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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER ONE

This is an introduction to the Trinity in terms of its persons, who each Person is, the nature and the salvation as which the Second Person is sent, and in which the Spirit of God is intensely, immensely and intimately active. As to that salvation, the theme proceeds to how it is obtained, or neglected,  and how this relates to the nature of Deity Himself.

TRINITY CHAPTER ONE

 The Witness, Work and Way of the Trinity in Love and Salvation

God is invisible. Visibility is a capacity to be captured by optical equipment so that the time, space, movement, character or elements of a thing can be discerned, or data toward this found by observation. When the type of vision is ocular, then the type of thing will have material components. God makes material things - law-girt, character-governed, so that matter being what He makes, He is not material. Hence to optical equipment He is not visible, just as - to use a rather paltry but pointed example - I as author am not visible WHEN and BECAUSE you read these words.

Anyone would be expected to know that; it is elemental to any understanding at all; and so is the invisibility of God.

However, whether I or any other causatively enveloped (but not contained, since God the author of human causality is within Me and He is not so contained) being, deposit speech, we realise that this is not a matter of law-girt containment: bad grammar for example is not such. Foolish imagination is not such. I then EXPRESS what I want to say, and this depends on what I think and envisage invisibly, drawing from whatever if any visible objects and observations in that realm, as of course from whatever invisible rational reflections and imaginative conflagrations of conception, or icy cold considerations of whatever amplitude. There are arousings of one's spirit, as occurred when Paul was at Mars Hill and saw what went on, not least the altar the to unknown God (Acts 17), and this can elicit thought or lead to a swift direction of the invisible eye - that is the power of the spirit of man to discern in the invisible realm - to God who made it.

In this work, our concern is not so much with His existence and the impossibility of overthrowing the grounds for this belief, such things being shown in the various sets such as

Deity and Design...., 

Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Who Answers Riddles,  and Where He is, Darkness Departs,

Scientific Method,  Satanic Method and the Model of Salvation,

Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer),

SMR and TMR,  

The gods of naturalism have no go!,

along with the other volumes in this area, listed in Search,

whether directly or through the topical indexes.

It is rather with the nature of God as revealed, and in particular, with His trinitarian truth.

Thus we look further. Seeing with the spirit plus the mind, with its logical filter, imaginative capacities and testing modes, as well as more directly as we perceive persons in general, as one whole with various aspects but an overall comprehension or at least apprehension of what they are both in kind and in individuality, we look towards this One of the multitude of invisibilities with which we are conversant and through which we so much operate or co-operate or war, as one race, and in individual fashion as the case may be.

Desire to see is not of any given weight, perception is not of any shape, though through it we may (or may not perceive shapes) and intention is not of any special coloration. These things are simply invisible as is any desire to dispute it. It is all in the realm of thought, imagination, desire, conception, discipline or its lack and understanding or the want of it. Some of us then, and it appears a vast majority are in this field, will tend to look to God in any important feature or aspect of living, as one might look to a house one owns, if attacked, sick or in need of a supportive environment in which to work.

In so doing, there will be two, and only two kinds of search and find mission. One will search and not find, and the other will, in some measure, search and not find. This makes it really quite simple.

Those who search and find will obviously have looked where it is that one does and can find God, and those who do not will either look in the wrong region or with the wrong desire, so that being warped in intention, and God being Spirit without material composition, merely making such things as their Creator, in terms of which they gain logical ground, and incidentally, facility for logical investigation with successful outcome, they look in the WRONG WAY.

Thus the two types, looking where He may be found and where He may not, these operate; and in the latter case, there may be a wrong directional motif or motive.

We turn now to those who look where He may be found, since our topic and theme in this volume is the knowledge of God, and there is no great gain in studying for this purpose, what does not reach the subject in view.

