Things that are hard to understand, as Peter says about some of the writings of Paul. There's an apostle saying that who actually has given us scripture. So if there are things that are hard for him to understand, there's going to be things that are going to be even harder for us to understand. But it doesn't mean now that we have a full body of revelation, 27 books in the New Testament, 39 books in the Old, that we cannot delve into a little bit more of the deeper end. of this knowledge in theology, theo, God, knowledge, study of God, and understanding some of these things that Peter said that are hard to understand. We saw, first of all, some of the things that are hard to accept. Kind of quickly about a brief rundown. Probably, and I've categorized it from Romans chapter 9, one of the hardest things to accept, not just understand, Mentally, but to accept because you can't understand it is why does God create the non-elect? You got non-elect people gonna come into existence and they're gonna pass out of existence and go into eternal torment under the judgment of God So in our way of thinking we look at that and their loved ones or their neighbors and we say well I'll create them in the first place. I mean it doesn't make sense God not only knows this but he causes these things. It's one thing to know it's nothing to cause it And then when you put yourself in those kind of situations, you say, well, if I was in that situation, I wouldn't do that. If I was in that situation, that'd be a crime for me to do that. And you're right, it would be. You can't do that. You'd be aiding and abetting in the demise of people, which God commands and tells us thou shalt not do. And so knowing that and seeing that, having that sovereign God do those things, knowing that then from there, we talked about the whole subject of hell. I mean, is hell eternal? Why do sins have to last for eternity and be paid for eternity? How can a loving God do this and send people to hell? These are the things in the scriptures that are hard to accept because they're just so off the chart. I mean, if you really think about this, and I'm trying to meditate upon this, if you think about hell and its eternity, It's like having an eternity. I mean, how can you even go to sleep at night knowing that people are going to die in their sins and go to hell? I mean, it's just, I mean, they never get out and they never go away. And we don't believe in annihilation where somehow they just kind of pay a sentence. And then all of a sudden they've kind of dropped out of existence. And so it's nobody's sufficient for those things as the text would say, who is sufficient for those things. And so these are things that's just hard to accept. We can understand the concepts, but to accept these things requires the grace of God, and it does. We're transitioning now to some things in the scriptures that are hard to understand now. The thing we're looking at today, and we're gonna be looking at maybe in the next few weeks, is this whole subject called the Trinity. Now God is trinity or a trinity. The thing about the word trinity that you need to understand is that trinity is a theological word or a theological concept. It's not a biblical word. You can't go to your concordance and under the T's look for trinity. You won't find it. So it's a theological construct. But it captures the biblical testimony. We've got many other words that do the same thing. We use the word hypostatic union. It does that. We're talking about the human nature and the divine nature of Christ coming together. And they call that term hypostatic union. But that's a theological term. You can't go to the H's and you can call it a hypostatic. You're not going to find it. Well, some people have argued that since it's not a biblical word, then it's not a biblical concept. Now, you've got to understand something. When we're dealing with the subject of the Trinity, and we're going to be looking at words, not biblical words, but words that help us understand the biblical concept, it does not mean it's not a biblical concept because we're not using biblical words. The point in using non-biblical words to get to the meat and the potatoes in defining a biblical concept is for precision purposes only. And why do you need that? Because heresy runs amok if you're not precise. Now that's just the nature of heresy. And when you're dealing with the Trinity, you're dealing with the actual being of God. We're not talking about an attribute of God. Trinity isn't an attribute. This is who God is. We're dealing now in the realm of slicing diamonds. You see one of those gemologists that slices diamonds or whatever? And if you're a gemologist or whatever you call them, a diamond slicer, the bigger the diamond, the scarier the piece. Because you cut that thing wrong, you can ruin the entire diamond. And so to know how to cut it and to know how to position it and things of this sort, you can't have a shaky hand when you do these things. You've got to cut it just right. And you're cutting it just right so that the facets of the diamond can illuminate its glory and beauty and majesty of what kind of rock it really is. And so to have that type of responsibility as well as privilege is off the charts. And so when you're dealing with the subject of the Trinity, one of the things you need to understand is that we have to stick close to the scriptures. But at the same time, when the scriptures will say something, many times they'll say something about Christ or the Holy Spirit or God the Father. And it's usually pursuing another topic, but it's telling us something while it's pursuing that topic about himself, about God. And so we take that and we say, wow, okay, look, he says this about Jesus or the text says this about the Holy