The Triune God

Ronald L. Kohl

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781596389816
• eBook ISBN: 9781596389823
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The persons of the Trinity appear throughout Scripture, and knowing them helps enrich our love for our triune God. Here leading pastors and preachers examine each member's qualities and roles.

Part 1

God the Father

1

The Greatness of God

Bryan Chapell

You may consider the character of God, the attributes of God, the provision of God—all the things that are great in his doing and being—but the greatness of God is such a broad topic that, if there’s any demerit in writing on it, it would be the difficulty of knowing where to even enter the subject.

God is great in more ways than any human can count, but one way he is great is in contradistinction to what we are.

A passage that makes that very plain is Romans 4. It is an explication of an amazing statement the apostle Paul has already made in Romans 3:28: “We hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.” What an amazing, shocking statement: one is made right before God, by faith, apart from what one does (the works of the law). Surely there would be a challenge to such an audacious statement, and so the apostle decides to give an example. Particularly for the sake of the Jews who had been gathering in the Roman church with Gentile believers, the example would have to be that of Abraham. In effect Paul says concerning Abraham, “You must remember that he was justified by faith apart from the works of the law, because the law wasn’t even there yet.” But what that begins to demonstrate is not only the greatness of the provision of God but the greatness of his mercy toward us, that he would provide righteousness for those who could not provide it for themselves.

So we read in Romans 4:18, “In hope, [Abraham] believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, ‘So shall your offspring be.’ ” What does it mean to hope against hope? Some of you know of the Stockdale Paradox, which was introduced to us in Jim Collins’s book Good to Great. It refers to Admiral Jim Stockdale, the high-ranking officer who was the prisoner held longest in the infamous Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War—after being shot down and wounded, he was held there for seven and a half long years.

You may know what pressures were placed upon him, but many wonderful things were written about his leadership in a difficult time—he was even willing to continue to wound himself to prove to his captors that torture could not persuade him to betray his country. When Jim Collins asked Stockdale what had sustained him and given him hope when there was no hope, Stockdale answered, “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining moment of my life.”

When Collins asked, “Who did not make it out of the Hanoi Hilton?” Stockdale replied, “That’s easy. The optimists did not make it out. They are the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas,’ and Christmas would come and Christmas would go. And then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it was Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

To such men, Stockdale said he would say, “We are not getting home by Christmas, so deal with it.” He told Collins how he taught others and himself to deal with such deprivations and disappointments. He said, “This is the most important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.”4

In a nutshell the Stockdale Paradox is this: believing profoundly that your life’s story will turn out well, while at the same moment confronting the most brutal facts of your present reality.

Those are inspiring words, but for us as believers, there’s a certain hollowness to them, because while Stockdale says with great firmness and stridency, “You must believe that the end will turn out well,” you and I know there was no guarantee he would get out of prison alive. In essence, he was pitting one hope against another hope. His hope was optimism in a long-term good end, and he pitted that against others’ optimism in a short-term good end. The reality is that both these types of optimism are human optimism with the limitation of human ability.

More Than Human Hope

When he speaks of hope against hope in Romans 4, the apostle is not saying, “There is one form of human optimism that’s better than another form of human optimism.” He is saying there has to be a totally different hope from human hope. It cannot be based on humanity’s abilities, goodness, will, and resolve. There is a scriptural hope that is of a different nature and quality from human hope; it is a divine hope, a hope in the greatness of God, not in the greatness of human ability, resolve, or righteousness.

If you work through Paul’s account of Abraham in Romans 4, you quite clearly recognize what he is saying. What we’re forced to do initially is to face the brutal facts. We do that first because we’re exposed to Abraham’s “hoped for” end. What does Abraham hope for? “In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, ‘So shall your offspring be’ ” (v. 18).

What was Abraham’s initial hope? Abraham means “father of nations, father of a multitude.” Keeping that in mind, the good outcome for which he hoped was simply that his name would come true. But the brutal reality he had to face is in verse 19. “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.” These are not pleasant or politically correct words: he’s as good as dead, and she’s barren.

Although we can read the words quickly, we understand the pain behind them. Abraham can’t produce children anymore. He received the promise of God at age seventy-five, but now he’s ninety-nine and has no children. His wife is barren, not just in that period of time, but since her youth. There was, particularly in that culture, a shame, a sense of unfulfillment that came to a couple—and particularly to a woman—who were unable to have children. But the brutal facts are these: he’s as good as dead, and she’s barren.

