God’s Threeness
John 3:1-17
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
John 3:16-17 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… Just a few minutes ago we confessed these striking words from the Athanasian Creed: “Whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold the catholic faith. Whoever does not keep it whole and undefiled will without doubt perish eternally. And the catholic faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance.”
First, we are reminded that the word “catholic” with the lower case “c” means “universal.” It has nothing to do with Rome but everything to do with the timeless truths of Holy Scripture that all of legitimate Christianity confesses. In this case, to be ignorant of the true God or to deny the true God is antithetical to the Christian faith, and it results in eternal death. But to know the true God is eternal life, as Jesus once prayed to His Father in heaven: “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” (Jn 17:3) And as we heard last Sunday from Joel’s prophecy quoted by Peter, “And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
God’s name is more than just what we call Him. His name is who He is and what He does; it is everything He has revealed about Himself. The name of the Lord, then, includes His oneness. The ancient Greeks and Romans worshiped many gods; they had a god for everything. By contrast, Moses declared to the people of Israel: “Hear, O Israel! Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one…You shall fear Yahweh your God and serve Him only” (Deut 6). The one God made the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. There are not three gods or two gods or many gods. There is only one true God. We confess in the Athanasian Creed that we have to know that to be a Christian.
But there is also a unique Threeness – a Trinity – to the one true God. The one God who created all things, who revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, is three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You have to know that to know Him. The Threeness of God is part of His saving name.
Jesus reveals the Threeness of God in today’s Gospel from John 3. The Pharisee and ruler of the Jews, Nicodemus, wasn’t yet a believer. He came to Jesus by cover of night and said, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” Nicodemus recognized that Jesus “came from God,” but he had no idea just how right he was. As John writes in chapter 1:18, Jesus was “the only begotten Son.” And as we confess in the Nicene Creed, “Begotten of the Father from eternity. God of God. Light of Light. Very God of very God.” He literally came from God the Father in eternity, and He also came from God the Father into the world through the virgin’s womb. Continuing in John 1:18, “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.” Where does the Father direct our attention? He points us to His Son.
Basically, Jesus’ response to Nicodemus is, “Yes, you are right, I have come from God the Father. I am the second Person of the Holy Trinity.” He doesn’t congratulate Nicodemus or offer a detailed explanation of the Trinity, but He does put salvation itself on the line.
Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The first birth, the one from our parents, counts for nothing toward a person’s salvation. The first birth, from our mothers, brings us into the world with the same sin and corruption of our body and soul as our mothers and fathers were born with. And that comes all the way from our sin-corrupted father Adam and our sin-corrupted mother Eve. No one is born with true knowledge of God, true love for God, true trust in God, or true fear of God.
It is true, however, that everyone is born with a reflection of the knowledge of God. We call it the natural knowledge of God, or natural law. Humans know by nature that God exists, in spite of the fact that our arrogant age of pseudo-science tries to deny it. We have a general knowledge of right and wrong. We know by nature and from nature that there is a God who is good, wise, powerful and just. But that natural knowledge cannot make us love Him or trust in Him, and it does not tell us anything about a Savior from sin.
We are all born wanting to earn our own way into heaven, wanting to be God, wanting to play God, wanting to tell God what is right and wrong, or to look for a God who agrees with us about what is right and wrong.
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But the true God insists that we are not good enough as we are, because we are all born in sin. The true God insists that we start over from scratch, that who we are by nature must be completely put to death, and that a new man, a new person must arise from the ashes, being born again.
But being born isn’t something to strive for; it isn’t something we do for ourselves. We can’t remake ourselves. We can’t change who we are. Someone else has to give birth to us. And Jesus explains to Nicodemus and to us how that happens and who it is that does it. “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
The Father pointed us to His Son, to know the Father by listening to Jesus. Where does Jesus point? He points to the Spirit. The Spirit—the same Holy Spirit referred to in the Old Testament, the same Holy Spirit whose coming we celebrated last Sunday—He is the only one who brings people into the kingdom of God, and He does it through rebirth, otherwise known as “regeneration.”
Jesus ties that rebirthing or regeneration to water. Not just plain water, but the water included in God’s command and combined with God’s Word, the water of Holy Baptism that is applied in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit to those who have heard the Word of God and wish to be buried with Christ through Baptism into death.
As Paul writes to Titus in chapter 3: “But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” There again we see God in His perfect Threeness. ”God our Savior,” that is, God the Father, “saved us through the washing of regeneration of the Holy Spirit, whom He,” the Father, “poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior.” The Threeness of God is part of His saving name.
We saved by grace through God-given faith in the works of Christ alone. And faith comes from hearing the message – the message that God the Father is willing to forgive sins for Christ’s sake, through the Spirit’s work of Baptism, which unites us to the death of God’s Son, who died for our sins. So faith clings to the promise which God Himself has attached to Holy Baptism.
The Spirit gives new birth. The Spirit gives life. But where does the Spirit point? He points to the Son. As Jesus told Nicodemus, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
In Numbers 21 Moses put a bronze serpent up on a pole so that the snake-bitten and dying Israelites could look up at it and be miraculously healed of the venom that was killing them. So God the Father sent His Son into human flesh so that He could be lifted up on the cross, so that all of us, dying in our sins, might look to Him in faith and be saved. The Holy Spirit is the one working in that message to actually turn our eyes to Christ so that we trust in Him and receive forgiveness and eternal life from Him. Again, the Threeness of God is part of His saving name.
How can God be one and three at the same time? How can each distinct Person of the Godhead be God, without there being three Gods? Only God Himself knows that, so we put such questions aside and focus instead on how the one God reveals His Threeness to us in the Holy Scriptures. The Father sent the Son and points the world to Him as the One who bore our sins and suffered for us and won us a place in His kingdom. The Son, in turn, points the world to the Father who sent Him and who desires all men to be saved. Jesus also points to the Spirit as the Sanctifier who gives us new birth and entrance into the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit points the world back to the Son and works faith and preserves us in the faith by Word and Sacrament.
God’s Threeness is part of His saving name. He certainly knows us much better than we know Him or even know ourselves. But that’s OK. All we really need to know is that God’s Son, Jesus, bore our sins, suffered and died for them, and defeated death and hell for us, and that He delivers the benefits of His death and resurrection to us in His Word and Sacraments. When we have those, we have everything we need to continue in this crazy world until or dear Lord calls us home.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
