of their own hearts, and thus to repent and believe; and the application is to examine oneself regarding whether this work has been effected, and if not, to seek it from Him. Thus whether overtly or implicitly, the Trinity is proclaimed and glorified in sound Evangelical preaching, and the God of all grace honoured in His three Persons.

Furthermore, the preaching of the Gospel is itself a Trinitarian act. As evangelistic preachers, we stand in the place of God the Father, the sovereign party of the Covenant of Grace, offering as God’s prophetic spokesmen that covenant blessing determined by the Father, as ‘able ministers of the new testament’ (2 Cor. 3:6), covenant emissaries of the Father. Equally, as preachers, we represent the Son in urging closure with His offer of mediation: ‘Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God’ (2 Cor. 5:20). And we stand alongside the Spirit, and in the power of the Spirit, proclaiming the message of the Spirit, as John records: ‘the Spirit and the bride say, come’ (Rev. 22:17). And salvation comes to God’s elect through this Trinitarian act, for ‘it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe’ (1 Cor. 1:21). And the salvation that they receive is itself a Trinitarian blessing, as Paul makes clear in this solemn, powerful passage from Ephesians 3:14-19:

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.

The salvation that is proclaimed is therefore a knowledge of the three Persons; but more than that, a relationship with them, that imparts their rich blessing into the soul of the individual believer. As Herman Bavinck writes: ‘The triune God is the source of every blessing we receive. He is the mainspring of our entire salvation ... Above, before and within him, the Christian has a God’ (The Doctrine of God, pp. 333-34). So thus all the glory of the saving effect of Gospel preaching is to the Triune God; the preacher has but done his duty, to God be the glory, Who ‘giveth the increase’ (1 Cor. 3:7).

3. The Trinity in Christian Service←⤒🔗

Having giving our worship, obedient service is the believer’s on-going active response to the wondrous attributes and achievements of our Triune God. As Paul says, after his passionate outpouring of praise at the end of Romans 11: ‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service’ (Rom. 12:1). Discerning our status in covenant with the Triune God, our service is the response of praise and gratitude. Yet even this response is a fruit of His indwelling our lives in the full Trinitarian presence and relationship of salvation, as our Lord promises: ‘If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him’ (Jn. 14:23). This indwelling brings forth its result in the life of sanctified obedience characteristic of the Christian believer. And this service is marked by diversity, the diversity of gifts and the diversity of exercise of them, comparable to the complementary function of the parts of the body (1 Cor. 12:12-30). This complementary diversity of role and function is itself mirrored at a higher level in the diversity of the nature of the Triune God. Therefore, we may state that the Triune God is concurrently the reason for, the cause of, and the model exhibiting faithful service. In the Father, we have the loving yet exacting requirements of a faithful parent, who expects His children to observe all things whatsoever He has commanded us. He lays upon us the solemn obligations of Christian service, and patiently chastens us in our failure to put into practice the commandments He has given. As the writer to the Hebrews comments, ‘We have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?’ (12:9). Equally, in the Son, we have the blessed example of a loving elder brother, who has demonstrated for us His perfect obedience to all the Father’s requirements. Again, hear the testimony of the writer to the Hebrews: ‘Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him’ (5:8-9). And in the Spirit, we have the enabling presence of God in our lives, bringing forth the activity of Christian service, an activity itself analogous to the resurrection of Jesus in its divergence from the life of the flesh. As Paul writes in Romans 8: ‘If the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you’ (Rom. 8:11). Thus we find, in each Divine Person, motivation and strengthening to press on with a life of zealous, diligent, reverent service to Our Lord God.

Conclusion←⤒🔗

So let us clearly acknowledge that our salvation is nothing less than a real living objective relationship with the Triune God, and this therefore marks every aspect of our public walk. Our worship is enabled by Him and directed to Him, as the Triune God, in Himself, and in each Person of the Trinity. Our preaching is in His place and in His power, in each of His three Persons, and its success comes from Him, and our service to Him is rooted in and enabled by each Divine Person. Truly we can say with one of old, ‘In Him we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). Therefore, as we marvel at the wonders of our God, let us live to His glory and honour, in each area of our lives, and dedicate ourselves more entirely to His service.