Spirit or about the Father. it says we put these things together and we put them together we try to in a systematic kind of way reach a conclusion about what we've learned over the body of books in the scriptures so that we come to a conclusion about this is who God is like. Now when we study this and you've got some text in here that you can see and if you're um on zoom you can see and the thing we're going to look at today and one of the things we also want to see is that in our study, we're going to look at three basic things. That the Bible teaches monotheism, there's only one God. The Bible teaches triunity or trinity, there are three divine persons. And then thirdly, the Bible teaches that equality, the divine persons are co-equal and co-eternal. What we're looking at today is the idea of monotheism, mono, one, theism, God. One God. Deuteronomy 6, 4 through 5 is the Shema, S-H-E-M-A. This is what they would recite. This is what they would confess, like their confession, a basic confession. When they asked Jesus in Mark 12, what's the greatest commandment? This is what Jesus quoted here in Deuteronomy 6, where he talks about, and I'm just talking about the part here in 4 and 5, but you can go on and read in verse 6, and he talks about the greatest commandment from that, to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul. But he says in verse 4, here over is Israel, And that's what Sheba means, to hear. Oh Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is one. That's why it's in italics. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Now this whole idea is one is meant to be parlayed against the whole idea that God is many. God is not many. God is one. He's singular. And we're gonna use terms, and that's gonna be part of the, I remember when they were talking, Augustine, Augustine had this problem Barth had this problem. You got systematic theologians and they voice it in their systematic theologies when they do the Studying about the Trinity and they change words like one Being one essence three persons to nature And they choose nature, essence, persons, substance, subsistence, because they can't find a better English word. Or they can't find a better Greek or Latin word. This is the closest thing that they can get to. And so they said, you know, for example, the word person, three persons. They said, we can't find a better word. It doesn't mean this is how it is in eternity. It just means language is going to fail us, because remember, this whole subject here is what makes it hard to understand. is that we're trying to permit an incomprehensible God. We're told that. In Romans chapter 11, all the depths of the wisdom of God, they're unfathomable. And when you're trying to understand His ways, let alone His being here, yeah, we're going to reach some spots here that we can't go any further. And language isn't even going to allow us. We kind of know what it's saying, but we don't know how to put it together. Many times we can put things together and we can, wow, okay, I get it. This unity of God makes sense here. But then all of a sudden I got to start explaining how it's diverse. I can't do it. I'll start losing a grip because if I go a little too far here to show their distinctiveness, I made them into three gods. They're not three gods. That ain't going to work. I can't use that language because I made the father a god, the son a god, and the Holy Spirit a god. So you come back and you regroup. You try to use another word and you make it. So together, you're going to get to what we're going to look at a little bit later on, modalism. You'll get into now, there's no distinctions between the person. Can't do that. I mean, just when we looked at the other day, when we were studying in Romans chapter eight, we had the Holy Spirit groaning and he who knows the mind of the spirit, wait, he who knows the mind of the spirit, that sounds like two distinct people here. But if I make them so distinct, I've got two different Yahweh's going on here, I got a problem. Because all of a sudden now I'm starting to combine essence of God, the person of God, and I got a problem. As we saw last week, One of the things we're trying to understand with the scriptures is they're also trying to understand some of these basic laws of logic that's trying to flow that don't violate laws of contradiction. I can't say God is one in being and three in being. Remember the law of contradiction? You can't do that. A can't mean non-A at the same time and in the same relationship. Give an example of that, remember? I took a pencil and said, what is it? He said, a pencil. Okay, right. Pencil equals pencil. That's the first law of identity and logic. It's an axiom. You can't prove it. You got to just work with it. Pencil equals pencil. But I can change that relationship and make a pencil into a weapon. So while a pencil can write, a pencil can also kill. So now the pencil has become a weapon, but I've called it a weapon because I've changed the relationship. Well, that's not a contradiction, but I've explained how I've changed the relationship, and you can understand that. This is what we have to do many times with the Trinity, with the terms that we use. When we say, you know, he is one in essence, one in being, there's one God, that's what you're gonna find here. Look in 1 Corinthians 8, 4 through 6, he starts talking about this meat offered to idols. He says, therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there's no God but one. He knows that. But what he kind of adds to this thing, he talks about, as he says in verse 5, that even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, so-called, all these fake gods, yet for us there is but one God. You know this, the Father, from whom all things are all things