Three grand essentials

Jesus Christ is the one talking in Isaiah 48:16: “Come ye near unto me, hear ye this; I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I: and now the Lord GOD, and his Spirit, hath sent me.”

“The Lord Jesus Christ is a unique person; He’s the only human who ever existed before He was born into humanity,” says Richard Jordan (shorewoodbiblechurch.org). 

“When you were conceived, you didn’t exist before then. Jesus did. He became flesh. He was the one where it’s said, ‘All things were created by Him.’

“It didn’t say He created all other things. It says He created ALL things. The Father didn’t create Him and then Jesus Christ creates everything else. If everything created He created, that excludes Himself. He couldn’t have created Himself.

“The eternal godhead—the Father, Son and Spirit—they each one have someone to love. They love each other. In the trinity, you don’t have God loving Himself. You have God in three persons—each person loving completely, totally, selflessly the other members of the godhead.

“The way the godhead lives is each member lives for the other members of the godhead. Nobody lives for himself; they all live for one another. That’s what love is. It’s much more than an emotion; it’s an action. Love is to value and esteem someone or something that causes you to take action on their behalf.

“You know what pleases God the Father? That in His Son, Jesus would have all preeminence. Colossians 1:19 says, ‘For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell.’

“The thing that thrills His heart is for everything to center in His Son. He loves and treasures God the Son so much. He doesn’t live for Himself; He lives for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“I John 5:7 is the greatest, clearest simplest statement on the triune nature of the godhead in the Bible and it’s left out of practically all the bible’s except the KJB. It says, [7] For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

“You go to a church and they’ll have a doctrinal statement on the trinity, listing a bunch of verses to prove it, but this verse won’t be there. Go check it out.

*****

“When you confess Jesus as Lord, who gets the glory out of that? Philippians 2:11 says, ‘And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’

“So when Jesus Christ is exalted, who does He point to? He points to the Father. So He doesn’t live for His own exaltation; He lives for the exaltation of the Father, and the Father lives, not for His glory, but for the exaltation of the Son.

“Jesus tells us in John 16 that, ‘When the Holy Spirit comes, He won’t speak of His own but He’ll speak of  mine because He’ll glorify Me.’ Every member of the godhead lives spontaneously for the benefit of the other members of the godhead.

“Now, that’s divine life. That’s deity life. That is eternal life. Eternal life has to do with living God’s life and it being your life. The way God’s life lives is that at every point, it lives for the benefit of the other.  That, by the way, is why there had to be three members of the godhead.

“That’s why three is the optimum number stamped all over creation because it reflects the godhead. It’s why three’s enough and five wouldn’t help any more.

“You get a 100 people in a room and we all share the same humanity. Our essence of humanity is all the same, but we’re a hundred different people. Well, in the godhead, the three people in the godhead all share the same essence of deity. But they are three distinct people.

“But the life they live, they each live for the other. Now, if there were only one of them, He couldn’t live for anybody else. If there were only two of them, well, they could never know for sure that they were sharing love, because there needs to be a third object that you can choose from that can be valued by you. But once you’ve got the third one, you don’t need four, five, six, seven and eight.

“By example, statistics say families in America have ‘2.1 children.' But when you have that third child, it changes your life as much as five more do. When you’ve got two kids, a four-passenger car works. The booth at McDonald’s works.

“When you have that third child, now there’s five of you. That four-passenger car won’t work until they’re about five years old.

“In the godhead, three allowed each one of them to live for the other equally and to demonstrate, ‘I’m living for you and I’m sharing with you and making that life work.’

“Eternal life isn’t just living forever; eternal life is the quality of the life that you live forever. You live that divine lifestyle; that divine attitude; that divine thinking process and this spontaneous living for one another.”

*****

Columbus, Ohio preacher David Reid (columbusbiblechurch.org), who is a lawyer by trade, spoke on this same subject once at a summer family Bible conference. He started by asking, “Is there any time in the gospels where Jesus Christ says, ‘Well, the majority text says this and the best reading is this’?

“What He does is He just quotes the Word of God with the firm conviction that it’s true. He doesn’t appeal to logic, or reason, or anything else. He takes it as a given that it’s available and it’s truthful.

“Well, what God said in Exodus 3, when Moses asked for a description of His name, was, ‘I am that I am.’ There’s no appeal to logic or reason. There’s also no appeal to any creative being. He doesn’t say, ‘You can believe it because so-and-so says that He says, I am that I am, and that’s sufficient.’

“If you think about that, what’s the Old Testament standard of proof? Is one witness enough? Deuteronomy 19:15. What Deuteronomy does is it establishes under the law a principle that two witnesses are required. Notice II Corinthians 13:1.

“Is the two or three witness’s requirement something that only happened in the Old Testament or is it a standard of proof that God operates according to throughout time? It’s throughout time. It applies during the dispensation of grace.

“Numbers 35:30. That simply says that if all you have is one witness you can’t testify. It’s inadequate. It’s incompetent as a matter of proof.

“John 5:31. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Can Jesus Christ lie? No because we saw it’s impossible for God to lie. What he’s saying is even the testimony of a single member of the godhead is insufficient, according to the standard of the scripture.

“Verse 32. Obviously three witnesses is preferable and it’s better than two. What’s interesting to think about is what is the strongest geometric shape? A triangle. When you mount a camera or microphone, what do you mount it on?

“John 1:1. That tells you clear as can be that God has existed in more than one person. Luke 22:42. Some people will say God is one God and He doesn’t really exist in three persons; He just has three different ‘modes,’ or three different manners of operation, but in that verse isn’t it absolutely clear that there’s a conversation between two different people going on? They’re apparently different persons with different wills and they can have an actual conversation between them.

“Matt. 3:16. God has to exist in three persons or what do you do with that passage? Plainly there’s something going on there that involves three different people all doing something different at the very same time.

“The very fact that God has a Son is a refutation and a disproof of the notion that monotheism in one person is the correct view.

*****

 “God can’t be incomplete and He can’t be dependent on His creation. Does God need something from man or a created being? You know why that matters? If God existed in only one person there would be no one for Him to love in the absence of His creation.

“If there’s only one person in the godhead, there is no one else for God to love. Is there anyone else for God to glorify or to have fellowship with? If God existed in only one person than He would be dependent on some created being in order to have a relationship.

“John 3:35. John 14:31. John 17:24. What happened in eternity past is the three persons of the godhead got together and decided what they were going to accomplish throughout time. They decided they were going to use time to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ.

“John 17:1. The reason the three persons of the godhead exist is to glorify one another. There’s something very shallow about glorifying yourself but there’s nothing shallow at all about glorifying another person.

“Exodus 3:13. There’s a fundamental order to the universe making three the strongest shape. I John 5:7. Look at verse 8. The idea there is there are three that testify. So there are three that bear record in heaven—the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost and these three are one.

“Let me read to you all of verse 7 in the NIV: ‘For there are three that testify:’

“Listen, people tell you that what the modern versions do is change the ‘thees’ and the ‘thous,’ but that’s not all. When you leave them out in verse 7, then it goes to verse 8 and you think all that’s being talked about in the passage is the water, the blood and the Spirit.

“What verse 7 is really about is it’s saying the three members of the godhead in heaven bear record, testifying to the exact same thing. That ensures that God the Father has satisfied the two or three witness’s standard of proof.”

(new article tomorrow)