“God as Three”

Sermon Transcript for June 6, 2009

By Pastor Bob Coleman

           
            This second in a four part series on the Holy Spirit will focus on a few scriptural images of God as spirit in three revelations or forms.  Not Pentecost, the meaning of God’s spirit coming in a very dramatic way in what we call the “birthday of the church” nearly 2000 years ago.  Some have thought that the Holy Spirit is only a New Testament experience.  That’s not true.  If you read further and you read openly in all of Scripture.  What I want to do for you today is to prepare a foundation for the next two weeks which will be on the “gifts” of the Spirit followed by the “fruits” of the Spirit.  The point of today will be to show God in three ways.  Now there is an old…at least I don’t know.  I went and ate at Steak and Shake this week and I didn’t ask if they still offer Chili Mac three ways.  I don’t know.  Anybody remember that?  I think it was Steak and Shake.  Well, Chili Mac three ways just simply means a combination that’s kind of mixed together.  And maybe that’s helpful.  But the Scripture I want to show you and share with you today is to help us to see God in three ways.

            The first, that God has chosen, by the way, all three of these are God’s wisdom and direction, is that God is a creator with power, majesty, and, yes, judgment.  We go to the very beginning of Scripture.  The most classic understanding of God’s creative power we find in the third verse in the first chapter where it says, “And God said, let there be light and there was light.  God saw that the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light day and the darkness He called night.  There was evening and there was morning—the first day.” 

            That clearly is that powerful, majestic, creative God that we so often identify.  Now that’s a powerful witness and that’s all right, but then later you can take it and keep God as creator and never go any further.  Isaiah, one of the prophets, in the 6th Chapter of Isaiah though enters us in and helps us to see God as more of a worshipful God--high and lifted up, in fact.  In the very opening versus of Chapter 6 of Isaiah it says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on the throne high and exalted and the train of his robe filled the Temple.  Above him were seraphs each with six wings.  With two wings, they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying.  And they were calling to one another:  “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty.  The whole earth is full of his glory.”

            This moves us from just accepting God as creator but saying that God is an object of worship, to be high and lifted up, mysteriously in a way with these strange creatures in this vision floating around and worshiping God.  There are other examples of that, many, in fact, throughout all of Scripture both Old and New Testament.  But I want to move us to another image which is at the end of time.  Revelation is in a sense is a picture of what will be in its final and complete understanding of God’s creation.  In the 4th Chapter of the Book of Revelation, starting with the 9th verse it says, “Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to Him who sits on the throne and who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before Him who sits on the throne and worship Him who lives forever and ever.  They lay their crowns before the throne and say, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory, and honor, and power for you created all things and by your will they were created and have their being.”  That’s an ending of history.  It’s saying that ultimately and finally the worship and glorification of God will be experienced in a total way.

            But there is also a part of God which is sometimes forgotten after that creation.  It is that God is a God of judging, too.  Making a right decision of what is good and true.  Later in that same book of Revelation, it becomes the image where God is sitting upon the throne in the form of Christ, actually, and starting with the 11th verse of Chapter 20, “Then I saw a great white throne,” John says, “and Him who was seated on it.  Earth and sky fled from His presence and there was no place for them.  And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne and books were opened.  Another book was open which is the book of life.  The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.  The sea gave up the dead that were in it and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them.  And each person was judged according to what they had done.” 

These are only four examples, but they talk about the creator God who has all power and majesty and is ultimately the one who is in charge.  That’s why God can judge in that way as is described in Revelation. 

Now a second revelation that God gives to us is how God is seen in a human being.  We know him as Jesus.  Jesus comes to us and walks among us and is our Savior, as we call Him.  And sometimes we have made confusion because we made it sound like there is God who is creator over here and then there is this completely separate being called Jesus.  I’m going to share some Scripture that pulls this together in a different way and helps us understand.

The first one comes from Isaiah in the Old Testament.  And this is a prophecy of someone who will come.  Clearly in Chapter 42 it says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold – my chosen one in whom I delight.  I will put my spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations.”  Now that’s clearly where God is calling someone, we no later to be Jesus, and if we stop with that he is kept separate.  But then we move on and we see the step of Revelation where God shows us even more.  When Jesus approaches John, the Baptist, in the 3rd Chapter of Matthew, and when he asks for John to baptize him, then as John does so in the 16th verse it says, “As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water.  At that moment heaven was open and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him.  And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son whom I love.  With Him I am well pleased.”  Still sort of an image of father, son separation. 