that we exist for him and one Lord Jesus Christ. Now they're introduced to Jesus Christ here, but whom are all things and we exist through him. So how does that fit when you've got one God and I got Jesus Christ coming on here? And so it's like, well, wait, it's like a one plus one equals one. That's not following the law of non-contradiction. I can't say God is one in being and God is three in being. I can say God is one in being, and he's three in person. Ah, they're one relationship. Use a different word. I've avoided the law of non-contradiction, because being isn't the same as person. I'm using them in a different kind of relationship. So that's how we get out of the charge, because you don't find many people, especially from the United Pentecostal Church, who believe in a oneness concept, a Unitarianism, when it comes to God. Our unity asks that we're no Trinity. And I'm listening to a debate right now about James White. James White's debating some guy from Plankton, Missouri, I think he is, a Unitarian thinking guy when it comes to God. And their hermeneutics is atrocious. When you go and say, God is one in essence, but three in persons, they don't see that. They want to see one in essence, three in essence. And that's what They can understand how something can be one in one sense and three in another sense. That should be no problem for you. I can say David Hatchett is one in the sense of David Hatchett. David Hatchett is one single person. They would have to wear three hats. I mean, it might be a day, it might be a host family. So we understand the relationship of the day that has these other things, and we can call that in different kind of ways. So the first thing we understand here, as we go through these passages, Galatians 3.20, God is one. 1 Timothy 2, there's one God. James 2.19, we read that God is one. The Old Testament and the New Testament affirm, as we said, this little statement that we said earlier concerning teaching monotheism, there is only one God. The Bible does not believe in polytheism. It does not believe in, here's a word that you don't hear a lot, henotheism. I don't know if you're familiar with henotheism. Henotheism is a lot like polytheism, except there's a head honcho God that's over these other smaller gods. The Greek gods are like that. You've got Zeus who kind of runs the show with all the gods. But then you have all these other gods here. And many times, whether it's in animism, or you find that little phrase in Colossians, and you find that little phrase in Galatians, it's called the elemental principles of the world. That little phrase, elemental principles of the world, that Paul used, is the basics of man-made religion. If you boil man-made religion down to its basic DNA, And you took animism, polytheism, penalism, you take all these isms out there, you'll find the basic elemental principles of the world, every man doing what's right in his own eyes, and constructing a god out of their own heart. And you will find that it's always works oriented, trying to do something to appease the God. That's why Paul puts that little phrase in there, because it kind of covers the waterfront. So then no matter whoever brings in something from Gnosticism or whatever, that these are the elemental principles of the world. But God is mono. One God. We serve one God. There's not many gods. Remember back then, you had a God over rain, you had a God over you know, fertility, you got a God over here. So if you, you know, you're suffering from this ailment, you call out to this God, whether it's Ra in Egypt with the sun God, because he needed this for the crops, or he needed, you know, this God over here to give him rain or whatever. And many of the plagues targeted these false gods that were staple gods in Egypt when God sent Moses there to free the people. So Yahweh was not only fighting against the Egyptians, he was fighting against the Egyptian gods and bringing them to bow to show that there's only one God. So when you became a Jew or if you were a Jew, you realize Yahweh rules and reigns over every facet of life. He rules over death. He rules over life, fertility, crops. If there's not a spot out there that you can say, well, I mean, it always comes up to this line, but then I got to call out to this God for that. But you had people who thought that way. So that's why this, the Shema kind of developed. Listen Israel, God is one. You can't offer cakes to the queen of heaven and expect God to bless you. You can't have household idols on one hand and kind of, you know, paying a little, you know, obeisance to them. And then at the same time, go down to the sanctuary three times a year and try to bless Yahweh. It's not gonna work. He wants all of our allegiance. Think of the first commandment of the 10 commandments, right? Think of the second commandment against idolatry. I mean, they kind of go work in the first and second for a reason. God says, you're gonna worship me, you're gonna worship me and me only, exclusivity in these things. So this is a non-negotiable. We know that, monotheism, right from Genesis 1.1, in the beginning God created the heavens and earth. Now, kind of give you a little bit more of a, kind of muddy the waters a little bit more. The Hebrew word for God, you can get two words. You get the word Lord, if you have a, sometimes a new American standard, they capitalized Lord, L-O-R-D, if you're reading. And what they're trying to say is this, when you see the word Lord capitalized, the Hebrew word behind that, and there's no vowels, But there's consonants, full consonants. And however you pronounce the consonants, you will come up with the word Jehovah or Yahweh. And it's the covenantal word for God. But then there's another word. In Genesis 1, we have, it says, in