03 - The God We Believe In
Core truth: One God, eternally existing in three coequal, coeternal persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is what Christians have always confessed.
Anchor texts: The Nicene Creed; John 1:1-14; Matthew 28:19
This week's step: Read the Nicene Creed daily, and read John 1:1-18.
This is first-order doctrine and the heaviest session in the course. Your job is not to make a new believer a Trinitarian scholar in an hour. It's to give them a sturdy, ancient summary they can hold, and to make sure they don't pick up an error. Get the precision right yourself before you walk in, especially on the Son being begotten, not made. Read the Leader Notes at the bottom first.
Connect
Pick up the week, then flag the deep end.
- How did Ephesians 1 go? Did they find their identity statements?
Be honest: today's the deep end. We're talking about what God actually is, and parts of it are genuinely hard. That's okay. Mystery is part of the deal.
Read
Read the Nicene Creed together, slowly, out loud. Then these two.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Dig
Let them answer first. Draw this out.
- The creed is about 1,700 years old. Why might it matter that Christians have said the same thing about God for that long?
- (We're not the first. This guards us from inventing our own god.)
- John 1 says the Word "was with God" and "was God," and then "became flesh." Who is the Word? What's John claiming about Jesus?
- Matthew 28 baptises into one "name" (singular), then lists three: Father, Son, Spirit. What's that doing? One name, three persons.
- The creed says the Son is "begotten, not made." Why fight over one word? What would go wrong if Jesus was made, that is, created?
- (Then he's a creature, not God, and he can't save us. This is exactly the error the creed was written to kill.)
Frame
Here's the Christian confession, and it's worth saying carefully.
There is one God. Not three gods. One. And this one God has always existed as three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are equally and fully God, equally eternal, none made by another. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and there is one God. That's the mystery, and we don't dissolve it, we confess it.
- The creed exists because a man named Arius taught that Jesus was created, a kind of super-creature God made before everything else. The church said no.
- The Son is "begotten, not made," "of one substance with the Father." Begotten doesn't mean he had a beginning. It means he is eternally from the Father, the way light is from a flame, never without it. The Son has always been the Son. There was never a time he wasn't.
Now hold one thing carefully, because it trips people up. In the gospel story you see the Son submit to the Father, sent on a mission, doing the Father's will. That submission is about role in the rescue plan, and it's real. It never means the Son is less than the Father. They are equal in being. The Son obeys the Father the way an equal might take a role in a shared mission, not the way a lesser thing serves a greater one.
This matters in the real world. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses use the word Jesus and mean something different, a created being. The creed is how we say: we're not talking about the same Jesus. The God we worship is Father, Son, and Spirit.
Land
- What's the hardest part of this to hold?
Let them say "I don't get it". The right response to the Trinity isn't full comprehension, it's worship. We understand enough to know who he is, not enough to exhaust him. That's what it means that he's God and we're not.
Next Steps
- Read the Nicene Creed every day this week. Make it the wallpaper on your phone if it helps.
- Read John 1:1-18 with the three questions.
Pray
Pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, and point that out as you do it.
- The Christian prays into the Trinity. Let them feel that the doctrine is also a relationship.
- Precision is the point here, so don't wing it. The two things to get exactly right: (1) the Son is begotten, not made and was never created, his sonship is eternal, not just a role he took on at Christmas; (2) the submission we see in the gospel is temporal and role-related, never a difference in being or worth. If you blur either, you drift toward the errors that the creed condemns.
- Avoid bad shortcuts. Don't explain the Trinity with water/ice/steam (that's modalism) or with "made of the same stuff" language (he's not made of anything). Better to say "one God, three persons" and admit the mystery than to reach for an analogy that teaches an error.
- Keep the philosophy words to a minimum. "One God, three persons, equal and eternal" carries more than "consubstantial" ever will for a new believer.
- If they leave confused but holding the creed and worshipping, that's a win. The comprehension will grow over years.