As we consider a biblical worldview, and we are looking at this time at the worldview of God as found in Scripture. We are going to spend one more day on that, although as I said yesterday, we could spend weeks and months exploring all the things Scripture says about it. That would be a profitable study and I hope you have done that. I would point you to books such as A.W. Tozer – The Knowledge of the Holy and J.I. Packer – Knowing God, and many other good books on who God is. Those are two that are very accessible and readable. If you haven’t read those two books, I would really encourage you to do so. Let me talk about a couple other things about the biblical worldview.
God exists in a Trinity. That is the thing that distinguishes us from Judaism, for example. In ancient Judaism, in the Old Testament, an essential key part in their doctrine. For example, Deuteronomy 6:4 says, “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” That was known as the “Shema,” and that was the key basic doctrine of the Jewish faith. The Lord is our God. There is just one Lord. Monotheism.
When we come to the New Testament, actually there are touches of this all the way through the Old Testament. When we come to New Testament, we find that God exists in a Trinitarian form. For example, in what we call the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19, it says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” You notice in that verse that name is singular. Baptize them in the name of. The one name of, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So, we have all members of the Trinity aligned together and we are to baptize them in the name of that Holy Trinity. Here is a quick definition, a bit more complicated, that God exists in three eternal, equal persons, same in substance, but distinct in subsistence – that is that all members of the Trinity, all three persons within the Trinity are completely, fully, and equally God. Their essence is the same, but they have different roles within the Trinity in ways that we do not understand. People have said, for example, that if you try to understand the Trinity you might lose your mind. If you deny the Trinity, you might lose your soul. So, the point is that the Trinity is a very complicated doctrine found, only in the revelation of Scripture. Nobody would have invented it or made it up. It is from the revelation of the Word of God, yet it is something that is beyond the comprehension of us in our finite minds. There is no comparison. There is no metaphor that fits. No analogy that fits, yet it is a revelation of Scripture.
