The Trinity Explained

1. 0:00Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 8, Question and Answer 24.
2. 0:14How are these articles divided?
3. 0:16Into three parts: God the Father and our creation.
4. 0:20God the Son and our deliverance, and God the Holy Spirit and our sanctification.
5. 0:26Since there is only one divine being, why do you speak of three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
6. 0:33Because that is how God has revealed himself in his word.
7. 0:37These three distinct persons are one, true eternal God.
8. 0:42In Lord’s Day 7 of the Heidelberg Catechism, the Apostles' Creed has been set forth, and the catechism has identified this creed as being the articles of the Christian faith.
9. 0:54And we've made the confession that in order to be saved from our sins, we must believe all that is confessed in these articles. Having set those articles forth now in Lord’s Day 8
10. 1:06the catechism moves on to discuss the way in which these articles have been organized. And what we confess here is that the Apostles Creed has been written in such a way that it reflects the triune character
11. 1:20of the God whom we serve. And we see that in the way that these articles are described.
12. 1:27The first thing the catechism teaches us is that the Apostles' Creed begins with a confession about God the Father and our creation. Now to speak about God the Father is to acknowledge that there is indeed a living God.
13. 1:42There is a living God of heaven and earth, and he is the one who has made us.
14. 1:46He is the one who has created us.
15. 1:49He is the one who has given us life.
16. 1:51And it is to acknowledge that as the one who is the source of our life and our being, that he has a claim on our lives.
17. 1:59As the one who has made us, he insists that we serve him, that we honor him, that we image him in this world.
18. 2:08The next part of the Apostles' Creed, however, deals with the reality that we have failed to meet the obligation of service to the living God.
19. 2:18And indeed we fail to meet that obligation because we have fallen into sin and so we are in need of deliverance and here we confess that for that deliverance we are dependent upon
20. 2:29the second person of the Trinity that is God the Son he is the one who affects our redemption and we acknowledge in this section of the Apostles' that the work of salvation that God accomplishes on our behalf
21. 2:43has been carried out in the person and the work of his son who came into this world and who allowed his blessed body to be nailed to the cross that his shed blood might atone for our sins.
22. 2:56We then move on in the Apostles' Creed to speak speak about the third person of the Trinity. This is the person of the Holy Spirit. And here we make the
23. 3:07acknowledgement that having been brought to new life in Christ, that it is the Holy Spirit whom we receive as a gift. The Holy Spirit who comes to live and dwell in our hearts and who by
24. 3:19power enables us to live out the life to which we've been called and he does that through his work of sanctification. The work of sanctification is the work of
25. 3:30causing us to be holy. It is the work of causing us to come to look like the one who has saved us. It is the Holy Spirit.
26. 3:39Spirit's work whereby he makes us conform to the image of the one who has saved us, the Lord Jesus Christ.
27. 3:46Now, to speak of the articles of the Christian faith as being reflective of the triune character of God is to acknowledge that we do serve a God who is a triune
28. 3:59God. Now the word Trinity comes from the Latin word trinitas, and that is a word that means threeness. And so what we confess here in Lord’s Day 8 is that Christians believe in
29. 4:13and they serve a God of threeness. Now that is not to say that we serve three gods, it is to acknowledge and to confess that we serve one God, one God who has revealed
30. 4:26himself to be a three person God. Now that is surely a great mystery of the Christian faith. It is beyond the understanding and beyond the comprehension of any
31. 4:39human being to completely and fully understand how one single God could be composed of three distinct individual persons.
32. 4:52We shouldn't however be surprised by this, we shouldn't be surprised by the fact that the God who is so much greater than we, the God who is our maker and our creator, that he might exceed the boundaries of our
33. 5:07understanding, that he might transcend the limits of our comprehension.
34. 5:12What we should do, however, is accept that he is the God who has revealed himself to be in the pages of Holy Scripture. Now if you turn to the scriptures and you read the
35. 5:26Bible from one cover to another, you will discover that there is no specific place in which the triune character of God is explicitly stated. But what you will discover is that the
36. 5:39threeness of God is something that is woven throughout the whole of the scriptures. And we discover that when we look at the scriptures we are introduced
37. 5:50to God the Father and we are introduced to God the Son and we are introduced to God the Spirit and that each of these three distinct personal is accorded things that only God himself possesses.
38. 6:04We discover that these three persons each have divine names.
39. 6:09We discover that each of these three persons is credited with having divine attributes and perfections.
40. 6:17We discover as we read through the text the pages of God's Word that each of these persons is spoken of as having performed divine works. And finally we discover throughout the pages of Scripture
41. 6:30that each of these persons is also receptive of divine worship and praise.
42. 6:37And so we must accept that indeed though it is beyond our comprehension that God is as he says he is in the pages of his word one holy true three-person God now this isn't
43. 6:54something that Christians are just called to accept it is also something that they are called to rejoice in, because this is not just who God is, it is also who God must
44. 7:06necessarily be if we are to be saved. For we must acknowledge that unless God were a father, there would be no one who could love us, love us with the depth of utter devotion
45. 7:19devotion that he does to the extent that he loved us even when we rebelled against him and became sinners.
46. 7:27For nothing but the love of a father could save rebellious sinners like us.
47. 7:33And we must acknowledge that if we're to be saved, we don't need God just to be a father, but we also need him to be a son.
48. 7:39For without a faithful and obedient son who loved his own father and who delighted in the will of his father to such an extent that he was willing to lay his own glory by and to take upon himself our frail human flesh, without a son who loved his father like that,
49. 7:59who would have come to save us. And we also need him to be the Holy Spirit, for a father's love and a son's obedience would not be enough to save us
50. 8:14without the light of the Holy Spirit, who enables us to see and to believe in the these truths. What we must confess and what we must rest in and indeed what we must rejoice in is the
51. 8:29reality that not only is God a three-person God, but that in order for us to be saved, he must be a three-person God.

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