Subject ? Should you not have said 'object' ? one might be asked. No, the term 'object' suggests something readily available by simple investigation. You would scarcely refer to your very neighbour in this manner, since he is so very much a subject, and his subjective life is so rich and varied, in general, that the term 'object' suggests something far more accessible and dirigible than is actually the case. Some neighbours of course are more objective than others; but this is another use of the term. In this adjectival form, it means 'inclined to view things without disturbing irrelevancies or contrary motives, so that one might hope to see them as they are, without systematic warping or distortion.'  A subject may be an object subject or a subjective one: it depends on the way that neighbour functions in his spirit, warped and wayward or reasonable with duly functional use of his powers.

Let us then take an objective subject and such a person, by mercy delivered from the rebellious spirit and dissident nature with which mankind since his fall is now naturally equipped, more or less obviously, relative to God. Such a person looks for God where He may be found. Why is this so ? It is because that one has ceased to be confused and confounded by looking where He may NOT be found or with a wrong spirit so as to distort what MAY be found.

We move now into biblical territory (with due respect, thus far, to Romans 1 and Ephesians 4:17ff.). Having been saved by grace (since the Bible is demonstrably the word of God as shown in the above list of references, and since this is our topic in applied theme), the person looking effectively for God, has two major helps to the workings of his or her personality, individuality and rationality, spirit and nature in this.

The first is the Bible, which sets out in a way to avoid the ephemeral thoughts, the merely imaginative thrusts and erroneous confusions, what is the case concerning Him. The second is the Spirit of God, who moves on the heart, in the mind and indeed, in the very competence of one's power of spiritual vision, one's own spirit, to enable things not otherwise easy to understand. In one way (only), it is like understanding or not - music, or architecture, or computing or physiology. If you have this understanding, then problems relatively tend to disappear, and systems of thought to be applicable and knowledge to be eludicative and testing to be confirmatory or corrective, and so on.

So here. If one is equipped with the sort of approach of spirit and mind which is ready to learn, able to learn, delivered from mere vocal yokel imaginations (and such is not a social term here, but one regarding the effective or other approach to the One with whom we have to do - God Himself), and is in fact regenerated (as in Titus 3:5ff.), and so washed and restored to the type of image which culture compresses, seduces or warps, the one is ready to see. This is not enough, but it is the first of the foundational needs. It is by no means beyond logic, for as shown above, logic requires it.

It is, however, one thing to use logic to find someone, and quite another to continue in that vein when the one sought IS found. Some have an idea of someone and on meeting that person are filled with admiration, horror or distaste. There may even be a hot argument, and words of more lava than logic may be emitted on one side or the other. The likelihood of a due and correct understanding is thus small. To know something you must not only be equipped with mind and spirit for it, but the will for it.

When thus the one is ready to seek the vision of God, to see Him, to understand Him at this point and have a sound grounding in knowing Him, so that what follows in the end is what was well begun at the first, there is then still action. The word of God has already been noted, which shows the roads and the scenery. The Spirit of God is also necessary to focus the eyes and to emphasise the major features which so readily to dim eyes (of the spirit, metaphorically) can become diffused or even confused.

In Proverbs 1, you have the nub of this matter. Let us look at the first part of the section here relevant, verses 20-23.

                    I will make my words known to you."

The first point to our present purpose is this. There is an obvious peril in seeking to find and to know God, that great supernatural neighbour who is also the sovereign and founder of the universe and of us who are in it, and it is that we might be inclined to 'love simplicity'. In this case, it is the one in view. It is not that we might have too little mind,  or too little education. It is something to the point. We might have some idée fixe, some obsessive or compulsive or directive dynamic within us, which makes us spiritually simple-minded.

You get this sort of thing very readily in those who having once tasted the things of God, have found it more to their taste to spit them out, and so, to change the image, they are like shallow soil in which seed germinates, but does not live because it is scorched by the sun. In Christ's parable, this is the word of God which dies in their hearts, because they are not broken up, but having some superior conception of themselves or lustful desire, they become mere spiritual residues, living out lives without God.

