Starting in Revelation 1. Today is Trinity Sunday, and it’s the time each year where we focus and highlight this central Christian belief. We’ve been going through the Book of Revelation. We’re going to primarily be looking at a text to and from the book, but as it’s more topical in nature, we’re going to include some other passages as well. We look to the reading of God’s word.
If you join with me in prayer.
Father, as we meditate on your heavenly mysteries of wisdom, we ask that you cause us to grow in true faith and devotion to you. We ask this for your glory and for our great good, and we ask that you grant this all through our Lord Jesus, in whose name we now pray. Amen. Revelation 1, beginning in verse 4. John to the seven churches in the province of Asia: Grace and peace to you from him who is and was and is to come, and from the 7 spirits before his throne, from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the rulers of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and has released us from our sins by his blood, who has made us to be a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be the glory and power forever and ever. Amen. Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be. Amen.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and was and is to come, the Almighty. Revelation 5. Then I saw a Lamb who appeared to have been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by four living creatures and the elders. The Lamb had seven horns and seven eyes, which represent the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And he came and he took the scroll from the right hand of the the great English mystery writer Dorothy Sayers.
She once remarked that to the average churchgoer, the mystery of the Trinity means the Father is incomprehensible, the Son is incomprehensible, and the whole thing is incomprehensible. Something put out by theologians to make it more difficult, nothing to do with daily life or ethics. Now, Sayers herself did not believe this. She was a devout Christian. She was a defender of Christian belief, but she captured what many people think.
Everyone tells you that the Trinity is important, but you’re not really sure why. Why is it important? Because we’re talking about the living God who has revealed himself to us. He has revealed himself to us in a relationship of covenant love. And God’s loving relationship to us, it flows out of this loving relationship of he who is Father, Son, and Spirit.
Spirit. A mystery, to be sure, but the universe is filled with mysteries, and many of our most profound questions that we have actually come out of the nature of who God is. We, we see that the nature of God, of our Creator, as some of the first moments of answers to these difficult questions, because we’re made in his image and his likeness. To leave God out of the picture is like trying to use an X-ray machine without any film. It just doesn’t work.
And because the Lord has revealed himself to us as one God in three persons, we must know and worship this God. Only Christianity has a triune God. It has often been said— I’m sure you’ve heard this said— that if you’re going to make up a religion, you would never do it this way. You either have a single god with no derivatives, or you would have multiple gods, but not one God in three persons. And that’s exactly what we have in Christianity.
The Father is divine, he is God. Jesus is divine, he is God. The Spirit is divine, he is God. And yet they are all distinct, and Scripture speaks to this. At Jesus’ baptism in Matthew 3, we said, when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the The heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descend like a dove, coming to rest on him.
And a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” And Paul gives us many of these Trinitarian benedictions. 2 Corinthians 13: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you. And Jesus, at the end of Matthew’s Gospel 28, The Great Commission, he says that we are to be baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All three throughout Scripture interplay, and we see that in the book of Revelation, which is this heavenly vision of this relationship. It’s certainly apocalyptic in what it’s presenting to us, but the, the realities of what John is saying comes through with how God has made himself known to us.
Well, how has he made himself known? Verse 4 tells us, John, he’s writing to the 7 churches in the province of Asia, grace and peace to you. And that grace and peace, it comes from God. And now he goes into this triple designation. It’s not an accident.
Revelation weaves these 3 together. He makes himself known as God the Father, Son, and Spirit. Grace and peace to you from him who is and was and is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth. And in the aspect of the Father, we hear echoes of Exodus 3 when God reveals himself to Moses and he says, I am who I am. And in Isaiah 41, where there the Lord said, I am the Lord, the first and with the last.
I am he. But notice the reference to the one who is to come, speaking of the Father, repeatedly through Revelation. That’s used actually of Jesus as one who is to come. And then the seven spirits before the throne. And as we’ve seen, that seven in Revelation, it speaks of perfection, totality.
