The Baptism of Jesus is one of the clearest Biblical pictures of the Trinity: Jesus was baptized, God the Father spoke and the Holy Spirit descended. All three Persons present and interacting; all One God.
From our Bible-based study of the Trinity, we have established so far that all three members of the Trinity are God and all three are Persons. Having said that, how do these persons exist? This was one of the early and most important challenges for the early church to figure out because, in part because the church came from both strict Jews who believed in ONE God and pagans who believed in many gods. How were they to understand Jesus?
For the first almost 500 years the church worked to clarify this truth. They did this in large measure through various church councils and the resulting creeds that came from them. This week we will look briefly at church history to understand their thought processes and ultimate decisions.
In the church today we stand on the foundation of careful study of wise Biblical scholars of the past and I hope this brief view of them will inspire you to study the church councils in more detail.
Last week we started our study of the Trinity and we could see from the Bible passages that God the Father is God, God the Son is God, and God the Holy Spirit is God. All of them in the Bible are described with the attributes of God. This week the lesson looks at what it means that each one is a Person. We also briefly look at the false Mormon interpretation of the Holy Spirit (who they describe as different from the Holy Ghost).
In a recent television interview, Pastor Rick Warren was asked his opinion about the Mormon Church and he graciously replied that he had a problem with their view of the Trinity, that it was not the Biblical view. I appreciated that because it cut to the core of the difference between the Mormon Church and the Biblical Christian Church–what God do we believe in?
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