However you may also find it in those who tossed this way and that, find it too upsetting to track down the things that matter most, and become experts in diversion, by radio, TV, text messages, blogs or whatever; not that these things need be wrong, any more than breathing; but to take the latter case, there should not be too much dust in the air, however good one's lungs.

If then one is ready to be TAUGHT, rather than be SIMPLE-MINDED, the usual equation, then one can learn. But by whom is one to be taught when it comes to God ? There is assuredly no one better than God. But HOW will He do it ? Here in Proverbs 1, we learn that it is by His Spirit. He is ready to pour this out on the sincerely enquiring and ready soul. What then is the RESULT of such a situation, when this actually happens ? It is this:    "I will make my words known to you."\

There is a rebuke, for no one is without sin against God, simply for a start, and the correction must be applied to one's spirit and equipment. It is called repentance when one is ready for this, and it operates (as in Acts 11:18). God may grant it, and when He does, it is effective preparation. But what if He does not want to do so ? someone may ask. In Ezekiel 33:1 and I Timothy 2 and Colossians 1 and John 3, with I John 4:7ff., we find one thing in common: It is this. If there is one thing God hates it is, lack of love (I Corinthians 13 is eloquent on this).

• HE IS LOVE. He says so, meaning in context that He entertains NOTHING to the contrary, allows NOTHING to spoil or soil or compromise or qualify it: its is regnant and foundational. Lovingkindness and mercy go before Him, just as justice is foundational to His throne (as in Psalm 89). HE INSISTS and PERSISTS with His desire that having made peace by the blood of the Cross, He might reconcile all things, yes ALL THINGS to Himself. He is not so simple as to allow man to determine this in one swoop of spirit, since this may be insincere or mere emotion. God FOREKNOWS who are His without absolute knowledge and sovereignly ensures that they become His in due course (Romans 8:29ff.).

Despite the ideas of some, this is HIS protestation: He SO loved this world, and not coming in order to judge it but to save it, GAVE His only begotten Son with this in view, so that anyone who believes in Him should not perish. His motive is love to the world; negatively, it is NOT to judge it, and positively He has provided all needed so that believing in Him fulfils that love. What does not do so, He intimates in John 3:19, has only itself to blame. Those who would blame Him are in defiance of this word.

God then is willing. What then is one so turns and is so reproved and so repents ? Then one might say: Oh the magnitude of the word of God, which I now see to be His in the Bible, alone valid and verified among all religions, and that He is not a careless and insensitive sot, who allows cruelty to flourish and vast numbers of superior plans not to happen, while man suffers. I now see that His word is what we go by, and most of us go by it, passing it by. In fact, He has both SAID and DONE all to the uttermost point, beyond the mere plans of politicians. Not as mere king but as GOD He has come and died for my sin, so that being cured of this spiritual indisposition, I might see and know and understand and by converted, and knowing God Himself have eternal life (Matthew 13:13-15, John 10). It is man who is remiss; God has done all, and calls and what is more, is willing to MAKE HIS WORDS KNOWN TO US. He says so, as we saw, in Proverbs 1.

How then does He do this ? It is by His Spirit. Thus His Spirit applies the word of God, elucidates it, teaches it (as in I John 2:19, God Himself the pre-eminent teacher, and as in Matthew 23:8-10, the adequate one, whom no obedient Christian allows to be displaced in this, His office). To be sure, we may minister to one another, help, teach, but it is HE ALONE who has the final say, the final teaching, the impact that matters and illuminates definitively, as He puts His word into our minds and spirits and hearts.

The Father is that grand repository of wisdom and grace, mercy and love, understanding and peace, beauty of holiness and power which is EXPRESSED definitively as God in His eternal WORD, as in John 1, Isaiah 48:16, and that WORD is made clear to us by His SPIRIT, applying and expounding, inculcating and reviewing.

