An excellent lesson on the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity.

May God bless,
Carl
my website -- http://www.nettally.com/saints/
my blog -- http://www.anniemayhem.com/cgi-bin/wordpress/

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The Three Divine Persons
G.D. Watson

While no one can be a New Testament Christian without an unquestioning
faith that there are Three Divine Persons in the Godhead, of the same
substance, eternity and glory; yet there are very few who have searched
into the Bible doctrine upon this subject, sufficient to find out the mode
of the Divine existence, or the offices of these three Divine Persons, or
the experiences we may have in communion with them. In treating upon this
blessed theme, we want to examine some Scriptures on the subject. We will
then endeavour to form a clear view of the mode of God's existence, and
then the special functions of the adorable Trinity.

It is a beautiful task to study about God. The human mind can never be
employed on any subject so full of rich reward as when trying to find out
the knowledge of God. To search after the character and perfections of God
is the highest science, the deepest philosophy, the loftiest poetry, the
sublimest history, the truest theology and the most thrilling biography.

1. Let us examine some Scripture passages that unmistakably set forth that
the true and living God is a community of three Divine Persons. In the Old
Testament the word "Elohim", translated God, is in the plural form,
indicating more than one Person. God is spoken of by the name "Father",
about ten times in the Old Testament. The second Person in the Godhead is
spoken of as the "Son of God" nearly as many times, and the Holy Spirit as
a Divine Person is spoken of scores of times.
When we come to the New Testament where the Son of God is manifest in
flesh and blood, the veil that seemed to hang over the Divine Trinity in
the Old Testament, is entirely removed. Nothing can be more clear than the
revelation of the Godhead, as Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the gospels
and epistles.

In Matthew 3:16 we read, "When Jesus was baptized, the Heavens were opened
unto Him, and the Spirit of God descended like a dove, and lighted upon
Him, and a voice from Heaven said, this is my beloved Son, in whom I am
well pleased". Here we see the Son of God standing on the earth in His
humanity, and then the Holy Spirit descending from the Father and resting
on the incarnate Son in a visible form, and then the unseen but distinctly
heard Person of the eternal Father, speaking from Heaven. Here are not
only three Divine Persons, but they are acting in perfect unity, and their
relative positions exactly set forth their special offices, as the
authoritative Father, the submissive and obedient Son, and the proceeding
and anointing Holy Spirit.

In Matthew 28 :19, Jesus commands His ministers, "to go and make disciples
among all nations, baptizing them in the name (or into the name) of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost". Here again is the Trinity
of Persons with perfect oneness of nature. A name in Scripture indicates
the nature of the person or thing bearing the name, and hence you notice
the name is one, but the Persons are three, baptizing them not into the
names, but into the name, that is, into the Divine nature of one God, Who
is the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

In John 14:16-26, we read, "I will pray the Father, and He shall give you
another Comforter, even the Spirit of Truth". And again, "but the
Comforter, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall
teach you all things". And again in John 15:26, "When the Comforter is
come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth,
which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me".

In all three of these passages, we have a perfect statement of the three
Divine Persons, acting in perfect unity, yet each Person in the same
relative position-the Father as the Fountain of all authority; the Son as
obeying the Father, revealing, and teaching, and praying, in His prophetic
and priestly offices; and then the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father,
by the command of the Son, as the anointing and powerful Comforter.

We read in Acts 1:7-8, that the Father had retained all things in His own
power, "but ye shall receive power, (or as the margin reads, the power of
the Holy Ghost coming upon you) and ye shall be witnesses unto me". Here
is the same invariable order of function in the blessed Trinity, namely
the supreme authority of the Father, the mediation and redeeming work of
the Son, for Whom believers are to witness; and then the Holy Ghost coming
from the Father and the Son, to fill believers with power and boldness
sufficient to send them to the ends of the earth, or to be martyrs.

In Ephesians 2:18 we read that through Christ, "we both have access by one
Spirit, unto the Father". Here is the same unchanging order of the three
Divine Persons; Jesus is the Mediator, through Whom we have access by the
operation within us of the Holy Spirit, unto the Person of the Father, Who
is the Divine Fountain Head, the ultimate resting place of our souls. More
than a score of similar passages could be cited, in which the three
Persons of the Godhead are mentioned, and always the invariable order of
office belonging to each Person.

2. The mode of Divine existence. Let us put together all the various
thoughts which we gather from the Bible, as to the order of the Divine
Personalities, and find out how there are three Persons of eternal
necessity, and only three, and the relation they sustain to each other.

It will not hurt us, but help us, to do a little deep thinking, and go
slow in these sublime mysteries. After we get through, it will be so much
easier to understand a great many things about God, and the Bible, and our
own religious experiences which have in the past so puzzled and perplexed
numberless Christians.