the beginning of God, it's not Jehovah that's being used. It's Elohim. Him, H-I-M, the ending of Elo, is the plural aspect of God. So there's this plural word for God. But the problem is, is that when you use Elohim in the Hebrew, I'm not a Hebrew expert, I'm doing this by studying, is that it's always used with a singular verb. It's like if I said, the United States is at war with Afghanistan. I mean, you don't understand perfectly what I'm talking about. Or should I say the United States are at war with Afghanistan? Now, if I say are, I've pluralized the states. The United States, plural, are, see, or whatever you might say. You want to use the singular verb versus the plural. But so a great question, is this the United States singular phrase or is it a plural? Are you talking about the United States? We're talking about the United States, one country. And so Elohim functions like that as a singular, but it carries that plural aspect to it. You find a little bit of that in Genesis one, a little bit later on, it says, let us make man in our own image. Let us go down and confuse their language. Let us, he goes and he sees. And so when you have that us aspect, is he talking about himself in the sense of the Trinity, or is he talking about himself in terms of the, of the, the counsel that he talks about of him with other angelic beings, if you read in Psalm 82, the jury's out on it. But there's some shadowing of this aspect of God being in a plural kind of aspect from the Old Testament. You get a lot of this also from Psalm 110, where it says, you know, the Lord said to my Lord. So you've got this, you have shadows of the Trinity in the Old Testament that gets fully developed or more developed when you get to the new with the coming of Jesus Christ. So that's why I think we read it this morning in Hebrews chapter one, when God speaks in diverse portions in many ways, today he speaks through his son. And so now we get to know in a fuller revelation, this whole idea of who God is. And the first thing that screams at us is that, well, wait, God's one, but then Jesus is claiming to be God. in Jesus in John 17 is praying to his heavenly father, do we have two gods or what? And so in the early church this began to cause some problems because they didn't know how to accept this. And so one of the things that got emphasized right off the bat was something called Monarchism. Now think of what a monarch is, right? Monarch comes from two words, mono, one, arch, the Greek word for ruler. It can also mean source or beginning because you've got that in John 1, 1, in the beginning was the word, in the arch, you see. So their arch means beginning, source. But other times it can mean ruler, chief. So monoarch means monarch. So this monarchism basically came into existence to preserve the unity of God, this monotheism. And the way they would strive to do that, in stressing that, forced many of them to embrace one of two heresies. And you're going to find these heresies in the early church, and that's why they all get together and say, okay, well, so we've got to have a council here, and they would have councils. Council of Nicaea, Council of Constantinople, Council of Cowsea, Nicaea. You know, all these different councils that came around because the bishops would come and they'd say, all right, we've got this thing going on over here on the east, we've got this thing going on on the west, we need to figure this out. What does the scripture say about this? And that's a good thing because like cutting diamonds, you need to have precision. When you find affirmations, it's gonna fight against areas. who doesn't believe that Jesus Christ is God. Precision is everything. The very one letter from one Greek word, homoousios, homoousios. Is he similar in substance or is he of the same substance? That's huge. Talk about slicing it thin. That's crossing the teeth. But it's everything. If Christ is of a similar substance, then he's not really of the same substance of the font. And that was a big deal, 451. They had to cross that bridge with that. But then here was the first one, kind of coming out of the chutes in the second and third centuries, was this whole idea of monarchism and stressing the unity of God, which is a good thing, which is always the case, right? They go overboard and they get out of their lane and they they developed two basic heresies. The first heresy was something called modalistic monarchism and it just got boiled down to what's called modalism. Now modalism, and we still have it today, there was a bishop and the guy was his name was Sibelius and his idea of God. Remember now he's stressing is on stressing the unity of God. I mean I gotta have one God here okay. So he would say well God has come to us in different modes modalism okay and it kind of he wanted to kind of maintain that monarchism but he said there's the father in that mode and there's the mode of the son and there's the mode of the Holy Spirit. Now if you don't think we still have that with us this is the entire This is the theology of the United Pentecostal Church. This is the theology of the One Way Movement. This is the theology of the Jehovah's Witness. So it's still a moment. But this is where it came from. If you talk about the third century, okay, AD, and they deviated from that, which is what you've got here. A lot of these cults had this. I call them cults because that's exactly what they are. But it's this idea, and of course, they're trying to make sense of God. Because see, when Jesus comes on the scene, he upsets everybody's apple cart on how you think about God. I mean, how are you going to have Jesus and the Father and all these sons? Well, God kind of manifests himself as the Father. And then he kind of changes and morphs and manifests