Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created (Revelation 4:11).
Article IX of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion reminds us that “man is very far gone from original righteousness,” “far gone” from the good and perfect state of his creation at the very beginning, before sin; and so it should come as little surprise to us that the greatest intellectual challenge that human beings face is understanding God. Sin is both a rebellion against God and the alienation from God that is caused by that ongoing rebellion. It is hard to know God when the automatic reaction of our fallen human nature is to turn away from him.
In fact, it is impossible for us to know God, at least on our own, without God’s help. That help is called “revelation,” and revelation is nothing like a human discovery of God and his qualities. Wrapped in the shroud of our sins, for sin is death itself, we are surrounded by evidence about God. Only the worst sort of fool could imagine that the world around us just created itself, but whatever part of that evidence leaks through the barrier of sin is just enough to prove that we are responsible to Someone for our lives and for our behavior, but not enough to tell us who that Someone is with any kind of clarity or surety.
It is of God’s own mercy, then, that we know him by his own initiative and action. He reveals himself to us, by means of the Holy Ghost inspired writers of the Holy Ghost inspired Scriptures. God acts in history, God acts in our lives by the power of grace, and most of all, God becomes man in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ so that we have no excuse for not knowing him as he truly is. He tells us flat out “I AM THAT I AM” (Ex. 3:14), and his Eternal Son made man defines that “I AM” in the most explicit terms: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 28:19). God has said, “I AM… the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
Once again, however, it is a function of sin that many people take the position that they cannot believe in the I AM, the Blessed Trinity, until they understand how One Indivisible God may also be Three Eternal Persons, without confusion or division. Instead of taking God at his word when he identifies himself, they demand God’s own knowledge and omniscience since it is only the Eternal God and Creator who knows absolutely who and how he or anyone else is. The irony is that many of the same people who demand to understand God are paying a psychiatrist $200 an hour to help them “find themselves” and understand who they are. And imagine telling another human being, let alone God, “I will love you as soon as I understand you.” The Wedding-Industrial-Complex would go out of business.
The human imagination just isn’t up to dealing with the One True God. Some of the pagan gods are simply monsters that embody some human fear to be bought off with sacrifices, while the rest are mostly inflated versions of human self-esteem. The Greek god Zeus, for example, is just like a drugged-up celebrity with a beard and few thunderbolts. He’s rich. He lives in a palace. He never has to do anything that he doesn’t feel like doing, and mostly he feels like chasing young goddesses and younger women for his pleasure. The mythical Zeus lives the dream life of a not-too-bright twelve year old boy, untroubled by any serious ambition.
What’s missing in all of the pagan gods is creative, constructive purpose. As the patriarchs of the Old and the New Testaments and the representatives of all living creatures declare in St. John’s vision of heaven, “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” The “pleasure” here, however, isn’t the pleasure of frittered away time. It is the pleasure of a good will; the pleasure of being and of sharing existence with creatures; the pleasure of creating companions, rather than toys or pets; and the pleasure of redeeming those companions from their own sin and folly, nurturing them into an eternal adulthood of love, dignity, and honor as the children of the kingdom of God.
What God offers us is more than most of us, including some of the brightest of us, can begin to comprehend. We keep trying to make God like us, to tame him and to domesticate him, so that we can manage him rather than obey him. Michelangelo was an incredibly gifted artist, but when he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he couldn’t figure out what to do with God, so he painted a picture of Zeus, the man with the long white beard, on the same level as Adam, touching his finger to give him life. Besides the fact that the church has forbade even the attempt to make an image of God the Father, who is self-existing, perfect, bodiless, transcendent, and Eternal Spirit, this well-intentioned picture has done far more harm than good.
Orthodox, biblical Christians absolutely, positively don’t believe in the “man upstairs.” When people say today, “Christianity is obsolete because no one can believe in an old man with a long white beard,” Christians ought to be saying, “Neither do we. Christianity was fifteen centuries old before anyone had the silly idea of reducing the Lord God Almighty to an old man with a beard. And no faithful Christian, who knows anything at all about the Bible, believes that kind of nonsense still today.”
Furthermore, Michelangelo’s famous picture, whatever its many artistic merits, neglects the fact that God did not create man in a game of tag or touch my finger. He formed man from the clay of the earth and breathed the Holy Ghost into him to make him a living soul. And it was through God the Son, who would one day become man, that both the creation of the world and the creation of man took place.
The Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity have genuine, eternal identities of their own, but they do not operate as three separate departments of divinity. Anything that God does is a united action of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The Father is eternally the Father. He is not “like” a human father, but a human father who accepts the fullness of his vocation to be a father and lives by God’s grace is “like God”: an image and likeness of the Father in heaven. God the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, so that there never was an Eternal Father without an Eternal Son. And the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father through the Son as the Living Love of God: not a thing, not an abstraction, but an Eternal Person as unlimited in his divinity, might, majesty, and dominion as the Father and the Son.
There is order, of course, in the Divine Being and the Divine Love, because true love is always ordered. The Father is honored by the Son and by the Holy Ghost, not because of any limit or compulsion, but because to be the Son and to be the Holy Ghost is to love and honor the Father. Equality is not betrayed by such a love. It is perfected, so that love and righteousness are the life of God, rather than the fear, suspicion, and lust for power that blights fallen human life.
We are offered this morning, in the Exhortation that is read each Sunday we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, a perfect example of the operation of the Blessed Trinity, when we are told, “And above all things ye must give most humble and hearty thanks to God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, for the redemption of the world by the death and passion of our Saviour Christ, both God and man; who did humble himself, even to the death of the Cross, for us, miserable sinners, who lay in darkness and the shadow of death; that he might make us the children of God, and exalt us to everlasting life”.
We are saved by the concerted will and pleasure of the Blessed Trinity, together, as the Eternal Son becomes man and sacrifice for our sins to fulfill that will, as the Father bids and accepts that sacrifice, and as the Holy Ghost dwells in each of us to give us the life of that sacrifice, which is in the Father’s acceptance the eternal life of the children of God. Nothing could be more complete or more perfect because we are brought by the divine purpose into being and into more than being—into a life shared with the Lord God Almighty, the I AM, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
We live now as we pray: unto the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Ghost. We are, now the sons and daughters of grace, as certainly and permanently as God is the I AM. We have eternity to work on understanding all of this, although I expect that we will never exhaust what is to be learned about God’s goodness and love. But now, at least, we are simply required to love God back—to love him as he has revealed himself, to love the Blessed Trinity, and to honor and obey the Father as the Son and the Holy Ghost love, honor, and obey him. By God’s grace we are caught up in the life of God, and nothing but God should satisfy our hunger for life, worth, and meaning.