The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief

by James R. White

the Trinity is the highest revelation God has made of himself to His people.

True worship must worship God as He exists, not as we wish Him to be.

The essence of idolatry is the making of images of God. An image is a shadow, a false representation. We may not bow before a statue or figure, but if we make an image of God in our mind that is not in accord with God’s revelation of himself, then we are not worshiping in truth.

The Trinity is a truth that tests our dedication to the principle that God is smarter than we are. As strange as that may sound, I truly believe that in most instances where a religious group denies the Trinity, the reason can be traced back to the founder’s unwillingness to admit the simple reality that God is bigger than we can ever imagine.

God is completely unique in the way He exists, and there are elements of His being that are simply beyond our meager mental capacity to comprehend.

The fact that God is eternal is another facet of His being that is beyond us. We cannot really grasp eternity, nor how God exists eternally rather than in time.

Finite minds are trying to express in words infinite truths.

The problem is, of course, God is completely unique. He is God, and there is no other. He is totally unlike anything else, and as He frequently reminds us, “To whom then will you liken Me?” (Isaiah 40:25).

Within the one Being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

when speaking of the Trinity, we need to realize that we are talking about one what and three who’s. The one what is the Being or essence of God; the three who’s are the Father, Son, and Spirit. We dare not mix up the what’s and who’s regarding the Trinity.

Their relationship is eternal, not in the sense of having been for a long time, but existing, in fact, outside the realm of time itself.

Every error and heresy on this doctrine will find its origin in a denial of one or more of these truths.

God does not exist in the same mode or way we do. He is utterly unlike us in many aspects. One truth about God’s existence that is very difficult for us to grasp (but very important for us to struggle with) is that He is not limited to time and space. Theologians refer to this as His spirituality, not in the sense of simply being one spirit among many spirits, but that He exists as spirit and is therefore “omnipresent.” It is best to think of omnipresence more in the realm of “lack of spatial limitations” than anything else. As with most things, God is far beyond our creaturely categories. When we speak of His omnipresence, we are saying something that is primarily negative (He does not have limitations of space, just as His eternal existence is basically a statement of His not having limitations based in time).

“God is spirit,[4] and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24).

Before the mountains were born or You gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting,[5] You are God. (Psalm 90:2)