The Ineffability of the Trinity
If ever there was a topic for making anyone feel like an assistant pig-keeper it must be this, the doctrine of the Trinity. Three, and yet one. The Father, the Spirit and the Son. All three fully God and yet this God is one God, not three. The sheer impossibility of it defies our feeble mortal minds – how can there be three who are one?
Truly anyone who claims to fully understand the nature of the Trinity is either mad, foolishly arrogant or just lying. Such a grasp is beyond the reach of human intellect, we can understand the nature of insects – how they function, how each part fits together to create the organism, what drives them and motivates them – because we are greater than insects. They are simple and lowly compared to us. Yet surely trying to understand the nature of the God who sits enthroned above the earth and to whom we look like little grasshoppers is madness. To expect fallen human minds like our own to understand God is like expecting insects to understand us.
“8For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
9For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:8-9
Grasshoppers do not grasp the ways of men, nor do men ever fully understand the ways of God.
So surely then we should not even try to grasp the Trinity at all? After all if it is an impossible truth about a God we could never understand then why bother? Surely those who do are merely trying to ‘effor’ the ineffable?
I cannot hope to convey the intricacies of the Triune God in a way that could be understood, perhaps I’ll do a blog post on it when ‘The Good God’ comes out and I can more easily plagiarise the wisdom of Mike Reeves… Until that day however, I just want to briefly consider some reasons why it’s worth grappling with this truth, why truly the doctrine of the Trinity is the most wonderful and beautiful doctrine that the Bible teaches.