There is only one God. The Scriptures declare this over and over. Hence
Unitarians and Mohammedans are gravely false when they charge us
Christians with worshipping three Gods. There is one and only one Divine
Being, Who is a Spirit-substance, without beginning, without ending,
without increase, without diminuition, with absolute power, knowledge,
truth, love, justice, wisdom, goodness. He fills all immensity, possesses
every possible perfection in all infinite degree, and is eternally
immutable.

In this one Divine substance of Spiritual Being, there are of necessity
and eternally, three coordinate Persons-the Father, the eternally begotten
Son, the Word of the Father, the eternally proceeding Holy Spirit. There
are not two Fathers, nor two Sons, nor two Holy Spirits, nor two Gods; but
one Father, one Son, and one Holy Spirit, Who exist in one blissful,
uncreated unity of substance and being. The Father is the Fountain in the
Godhead, supreme in authority and love Who utters forth His word in a
second Person and pours forth His Spirit in a third Person.

The Father is never commanded, is never sent on a mission, is never
subjected to humiliation, like the Son. He is never sent forth like the
Spirit nor is visible to human vision like the Son-Lamb, or the
Spirit-Dove. As Paul says, He forever "dwells in a light that no man can
approach unto". We are told in Scripture that the Father made His Son to
have dominion over all things, visible and invisible, with one exception,
and that was the Father. It is the supreme office of the Father to love,
and give.

The second Person is the only begotten Son, the Word of God, the Father.
Of necessity the Divine Being must utter forth the blissful knowledge He
had of Himself; and this utterance, this outspoken Word, this Infinite
delight, which God has in His own perfection, breaks forth of necessity
into a glorious Person, called the Word of God, the Son of the Father's
love. It is through God's understanding that He knows Himself, and His
self-knowledge inside the bosom of God, constitutes the eternal generation
of the Son. Ever since God existed, He certainly saw and understood His
own infinite blessedness, and as God's self-knowledge of His own bliss,
constitutes the very Person of His Word, of His dear Son, you see that of
necessity the Son is of the same eternity with the Father.

When God said within Himself, "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten
thee", (Psa 2:7), we are to understand it as an eternal act, inside the
glorious Godhead, without beginning, and without ending. God's knowledge
of Himself is not an act once done and finished, but an act incessant, and
ongoing forever and ever. Therefore the ecstatic joy of God's looking into
Himself, and understanding Himself, and speaking forth that
self-knowledge, which constitutes the generation of the Son inside the
Divine bosom, is transpiring at this moment, in all the vastness of the
Divine Nature, just as it has been transpiring in the eternal past, and
will continue through the eternal future. No angel mind, that has been
gazing for countless ages into the glad perfections of God, could begin to
tell us of the infinite bliss that God has in seeing His own glory, in
understanding the riches and perfections inside of His own bosom. It is in
this unimaginable bliss that the Father has in Himself, which forms the
Person of His Son, we see the reason why Scripture piles on the emphasis
about Christ being the "beloved Son", "His dear Son", "the only begotten
Son", and the "Son of His love".

When the eternal Father gazes down into the blissful immensity of His own
fullness, it is not a mere look, a mere glance of the eye, but it is
vital, and substantial, and reproductive. It is this abiding act of His
infinite fecundity which forms another Divine Person; co-equal, and
co-eternal, with His own Person, that adorable, begotten Son, Who dwells
in the bosom of the Father. He is the articulation of the Father's
self-knowledge, the pronouncing of the gladness of God's understanding,
and hence is named "the Word, which was in the beginning with God, and
which was God".

The Person of the Holy Ghost is constituted by the union of the love of
the Persons of the Father, and the Son, for each other. The Father loves
the Person of His outspoken Word, with all the strength of His
omnipotence, and the only begotten Son loves the Person of His Father to
the uttermost extent possible to Divinity. The union of these two streams
of melting, burning love, is so powerful, so unctuous, that it constitutes
a third personality inside of the one Divine essence, and that is the
Person of the Holy Spirit, Who proceedeth, floweth, like a river of
burning omnipotence, without beginning and without ending, from the Father
and from the Son.

The Holy Ghost is not begotten like the Son, and is not outspoken from the
Father, but Scripture emphatically states "He proceedeth" from the other
two Divine Persons. Just as the second Person is produced by God's
knowledge of Himself, so the third Person is produced by God's love of
Himself. Just as the Son is light, wisdom, knowledge, understanding,
revelation, truth, so the Holy Spirit is heat, emotion, feeling, energy,
unction, power, love.

We could gather over a hundred passages of Scripture, that would perfectly
fit in with this statement of how the three Persons in the Godhead exist.
The Holy Spirit was spoken of by the ancient fathers, as the "Divine
Jubilee" because in His Person the joyous love of Father and Son were
united. He was also spoken of as the "Divine Kiss", for in His Person was
the fruition of the reciprocal greeting of the two loves of the Father and
the Son.