himself as the Son. Then he comes at Pentecost and manifests himself as the Holy Spirit. And so you have these manifestations of God. And so that was called modalistic monarchism. That was one of them. Another one that came on, a second form of it, was something called dynamic monarchism. The dynamic only meant the whole idea that they were trying to address the relationship of the sun in this whole configuration. Another word for it was called adoptionism. And the guy that was big time with this was a guy named Theodosius. Theodosius. was he wanted to give honor and central importance to the person of Christ. I mean, so you can't fault him for what he wanted to do, but once again, he gets out of his lane. That's what you're gonna find. See, this is why it's so, so important that we stick with the scriptures. If the scripture says Jesus is this, then you take it to the bank and we don't waiver from it. And if he says he's not this, we take that to the bank and we don't waiver from it. If we can't understand it, then so be it. And then I don't quite understand. Well, how do you explain that? It's not upon me to do that. Because if I start explaining it, I will be preaching heresy because I don't know what I'm saying. I'm using terms that don't fit. I'm going to use a term that pushes me out of the lane here, pushes me out of the lane there. Better to say, I just don't know. I know this. I know this. Act like the blind man. I don't know that, but all I know is I can see, okay? But you want to give all the theology, and I just don't know it, but I know this, and we can say the same thing when it comes to the things of God. So in this adoptionism, and you can see this in the book of Hebrews and how he's exact representation of his nature, but you see Jesus is the highest of God's creation. God created Jesus, and then from Jesus, Jesus created everything else. So where it says everything that's coming to being is coming to being in Colossians chapter 1, that's because God's created Jesus and let Jesus be the creator of everything else. That's how they would explain this adoptionism. This whole idea of how Jesus can create stuff or Jesus can redeem people and things of this sort. He's just the highest of the created order. Arius would agree with that later on. Arians and how they believe in this Jesus was the highest of the created order. similar substance with the Father, but not the same substance with the Father, which would mean Jesus then is God. And because of Christ's obedience during his time on earth, the Father adopted him. Here's where adoptionism comes in. And he gets called the Son of God. He gets begotten as the son because of something that he has earned. So he's the firstborn of the creation. He's the first of everything you see. He's begotten. Everything that has a beginning, though, is what? Is less than God. And so as he becomes this, you know, you have people who believe in this in the early church. And so they call a council in 325, the Council of Nicaea, in the city of Nicaea. And Constantine, or his son, was in power during that time. And so Christianity had a little pull and power they weren't being persecuted all the time as a because Constantine quote became a Christian and part of the Nicene Creed where you get the Nicene Creed heard of it from the Council of Nicaea it says it affirms that Christ is the only begotten Son of God begotten of the Father before all worlds and that he was begotten not made Father declares that he is God of God, light of light, very God of very God. So they're saying that he's not what? He's not similar to the Father. He's of one substance with the Father. So now they're saying Jesus Christ is God. And remember, the whole thing is sparked by this first tenet that we're looking at when it comes to the Trinity of monotheism. There is one God. And if there's one God, and we have Jesus on the scene, and Jesus is claiming to be God, then how can he have the same substance with the Father and we not have two gods? And so you're going to have to use language to be able to define God in such a way that you have one God, this is our basic tenet here, but yet in the manifestations of things, I've got to be able to have Christ as God and the Father as God and not have two gods. How do you do that? And that's where the language begins to come up for essence versus persons. or essence and persons come in to begin to explain how we believe in one God. But at the same time, there's more than one person. There's a biblical picture of the Trinity. Here's the Father, the Son, the Spirit. And notice in the middle is the word God. The Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and the Father is God. But also on the outside, the Father is not the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not the Son. The Son is not the Father. They're distinct. Jesus is praying to somebody in the garden in John 17. The Holy Spirit's groaning with words too deep for us to understand in Roman days. And so while we can begin to parse out some distinctions between the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, be careful. I don't want to have these things so distinct that I got three gods. And that's where the real difficulty is going to be. That analogy right there, that's what some would call heresy, because it's tripartism. Yeah. Yeah. That's what they would say. Exactly right. Here's the key, though, is we understand this term in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as persons. This is one in essence of being, which means, and of course, we can go into more detail, and we're going to do that as we come. The point I want to make today is that there is one God. That's the basic tenet. You cannot believe in a trinity and believe in there's three gods. There's