In our human understanding, clearly a father and son are two different beings.  And that, so far, is the story.  But the writer of the Gospel of John gives us several understandings that are even more helpful.  It starts first with talking about God and Jesus being glorified together.  As it speaks first in the Gospel of John in the first Chapter, Verse 32 it says, “Then John (that’s John, the Baptist) gave this testimony:  I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on Him (that’s Jesus).  I would not have known Him except the One who sent me to baptize with water told me.  The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is He who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.  I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God.” 
John is helping us understand that clearly Jesus has a purpose greater than just walking upon the earth and even dying for our sins.  But to bring what now we understand in terminology a new revelation called the Holy Spirit.  Now the Holy Spirit is further magnified in this relationship with Jesus in that in John 13 it says in verse 31 and following, (Jesus is speaking):  “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him.  If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself and will glorify him at once.”  Here God is bringing together the very understanding that Jesus and God are equals in this being glorified.  And moving on, John continues in quoting Jesus in Chapter 14, Verse 10 when he says, Jesus does:  “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and that the Father is in me?  The words I say to you are not just my own.  Rather it is the Father living in me who is doing His work.  Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.  Or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.”  This experience is where Jesus is helping His disciples and us to know that when you see me (Jesus), you see God, the Father, the creator.  We are one.  One as one God.  That’s very helpful.  We need, as Christians, to make sure we are clear about that.  That it is not a separate God over here as creator and Jesus as a separate God.  We’ve sometimes been criticized in our faith and our interpretation.  Clearly Jesus is God in this passage.  And further, Jesus emphasizes in Verses 23 when He says, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching.  My father will love him and he will come to him and make our home with him.  He who does not love me, will not obey my teaching.  These words you hear are not my own.  They belong to the Father who sent me.”

Now there are other passages that could be lifted up to help share this revelation, this image of who God is.  But so far at this point we have God who is creator and God who is savior that we see and understand in Jesus Christ.  There is a purpose for Jesus coming.  It’s that God comes in human form in our presence to save us.

The third understanding that God gives to is what has been commonly called the Holy Spirit as if it is something separate.  But again, remember God’s Holy Spirit is one that we will see in just a moment did the creation in the very beginning.  So we go back to Genesis and the very opening verse is where in Verse 26th of the first chapter it says, “Then God said, ‘Let us (and notice the plural) make man in our image, in our likeness.  And let them rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, over the livestock, over the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”  That plurality is that God as creator, God as Savior, and God as Holy Spirit existed from the beginning.  That’s the plurality.  Not three different people like we think.  It’s a different understanding of plural.  But there we see the reference that they were there together in the beginning.
But then we get very personal.  For God just didn’t say as He did with light, “Let there be light.”  But when it came to human creation, in the 2nd Chapter it is recorded “that the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being.”  God particularly takes the step to give life to human being because they are created in His image, in that image of a spiritual creation.  And later in Verse 8 of Chapter 3 of Genesis there’s even more of a personal connection.  This is one that is mystifying, in a sense, to think of it.  But in Verse 8 it says, “Then the man and his wife (that’s Adam and Eve) heard the sound of the Lord God as He was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.  And the hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”  Here God is trying to say to us, “If you can’t understand anything else, think of God as personal as someone who could actually walk in the garden.”  It was the Spirit, of course, that was there.  It was the same Spirit that later in the 12th Chapter of Genesis, calls forth a man that we now know as Abraham and says to Abram, “The Lord God said to Abram, “Leave your country and your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.  I will make you in to a great nation and I will bless you.  I will make your name great and you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.  And all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” 

Here God takes a personal step as a creator not just to give life, but to call forth individuals.  Multiple times this is done throughout the Scriptures where God says to someone, “I want you to go and do these kinds of acts in my name.”  It’s Abraham, it’s Moses, it’s Isaiah, its multiple individuals.  We may not hear directly God’s voice but these are models for us that God’s Spirit calls to us.  In fact, Isaiah 6 is asked a question and in Verse 8 of Isaiah 6, “Then I heard the voice (Isaiah says) of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? (that’s Godspeak).  Who will go for us?”  And Isaiah’s response is, “Here am I, send me.”

What we have is God’s Spirit personally engages individual human beings and all of creation to follow God’s will.  That movement of the Holy Spirit is as old as the Scripture itself.  It is not a new understanding in New Testament only.  But John does help further recording the understanding that Jesus comes as Savior, the presence of God in human form, and in the 14th Chapter of John, back in those same discourses, which I encourage you to read 13, 14, 15, and 16 to get a full understanding.  But Jesus, who is God present, is also saying, “I will be with you for all time.”  And the only way that God can be with you or Jesus can be is as a Spirit.  So in the 15th verse of John 14 it says, “If you love me, you will obey what I command you.  (Jesus says)  And I will ask the Father and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever—the spirit of truth.  The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him.  But you know him for he lives with you and will be in you.  I will not leave you as orphans.  I will come to you.” 