They lived in a different era. Abraham had longevity in a number of ways. He apparently was still strong enough to make a journey of several hundred miles by foot with a caravan, with all the travails that went into that. And even though his wife was older, Sarah was apparently beautiful, because she could still tempt kings. But neither of them is able to bear children. He’s initially seventy-five and will be ninety-nine before he sees any fulfillment of promise; she has never been able to bear children. Neither is worthy. When God declares that the promise will be fulfilled, Abraham laughs and falls on his face. Sarah laughs and lies about laughing. They’re not able. They’re not worthy. The brutal fact is that this had to be a horrible waiting period as they faced the reality of their own inability.

What must it have been like for Abraham to have been told at age seventy-five that he was going to have a son—and then to have to wait for almost twenty-five years? Ray Pritchard described it this way:

At age 76 Abraham buys a crib. Imagine going to the store. “Well, Grandpa, for the grandkid?” “No this is for me and my wife.” Age 77, pick out colors for the baby’s room and paint the room. Age 78, the list of baby names is getting really long. Age 80, sign up for a diaper service. Age 82, subscribe to New Parents magazine. Age 85, re-subscribe to New Parents magazine. Age 95, repaint the baby’s room. Age 99, attend Lamaze classes with your wife, and between blows (puff, puff, puff), scratch your head and say, “Was God just kidding?”5

In Genesis 18, when he is given the announcement of the coming of Isaac, Abraham laughs and falls on his face. You have to understand his response is not humor but the release of deep emotional pain. He collapses. He is not able to take the news. Yet Paul declares, “No distrust made him waiver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God” (Rom. 4:20).

How astounding to say that Abraham is not trusting in the character of his circumstances, for they are terrible. No, he is trusting in the character of his God. “Why should I keep trusting? Why should I not waiver in faith? It’s not because my circumstances indicate that I shouldn’t waiver in faith; it’s because I have trust in my God.” What Abraham has from his God is the promise of a son, and because he has that promise he does not waiver. The reason we are not to waiver in the awful circumstances we face is not because of the promise of a son but because of the provision of a Son. That is what God has shown to us, and it’s one of the most difficult but important aspects of pastoral ministry and Christian faith: to say, “When my circumstances give me no reason to trust God, I trust him because of his character.”

A few years ago I was picked up prior to a theology conference. The man who drove me from the airport to the conference was a man I’d known for some time, a ruling elder in a Presbyterian church. As he was driving me from the airport, he began to unfold the details of his life in recent years. He had a son in prison, a daughter living with a man who was not her husband, a church in turmoil, and no sense that anybody was coming around him to support him and his family despite his suffering. Finally he asked me, “Bryan, how do I trust God in the midst of all this?” I don’t know if you are like me, but in those moments I feel absolutely tongue-tied. I’m supposed to know the ready answers, but all I could say was, “I trust him because he sent Jesus.” God’s Word tells me that this is a fallen world, that we will go through a veil of tears because it is a corrupted world, and that if you are looking to trust God on the basis of circumstances, you will be sorely and awfully disappointed. We do not look to circumstances; we look to God.

My early pastoral experience was spent ministering in a mining and farming community. I learned so much about faith from people of faith, though not quite in the terms I had learned in seminary. I learned what it meant to trust God in the hardest of times by hearing the account of an older miner who had been injured early in life in the mines. Because of what had happened, he spent the rest of his life as an invalid, watching family and friends prosper while he himself lived in great deprivation.

In old age he was approached one day by a younger man, who said to him, “I hear that you are a man of faith. How can you be one who trusts in God, with all the hardships that have happened in your life?”

Lying on his bed as an invalid, the older man said with great candor and honesty, “You are right. There are times when Satan sits in the chair that you are sitting in and asks me those very questions. He points out the window to men who are my age who have worked in the mine and have prospered, and he points to their fine homes and their expanded families when I have none. Satan says to me, ‘Does Jesus really love you?’ Satan points to younger men and older men whose bodies are still strong, without the broken legs that I have, and Satan points to their healthy bodies and says, ‘Does Jesus really love you?’ ”

The younger man was left aghast at the honesty of the older. “What do you say? What do you say when Satan speaks to you that way?”

The older man said, “I take Satan by the hand, and I take him to a hill called Calvary. And I point to the thorns on the brow and the nails in the hands and I say to him,...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Part 1: God the Father
• Part 2: God the Son
• Part 3: God the Holy Spirit
• What is the Alliance?
• Also from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals
• Notes