one God, which means one being. That means the Holy Spirit is God. The Son is God. The Father is God. They possess all the attributes of the Godhead. It's not like, well, it's not like a pie and you cut it into three parts. You can't divide up God. I know. All the analogies break down. But you're right. Because some people, and this is what they were doing. This is what Sibelius was trying to do. He was trying to explain it like, well, it's kind of like water. You can freeze it. You can steam it. It's liquid. But it's modalist. You still have, over here, even Everything of the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Father possess. Everything the Father has, the Son, and the Holy Spirit possess. And you're going to find that kind of language used when they start hammering out those creeds. And you see that precise language that's going to be used so that while they try to maintain a distinction, at the same time, they have to understand they can't give up the unity that is among the three that comprise and makes up the one true God. trying to explain it to you a little bit more, it's gonna be almost impossible. He had men do this for hundreds of years. Another illustration we'll be looking at a little bit further next week is this one, where you're gonna find there's these truths of equality of persons, and there's three persons, and monotheism, and as you get to these angles here, you get to heresies. So if I If I try to do something different with the three persons and the equality of persons, and I get out of my lane, I get into polytheism. Three persons with monotheism, if I get out of this, I get into subordination. If I do something out of here with these two, these two angles here, I get into modalism. So all these things, once you get out of your lanes, you get into these heresies. And we're going to see the development of that and how they fight against the scriptures. But then also what they're trying to do is understand some things and push outside the lanes that scripture does not venture out and thus says, no, you can't do that. And Tom's right. The analogies are going to fail no matter what. Sibelius used his analogy back then of the sun. There's the sun and the There's a globe in the sky, then there's the rays of the sun, then there's... Once again, you're trying to make something understandable, and what you basically wind up doing is teaching motorists. That's what it boils down to, because you're trying to understand a concept that looks like it's contradictory, but it's not. It's contrary and contradictory if you use the same terms, one in essence, three in essence. You can't have three essences. but the relationships differ with essence and persons, then you got a whole different ball game, but you have to still define your terms and make it such that it's not just, he isn't just understandable, what you're trying to achieve is to make sure that you don't get outside your lane and you do something that's anti-biblical. So I want to take a small bite this morning and just talk about just the most basic of truths, which is that in this whole idea of there is one God, That's the most basic thing we need to understand about the Trinity, because Trinity means three. And we'll get into, you know, one God, three persons. But before you get into the one God, three persons, I really want to handle the idea that there's one God. One God, not three Gods. And our conclusions, whatever we reach, we have to start with that, is that there is only one God. At the end of the day, at the end of the argument, it's going to be one God. Okay, now how we understand that one God as the scriptures lays this one God out before us? Yeah, we're gonna strive to use the terms, even as the church fathers strive to use the terms, so that we can understand the distinctions without compromising that concept of one God. I know you got a million questions, I would have a thousand questions, but we're not gonna be able to answer them all simply because we haven't got there yet. Does that make sense? That's great. Father, we do thank you for your word. We thank you for these truths, Father, that's, well, they're just way above us. We don't understand them in their fullness. We understand them in a limited way. And we thank you for that, and we can worship you. And we do bless you. We thank you, Father, you are the three in one, three persons, one God. We don't worship three gods Thank you father We come to you our heavenly father through the work of your son in the power of your Holy Spirit Yes, we thank you and we thank you that you teach us to do That father that the language of heaven will always be that the language of the sons and no one no man comes to the father Apart from Jesus Christ that only through him will be the language that we speak the language that we come to know you by Everything will be funneled through the son. Thank you. He's the exact representation of your nature The heir of all things the creator of all things he holds all things together with this top We thank you father for these descriptors of the sons It's not some created being we thank you and we're mindful fathers, we come into your presence knowing these truths, Father, that you would help us, keep us humble of heart, to not move away from these truths, to not be enamored even in the illustrations and things that we try to capture, we try to teach, that we don't want to be set on the course of modalism, we don't want to be set on the course, Father, It doesn't make distinctions that we know that you have given us in your Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That title that we baptize and make disciples in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We thank you for that. We bless you and worship you.