The Holy Spirit is always compared to things in motion, like air, heat,
fire, exuding oil, a living dove, and a flowing river. He is never
compared to standing water, but to a flowing river, a gushing stream.
Motion is force, power; hence the Holy Spirit is constantly referred to in
Scripture as the power of God, the Energizer, the Person Who imparts
Divine feeling, Divine motion. As Christ is generated by the Divine
understanding, and reveals to us the truth of the Father; so the Person of
the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the burning mutual love of the Father,
and the Son, causes us to feel, to experience, to rejoice, in what the Son
reveals.

The Holy Spirit proceeds from, and always obeys the Father and the Son,
but there is not a single Scripture where the Spirit exercises any
authority inside the Divine nature, but His authority is over creatures.
The fecundity of the Father is seen in the production of the Word; and the
fecundity of the Father and the Son is seen in producing the eternally
proceeding Spirit. The Holy Spirit has no fecundity inside the Godhead,
and is the limit to Divine personalities. But as if to compensate His
blessed Person, His fecundity is manifest outside the Divine nature, in
giving life to numberless creatures. When the Son of God had created all
things, it was the Spirit that brooded over creation, and filled creation
with living creatures and it is by the fruitful Spirit that penitent
sinners are born again.

A beautiful type of this is set forth in Scripture in the lives of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Every Bible reader will recognize the fact that
Abraham is a biographical type of God the Father, and that Isaac is a type
of God, the Son, that peaceful and obedient Son Who obeyed His Father,
even to being offered up in sacrifice. But how few Bible readers ever
remember, that just as truly as in either of the other cases, Jacob was a
type of the Holy Spirit, because of his fruitfulness, from whom came the
twelve tribes, the twelve Princes in the kingdom, corresponding with the
twelve gates in the Bridehood city, and corresponding with the twelve
manner of fruits spoken of in Scripture, which is produced by the Holy
Spirit or the tree of life.

3. The various offices of the three Divine Persons correspond most
accurately with the three great functions in our bodies-the heart, the
head and the hand. God, the Father, is the infinite heart in the Godhead,
the original, unseen, living fountain, from which the other Persons flow.
In every living creature, the heart is the first thing that is formed.
From it, the next organ that is produced, is the head. From these there
come forth the hands, or wings. Every part and atom of a human body was at
one time in the heart. The eternal Father is, in the Godhead, what the
heart is in the body-the fountain, the spring, hidden out of sight-and its
special function is to live and give for with every pulse it is giving.
God is love. The Father so loved "that He gave His only begotten Son". The
Holy Ghost is the gift, the promise of the Father. The Father has
appointed His Son to be the head over all things. Paul tells us, all
things are to be headed up, or retreaded, in Christ. The head is the organ
of knowledge, understanding, wisdom, revelation, dominion, Kingship,
judging, speaking-all of which functions are in Scripture, in multiplied
ways, ascribed to our blessed Lord Jesus. As in the production of every
natural life, the head is the first organ that is produced out of the
heart, so God's Word is the first begotten, the firstborn, the adorable
Person, Who comes next to the eternal Father.

As the hand is the third organ formed from the pulses of the heart and
head, and is pre-eminently the organ of power, of executive strength, of
ministry to all the body, so the Person of the Holy Ghost, Who proceedeth
from the Father and the Son, is the hand, the power, the executive
Minister, the unction, the all efficient Agent of the Godhead. The hand
obeys the heart and the head, as the Holy Ghost implicitly and powerfully
carries out the will of the Father and the Son. As the hand is that organ
that ministers to all needs - feeding, bathing, nursing, soothing,
caressing, lifting, and moving-with executive beauty, or delicacy, or
power, the affections of the heart, or the judgments of the head, so the
Holy Ghost is spoken of as performing these corresponding ministries in
the things of God.

Thus in our own bodies, our own God has set up a type of His glorious
being, and the functions of the three Divine Persons. Have you ever
noticed how the power of the Holy Ghost is spoken of in Scripture, as "the
hand", and as "God's right hand", and as "His holy arm"? For years, I used
to wonder why the Bible so many times says, that "God spake by the hand of
Moses". I understand it now, since the glorious Trinity has been so
sweetly and powerfully revealed to me. Moses spake by the Holy Ghost Who
is the right hand of God's power. The very instant that a heart is formed
the head and hands are also within it, of the same substance, and age,
though not manifest. In like manner from all eternity, in the bosom of the
Father, the heart of the Godhead, the love-fountain of all being, there
was the blessed Son and the Holy Spirit, of the same substance, essence,
and glory, to be successively manifested to us creatures in time.

An excellent lesson on the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity.