What Is The Trinity?

You may have noticed that I missed last week’s Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday posts.  Our church was having revival services all week and my time usually spent writing for the blog was spent listening to a fiery old evangelist and rejoicing with heaven as people were getting saved.  I don’t regret missing my articles one bit.

Anyway, last time in Matthew Mondays, we looked at why Jesus was baptized.  This week we’re going to look at what happens at the baptism:

“As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, 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." (Matthew 3:16-17).

This is one of those rare moments in the Bible where we see all three members of the Trinity in action: the Son is being baptized, the Spirit is resting on Him, and the Father is speaking from heaven.  What a beautiful, powerful moment this is.

This begs the question what exactly is the Trinity? 

Now, there have been millions maybe billions of Christians before me who have asked this question, and I make no claim as being definitive here, but I’ll do my best to relate my understanding of what the Trinity is.

If we want to know what God looks like, the first place to look is in a mirror, not that we are gods by any means, but that we were made in His image.  He made us to look like Him.  If His image is Trinitarian, then ours probably is as well.  There’s this verse in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 that says, “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

And so we have what looks like a trinity of man: body, soul, and spirit.

The body is the physical being, the soul is the mind, will and emotions, and the spirit is the power of life, which was extinguished after Adam’s fall, but reignited by the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit: three separate parts but one.

What if the Trinity of God looks like this as well: the body in Christ, the spirit in the Holy Spirit, and the soul in the Father: three separate parts but One?