And we’re going to see this sevenfold reference to the Spirit again in chapter 3, chapter 4, and chapter 5. And then finally, Jesus Christ, the faithful witness. And in this doxology that John goes into, the focus is on the, on Jesus himself. And it shouldn’t surprise us. It’s Jesus who makes the Father known to us through the Spirit.
To him who loves us, has released us from our sins by his blood, who has made us to be a kingdom, priest to his God and Father. To him be glory and power forever. Forever and ever. Amen. That’s not something humans do.
This is the language of the divine. Jesus is the one who makes us a kingdom and priest. And you think, where have I heard that before? Exodus 19. God is speaking of making Israel a nation and a kingdom of priests.
There it is God doing the action, and here it is Jesus the one who is doing this. And John ends with verse 7, the glorious return of Jesus. Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and everyone will see him, even those who pierced him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. So shall it be.
Amen. And he is the one who is to come, even as it was the Father.
And this opening greeting is ended in verse 8, where God, the Lord God, says, I am the Alpha and the Omega. Who is and was and is to come, the Almighty. Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega is the last. We would say from the A to Z. God is sovereign.
He just transcends over all history. He’s the beginning, he is the goal of everything. And this exact phrase is used towards the end of the book in chapter 21, and it’s God is speaking. But then we hear it at the very last chapter, 22. This time it’s Jesus who is speaking.
Jesus refers to himself as the Alpha and the Omega, and throughout the book, in chapter 1 and chapter 2, Jesus refers to himself as the First and the Last. So Revelation begins and ends with this bookend of the Father speaking, being the Alpha and the Omega, the One to Come, and Jesus ending as the Alpha and the Omega. Human beings do not say this of themselves. You may recall in John’s gospel, some of the Jews wanted to stone Jesus because they understood exactly what Jesus was saying. And they, they said it very clearly in John 10, we’re not stoning you for any good work, but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.
They knew what Jesus was saying. They knew his claims. And we see that going forward in scripture everywhere. This great revealing, it continues in chapter 4 and chapter 5, the heavenly throne room. Chapter 5, it says, I saw a Lamb who appeared to have been slain, standing where?
In the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. The Lamb had seven horns and seven eyes, and then we’re told what that means, which represent the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And he came, he took the scroll from who? From The the one seated on the throne. Again, all three present in the throne room.
Jesus the Lamb, the seven spirits of God represented in him, the Father on the throne. The throne belongs to God, but the Lamb is the one occupying the space. The seven spirits are both the eyes of the Lord and of the Lamb. Together we get, we get this form of the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. Father, Son, and Spirit woven throughout Revelation in a very dramatic way, receiving worship, receiving praise.
It shouldn’t surprise us that in chapter 13, after the great dragon Satan has been revealed, that one of the things he, he does is he brings forward two other beasts, two false beasts. A counterfeit trifecta, a parody of God himself, wanting false worship in the same way that the true God is to be worshiped. And we see then the response, though, of God’s people, and certainly in the throne room. How do they respond to this glorious picture? They worship.
These great angelic beasts are angels. They are crying out, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come. And these elders are falling down worshiping, saying, worthy are you, O Lord our God, receive glory, honor, and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. When the Lamb enters the throne room, the angels and the saints, thousands upon thousands, also begin in worship. And it’s so similar to what they said of the Father: worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.
This is either the most incredible cosmic response to our triune God, or it is terrible blasphemy. There is no other alternative.
But this is exactly how God has revealed himself to us in his word. At the Incarnation, John tells us that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, that the Word was with God and the Word was God. Jesus reveals the Father to us. He sends the Spirit to unite us to himself. That is the claim that Christianity has made, that through Jesus we can now know God from the inside.
Joe Bray puts it this way. He says the Trinity belongs to the inner life of God and can only be known by those who share in this life. As long as we look at God on the outside, we only ever see his unity. Think of it as if you’re looking at a stained glass window. From the outside, you can’t see the brightness of the colors or the picture itself.