Already we move to the trinity. With God there is not a row of books with his words in them, as with this author; there is ONE WORD, eternal, revelatory and directive of action. There is ONE HOLY SPIRIT, applying that word, intimating it, ennobling and enabling us to comprehend and apprehend, as He enlightens our spirits and purges our hearts, searching us, trying us, leading us on. It is a great work of teaching, purging, blessing, and conforming to the image with which we were created (II Corinthians 3:18, Colossians 3:10). Just as God does not merely set His will and thoughts in a book or a set of them, but in His WORD who is a PERSON and not a manufactured item, so His WORD does not apply these things by a series of on site engineers and instructors and foremen, but by HIS SPIRIT.

We can HAVE words to speak and to write, and DO things by thought and means; but God has His expression in a PERSON who IS the word, and applies and enables and empowers not by mere appointees, and means, but by HIS SPIRIT.

There is thus a specificity and specialisation that God has, in this, that as Isaiah 48:16 has it, God as Speaker indicates that He has not spoken in secret but openly. He has spoken from the beginning. Then we find that it is the Word spoken, the One with the message who Himself is now speaking as having been sent, and further we find that it is the Spirit of God who accompanies Him in His coming. There is nothing surprising about this: as in the baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in Matthew 28:19, done in the name, not the names, of these three, so it is with this same threefold God, one Being, three persons, that blessing comes. You find this in II Corinthians 13:14: the GRACE of the Lord Jesus Christ and the LOVE of God and the COMMUNION of the Holy Spirit, Paul seeks to have with all those to whom he writes.

Mathematically, the case is simple, for the word for WORD is also in Greek that for logic, reason and cause. It is clear that it is expression in context, but it has these intimate elements with it. God spoke and it was done as commanded from the first, and to the last, as in II Corinthians 4:6, just as He spoke and the universe had to come, so now in Christ Jesus, the incarnate word, He has commanded light to come to our hearts, and in this, the Holy Spirit explains and impresses the word so that we UNDERSTAND. It is not an event like pyrotechnics because it is not merely something then outside ourselves, but a matter imbued into us, concentrated in our minds, resolved in clarity in our hearts and brought to our attention in comprehension growing, as we walk with the Lord. When you walk with someone, it tends to bring a knowledge which if this be lacking, is very hard to obtain.

We are therefore cordially advised to WALK in the SPIRIT (Galatians 5) and to FOLLOW Him who is the word, and to do so unequivocally. In general, friendship cannot be equivocal; what love does a 'friend' have if at the point of crisis, a certain ambivalence appears! Is that a friend ? No, a friend as the Word of God announces, loves at all times. God Himself, the criterion and basis of all friendship, it the friend both above and before and after all, for in Him there is a love which will neither leave nor forsake (Hebrews 13, Romans 8:29ff.). HE IS LOVE; in love, He does not fail. Many may be shallow-ground substitutes for spiritual people, frazzled and dead with various delusions; but more are grounded, rooted and grounded in the faith and know God in His nature and actions, both through what He has said and its application by His Spirit. However, there is more, for He is known by habitual communion and reference and friendship, as one knows a friend; and with Him, this knowledge is greatly enhanced by the intimate and inward operation of the Holy Spirit.

Without that, it would be too lacking intimacy and ready understanding; without the Word of God, eternal and personal, it would be too hard to find the definition and delineation. Without the Father, there would not be that to be expounded and spoken. God acts as one BEING, and in three persons, each with precisely the same nature, desire, purpose and plan, but with specialised functions in the domain of mankind, his awakening, his salvation and his illumination; and as He is, so He does. As He made man in His image (spiritually of course, since matter is a product of God, as noted and we are discussing GOD not products, as our basis here), so man is encouraged by his own capacity to speak and to seek intimately to bring understanding and to formulate before speaking; and though we do such things in time, the Maker of time in our sense, where you have to wait for things, is not so limited. In all this, HE is three eternally, as to persons, one eternally, as to being, and never alone. He is one alone; but He is never alone.