Now we know that Jesus physically dies, is raised from the dead, and ascends into heaven.  We say that in our statement of faith.  And with that understanding, then Jesus says there will be a counselor who will be with you.  That’s the Holy Spirit.  It was there with you all the times before, but in the 16th Chapter with just the first verses of five and following it says, “Now I am going to Him who sent me, yet none of you ask where am I going.  Because I have not seen these things, you are filled with grief.  But I tell you the truth, it is for your good that I am going away.  Unless I go away, the counselor will not come to you.  But if I go, I will send him to you.  And when he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment.  In regard to sin because men do not believe in me.  In regard to righteousness, because I am going to the father where you can see me no longer.  And in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.”

            There are more scripture, more passages to be read, but this brings to the end the third understanding that God is Holy Spirit and God’s Holy Spirit has been with us throughout all time and creation and is available in a very personal way.  So that when God leaves as Jesus, God is present with us in that Spirit.

            The bottom line for today is that God has chosen how we are to know and experience God.  We don’t create it in our own imagination.  God is neither singular nor plural as we understand that to mean.  And we think of singular and plural for God as one spirit who has been revealed in three ways—creator, savior, sustainer.  All three are the three-fold revelations of God.

            In the next two weeks, we will look at how that Spirit gives us gifts of the spirit and also fruits of the spirit.  How they become evident of God’s spirit in us.  This is just a partial tour of Scripture.  There are many more things that will support each of these.  And the power and the presence of God is in a sense accomplished—almost. 

            The next and final and for me the most important piece is that God comes as the creator God but also comes and is with us in the sense of being a personal God.  It’s a personal nature of God that he takes the effort to bend down and breathe in to us the breath of life, to create us as individual beings.  Almost beyond comprehension every single being is conceived and made as God forms us, as it says in Psalms 149 “in our mother’s womb”.  As high and lifted up and as powerful as God is, the Spirit of God also fearfully and wonderfully makes each of us in God’s spiritual image. 

            There is an old poem written by James Weldon Johnson, it’s called “Creation”.  It’s actually part of a collection called, “God’s Trombones”.  But I wanted to share that with you today.  And we could have read it.  Roger would have done a beautiful job.  We thought about images to represent the creation story told again from an old Negro, black spiritual understanding.  But James Weldon Johnson wrote this at the turn of the 1900’s. And he actually recorded, or it was recorded for him, telling this poem again.  So what more could we do. With the technology we have today is to have James Weldon Johnson, who died about 80 years ago, to be with us today to read his creation story, to present it as he meant for it to be heard.  Let’s listen for two things as we hear this.  Is that it describes God as being lonely, but it also describes God as being very personal in the creation story.  James Weldon Johnson…

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I’m lonely—
I’ll make me a world.
And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said:  That’s good!

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands
Until he made the sun;
And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said:  that’s good!

Then God himself stepped down—
And the sun was on his right hand,
And the moon was on his left;
The stars were clustered about his head,
And the earth was under his feet.
And God walked, and where he trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.

Then he stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And he spat out the seven seas—
He batted his eyes, and the lightnings flashed—
He clapped his hands, and the thunders rolled—
And the waters about the earth came down—
The cooling waters came down.

Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around his shoulder.

Then God raised his arm and he waved his hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And he said:  Bring forth!  Bring forth!
And quicker than God could drop his hand,
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said—That’s good!

Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that he had made.
He looked at his sun,
And he looked at his moon,
And he looked at his little stars;
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said:  I’m lonely still.

Then God sat down—
On the side of a hill where he could think;
By a deep, wide river he sat down;
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought:  I’ll make a man!

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image;

Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen.  Amen.

            We’ll be printing that and making it available for those who would like to read it again.  You can search and find it on the web.  But James Weldon Johnson, I think in a very creative way, has pulled together the majesty of God as creator coming to save us in a spiritual way but creating us individually and bending down like a mother, as he said, and breathing the breath of life into each of us.  Don’t be concerned where it says, God says, “I’m lonely”.  It’s not so much that God is lonely without us; it’s that God created us for the purpose of having a relationship personally with each of us.  And I offer that to you today.  That’s the reason God came as Jesus.  That’s the reason God is with us as the Holy Spirit so that we might know God and God knows us intimately, to dwell in us as he offers and promises.  So take that to your heart.  Understand the meaning of Scripture.  And the whole purpose of creation is intended for you to know God and for God to know and dwell in you as the Spirit.  Amen and Amen.

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