It’s just one solid mass of gray window. But from the inside, coming in, in the morning sun shining through, the beauty of that illumination and the wonder that you could not see now is before you in its fullness. In Jesus, we have been brought on the inside. You cannot remain on the outside if you wanna understand who God is. Without Jesus, you cannot enter in, you cannot penetrate the mystery of this divine fellowship, which we as Christians call the Holy Trinity.
Rightly, we call it a mystery. We have our hard time getting our heads around how something can be one and how it can be three. Been lots of attempts to explain this, but all analogies ultimately will fail at some point because the Trinity is the only one. To make an analogy, you have to have something like it, and there isn’t anything like our God. He alone is who he is.
But we do have a summary. We’ve seen that in the Nicene Creed, which we just said. We see it in our larger catechism. There is but one living and true God. There are three persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And these three are one eternal God, the same substance, equal in power and glory, although distinguished By their personal properties. It’s a mouthful to be sure, but we’re talking about God, talking about who he is. And we run out of language to be able to describe it. We run out of mental ability to try to comprehend this, but this is what we affirm. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
One, of scripture, and two, of reality. Think about it. World religions have either had a oneness, a unity that’s not personal. A force, a power, a divine essence that we can’t really know. Or you have many gods, many spirits, a great diversity with nothing really bringing them together.
Christianity has a unity and a diversity in a personal relational God. See, if you start with some non-relational Allah like in Islam, you can never enter in, you can never truly abide. It’s no surprise We think of how Allah is completely unknowable and distant, completely transcendent, completely other. And how that then gets lived out is that there’s almost no concept of forgiveness in Islam. Marriage relationships look like total domination of a man over his wife because there’s no room for two becoming one.
Islam wants a unity without a diversity. But the gods of the great myths, appear more human, to be sure. You can think even aspects of Hinduism like this, the myriad of the different gods, but they’re too human. There’s this constant struggle between them, this constant chaos in fighting for supremacy over one another. There’s a diversity, but there’s no unity.
Again, why does it matter? Because we live out these realities. We repeatedly say that God is love. What does that mean? C.S.
Lewis in Mere Christianity, well known for saying this, all sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that God is love, but they seem not to notice that the words God is love have no real meaning unless God contains at least two persons. Love is something that one person has for another. If God is a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.
And another, if we have God who is unipersonal, just absolute, no disunity, no diversity. If God were unipersonal, then he can have from all eternity power, sovereignty, and greatness, but not love. Love could not be at the heart of the universe, only power. And think about the, the wars that we have, the fighting that we have over what? Over power, over control, over supremacy.
We see that all around us, everyone fighting for power. Without the Trinity, you will not be able to connect the dots of the Bible for one, but the dots of your life coming together. Sort of like a pair of scissors with only one half. You know that you were made for of completion made for a purpose, but it’s outside of your grasp to bring it together. But that’s what we see in the Trinity.
Christopher Watkins points this out. When you think about this absolute unity and this personal diversity, it is the Trinity that bridges the two between absolute and personal. And this goes in other areas of life as well. Think about it in the sciences, the STEM versus the arts and humanities. Those two, even in universities, are sort of warring with each other because how do you bring this together?
All facts and all the world as we know, and then all the personal side of interrelation and literature and artistic expression, and how those two things just seem to be at odds. But the Trinity bridges those together, makes sense. How the fullness of knowledge can come together in who our God is. Think about that in terms of society. We have communal societies that emphasize the group, everything about them, but the individual gets lost, often just crushed.
And then you have societies where the individual is mostly elevated at the expense of everybody else. And we see that, we live that. We see that in our own country. Warring over this. How does that get bridged?
With a— community and an individual as one. The other great truth in Scripture is our sin is personal. It’s not abstract. Sin and forgiveness make no sense in an impersonal world. How can you sin against something that’s impersonal?
You can’t. But we know we do. How can I reconcile with those who either I have hurt or who have hurt me? How do you do that? How can I cleanse my heart to remove my own sin and my own wrongs?