Thus in John 8:29 we read that Christ was NOT alone, for His Father was ALWAYS with Him. The only thing that made for aloneness was His salvation, which as the WORD He carried out in Person on the Cross. Since sin separates from God (Isaiah 59:1-2), and the WORD of God was at that time bearing its guilt and penalty for all who would receive Him (Romans 8:32), to whom go all things, therefore He was denied all things in this exchange, and cried, "My God, My God, Why have You forsaken Me!"

This was not surprise but the splendour of substitution in which eternity was on this earth in the Word momentarily interrupted by disruption through vicarious sin bearing. In the sending, Christ rejoiced because of love, to come (Psalm 40, John 3), the Father was willing to send Him because of the heart and beauty of His holy desire, that would not sacrifice His subjects for pleasure or ease, and the Spirit of God moved where He would, as the Word knew and the Father granted.

Thus fellowship is not something God NEEDS from man: He has it in himself already. Man has some idea of this in communing within himself, addressing himself in exhortation as sportspeople often do and various Shakespearian characters did in soliloquy, and in the intimacies of illumination within. God is the basis of it all, and cause not only of the universe, the cosmos, but that personal cosmos, that min-universe, that is each person on this earth, with ideas and will and purpose and understanding, right or wrong, and comprehension right or wrong, and dynamic and drive and hope and resolution and power to resolve or to dissolve, in goodness of heart or in wickedness.

God is free, and has given to man a degree of freedom which, though fraught now with sin, which even when dismissed in guilt is a danger to be watched, so being severely subject to attrition, like wood in the ocean, yet is real enough for man to feel guilt, decide with due deliberation selecting principles this way or that, contrary to expectation or in accord with it, contrary to wishes or to follow them, unprincipled or governed by principle as desired. He is free to will as he will, and not merely to do; to have contempt for culture or to follow it, and to find in himself such an array of possibilities and ideas and schemas for review or adoption, that the concept he is determined is mere reductionism.

However, on the other side, he has such a danger of rationalisation and feeble-minded failure to obey right and chosen principles, or proven principles of truth, that only by GOD is he able in his present state to realise that freedom. How will one be free to will if the will is bound to sin! Thus it is only God who can free man from this. The point is always or usually missed that man being a PERSON, has personal powers of option whether to find, or keep, or value or apply or disregard principles, whether deemed true or not, and to envisage other options and to apply guilt or goodness to these. He is not insane as a race, but deliberates and puts down the foot of action where he will. Of course, being a spiritual being made by God, he has this power by virtue of being a PERSON, and in contact with principles of goodness and comprehensibility and conscience and expectation founded on logical grounds.

Being however a fallen spiritual being, he is not so free. In fact, Christ indicates that serving sin binds a man, and it is necessary for the Son of God to make you free (that is the eternal Word become incarnate in order to effect the work given). That is in John 8. Thus there is a complexity in the matter, as in all pathology. However there is also a perspicacity, for God is able to make man another being, through regeneration, restoring what is spoiled and soiled and inclined to be obsessive about this or that 'simplicity' which distorts the realities of life, its origin and destiny, both generic and individual.

Thus in giving to man the option to REFUSE being another being, God is moving for man in a domain which gives more than self-inflicted will, self-determined will to operate. Now there is another being to take, other than oneself, one corrected and cleansed. If one says NO, then, to that, so be it.

One has been free to reject a self which would will differently; and since sin obscures and seeks to snipe on decisions, God goes so far as to use His own foreknowledge to free man, going past our mere thoughts to realities He only knows to the uttermost, being infinite in wisdom, unbounded, and then applying it, gives to man the reality foreknown for Him. This He does, desiring ALL to be reconciled to Himself through the blood of the Cross; yet in this, He is NOT abusing His power by dictating or desiring, but rather using His truth to discern and to know what is NOT dictation. This He saves. IT is man, He declares with severity, who is responsible, not He, in John 3, and this IS the condemnation that light has come into the world - the one HE did not come to judge but to save - and man has preferred darkness.

Where this is not so, then salvation liberates and once more man may operate as a free being, truly preferring light to darkness and desiring to be instructed by the Holy Spirit according to the word of God.