You only can do that through a personal God who’s relational, whose desire is for love with you. We’re awash with beliefs that deny this. They’re everywhere. One MIT professor, Marvin Minsky, is one of the ones who started early in the 1670s working on AI, and he popularized the phrase that humans are meat machines, meat robots. And in a world of AI, what’s truly personal is lost.
See, if you equate an ‘I love you’ from a computer with that of a human, there’s only ruin before you. They’re not the same, and we all know that. The great dragon made a counterfeit Trinity, a parody of what God of the universe is like. And so too, we can make a parody of what it means to be human. We’re not meat machines.
We intrinsically, we know that. And yet that’s the model that often gets pushed on us, the thing that we’re fighting against. We are made to know God. We’re made to love him and one another. Our worship, our knowing a personal God, is grounded in his love.
Father, Reveals himself to us. He invites us to participate in himself through the Son, and we respond to this gracious invitation through the new life given to us by the Spirit. The Son reconciles us to the Father, and the Spirit is the bond of that shared love. Jesus personally was put to death on the cross for our personal sins. And in doing so, we have been reconciled to God.
Our triune God has made room for us in himself. And he is worthy of our worship, to have our lives now centered on him. And as the church, the body of Christ, we are to be the home of this love to the world. This is where that is to be seen and where that’s to be experienced from the inside out.
The world doesn’t get this. The world is struggling to see. And we see that constantly, even how we are trying to deny the limits and the bounds that God has made upon humanity, that we’re trying to transgress them continually with who we are and our identity, who we are in terms of what makes me human, what makes me a man, what makes me a woman, all the things that we struggle with. It flows out of this complete mess of a world that has disconnected itself from the true and the living Triune God. And we have answers to that.
We are able to come into it and say, “No, you were made for something greater. You were made to be complete, not just one half of a scissor, but in God that both come together and there is utility, there is meaning, there is significance to your life.” He is able to bridge those pieces for us. This is— the world is in such desperate need of this. We don’t have to worry about if somebody else is promoted over me, how somehow that takes away from me. No, I can rejoice in those around me.
I’m connected to them. And I can promote the well-being of somebody else, even as they can promote my well-being. And we see this self-giving love. Where does that come from? Comes from God, Father, Son, and Spirit.
And we reflect that. The world trying to figure this out on itself and putting man in the throne room, man in the center. And Revelation is telling us one thing, it’s putting God back in the center. It’s saying we worship the Lamb who was slain, who now lives. And we have, have community with him.
We have been pulled from darkness into light in him who reveals to us the Father, who connects us to that bond of love through the Spirit. You think, “I don’t know how all that works.” I don’t either. It truly is a mystery, but without it, the world doesn’t make sense.
And we are left fumbling in the dark, everybody trying to figure it out on their own, everybody trying to promote themselves, over somebody else because there’s only winners and losers in this system. But in God, we have been united to him who is our greatest and our highest good, to be able to expend ourselves into the lives of others as we see within his triune self. That is really good news. The Christianity When the foundational doctrines is the Trinity, and if you leave the Trinity, you leave Christianity, like almost overnight. This isn’t secondary, this is principal.
Because from this truth flows the reality of the world around us and how we as the people of God connect to that world in truth, in reality, through the personal work of Jesus.
We come to He who is on the throne and we worship. We give ourselves fully to Him, and in doing so, we are made fully human in everything that God intends for us to be. Pray with me. Father Almighty, we do thank you. Lord, you are beyond our comprehension.
You are beyond our grasp, but Lord, we have been made in your image. Thank you. And Father, we would ask that you’d continue to show us more and more of what that means. And Father, that you would bring to us through your Son that ever-growing relationship to you. And Father, we thank you that you have forgiven us our sins.
They are personally against you, and you have given us a personal Savior. We bless you for this kindness. We thank you that you have not walked away from a rebellious creation, but Lord God, that you have come into the midst of her to redeem her. We bless you, Father, Son, and Spirit. Amen.
Please.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.