Okay We got the handout already so we'll begin by reading from Isaiah Isaiah 46 8 through 13 Remember this and show yourselves men bring it again to mind OE transgressors. I Remember the former things of old, for I am God and there is none else. I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, my counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasure. calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executeth my counsel from a far country. Yea, I have spoken it. I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it. I will also do it. Hearken unto me, ye stout-hearted that are far from righteousness. I bring it near my righteousness. It shall not be far off. My salvation shall not tarry. And I will place salvation in Zion for Israel my glory. Let's pray. Lord God, we bow before Thee, thanking Thee that Thou art a God who doest all Thy pleasure and whose will and plan and decree can never be frustrated. Thou art God, and there is none else. There is none like unto Thee, and we thank Thee, Lord, that we may know the joy of bowing under Thee and trusting Thee more than ourselves and submitting our lives into Thy will. And we ask, O God, that also in times of sorrow and affliction and cross providences, that spirit within us may be stirred up to maintain that submission that we may trust Thee, Lord, in times of darkness, in times of trial. Please go with us today, bless us in lecturing, and help us to get a good grasp of the doctrine of Thy decree as far as we humanly can grasp it, that we may have a better understanding at the end of this lecture than we've ever had before. Lord, we look to Thee. Have mercy upon us, we pray, and bless us, for Jesus' sake. Amen. All right, so this morning we want to finish the section on the Trinity, looking at stages of historical theological development. Seven in number, and I'll go over those, as I said, in kind of a bird's-eye view, give you an overview. Then I want to look a moment with you at communion with distinct persons. We'll use John Owen as a paradigm there and come to a conclusion and then move right on into the doctrine of the divine decree. And I'm hoping to be able to cover what we need to cover in that section for the remainder of this hour today and next week, Wednesday, and then by Friday, beyond to the doctrine of providence. The first stage to be found in the historical theological development of the doctrine of the Trinity is the work of the Apostolic Fathers. They provide a rather unsophisticated witness to the Trinity. focusing largely on the economic activity of the Trinity, particularly in relationship to salvation. The Apostolic Fathers understood that since salvation comes to us by the ministry of the Spirit through the Son from the Father, that the Savior God is a triune God. They express that liturgically, of course, through the baptismal formula. They recognize that the whole of the Christian life is lived under that formula. We are baptized into the one name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And although they don't explicate Trinity in detail, They do seem to recognize the principle that Athanasius would later emphasize, that unless the divine being in this three-fold mess be a divine being in which subsists three co-equal persons, that is to say, unless the Son and the Spirit share the full deity of the Father, then it would be impossible that Christians will be baptized into the name of God the Father and two of his creatures. So it's when the Christian faith begins to move out of its own world into the encounter with the sophisticated intellectual world of the Gentiles that the early Christian thinkers begin to go beyond the Apostolic Fathers and begin to raise the question, how can we explain and justify and communicate this mystery of Trinity, this mystery of our faith to the outside world? And that brings us, of course, to the second stage that we call the Apologists. The apologists are asking the question, aren't they, where are their points of contact? Where are their bridges by means of which we can communicate the gospel to our contemporary society? Now, the early apologists discovered, or thought they had discovered, a great bridge for the gospel into the Hellenistic world by the employment of the Logos principle. because that principle was used in the Hellenistic philosophical tradition in a variety of ways. Most of those ways underline the idea of the Logos as a rational unifying principle holding together within itself a world that was in a perpetual state of flux. So in one way or another, the Logos principle was the Hellenistic philosophy's resolution of the so-called problem of the one and the many. Now my point is, is that the apologists seized hold of this, particularly through their reading of John 1 and other references to Christ as the wisdom of God, for example, Proverbs 8, and saw it as a bridge within their culture to communicate the gospel. Now, our interest at this particular point is not the broad interest of the whole field of apologetics, nor even the narrower interest of Christology, but the focus right now has to be strictly on the doctrine of the Trinity. And what we need to say is that the danger that the early apologists tended to fall prey to was that they seized too quickly upon the presence of a common language, as if the language of Logos would somehow indicate a common consensus with the world around them. What I'm getting at is something, maybe I can illustrate it. How often I've experienced this in the Dutch-English cultures where someone will come over from the Netherlands and in conversation they'll be saying something with certain words and I'll understand the words but the meaning to them in their culture is very different than the meaning to us in our culture. And often what is humorous to them won't be humorous to us. or what is embarrassing to them won't be embarrassing to us because of the nuances of the different cultures. And even taking up words, the same word, in a different way at times. And that's the problem of the apologists here. They use the common language of Logos, but they infused it with a different meaning than the culture around them. And so the early church fell into the trap of focusing too largely on the Logos language without realizing the radically different outlooks that were in view. The unhappy consequence of that was that the Logos concept trumped the Sonship concept. which is really the more fundamental category in Trinitarian theology. So much so that some of the early apologists spoke of the Logos-hood of the second person as being imminent in the Trinity and therefore eternal in nature. So Whereas the post-apostolic fathers were a little bit naive in their reflections on the Trinity, this more philosophical reflection isn't really that helpful either. That leads us to the third stage of development that takes place in the catechetical schools of the second and third centuries, and particularly in Alexandria. And within that context of the Alexandrian theology, the work of Origen, despite all his abnormalities, still stands head and shoulders above the others. Origen, 185 to 254 AD, it is fair to say, was one of the greatest thinkers of the third century church, perhaps the greatest. And even if he gave a lot of the wrong answers, at least he asked some very profound questions. And in doing so, he simultaneously both advanced and retarded the development of Christian orthodoxy. But with regard to the Trinity, one characteristic of Origen is the way that he begins to reflect ontologically about the relationships within the Trinity. That is to say, he moves from asking the question, why is it necessary for God to be triune in order for us to have salvation? That's where the Apologists ended, or rather the Apostolic Fathers ended. He moves from there to asking the question, what does it mean for God himself to be triune? As Father, as Son, and as Holy Spirit. And then he emphasizes, particularly in his book, First Principles, which is, by the way, often regarded as the first systematic theology ever written, he emphasizes within that context the unity and the trinity of the divine being in terms of the way the father may be said to beget the son by an eternal act of his will. So Origen comes to the conclusion that there was never a time when the sun was not. In fact, he's able to speak about the second person as homoousius. At that time, homoousius could mean generally the same, generically the same, or identically the same. Homoousia, meaning substance. And Origen appears to have understood Homoousius in the sense of generically the same. The son is generically the same substance of the father. And within that context, he then developed a somewhat quasi-subordinationist position of the son to the father. He says in First Principles, the existence of the Son is generated by the Father. That is to say, the relationship between the Father and the Son is such that the Son is dependent as Son upon the Father for His very existence. And so, in that sense, He's subordinate. The Father alone possessing deity within Himself. The Son is fully deity. but he possesses that deity only by generation of the Father. The Spirit, in turn, then, is subordinate not only to the Father, but also to the Son. The Spirit, to use Origen's literal words, quote, belongs to the third rank, unquote. He comes into being through the Father and through the Son. So there are two things going on in Origen's theology that will plague the church for centuries. On the one hand, the full deity of the Son and Spirit is emphasized. That, of course, is a good thing. The Son and Spirit are, generically, the same substance as the Father. What is problematic is that that is so in such a way that the Father is the origin of the deity of the Son and the Spirit. Yet, Origen admitted, this is all true timelessly, since the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are eternal in character. And so this tension develops in Origen, a tension between expressing the Trinity in terms of the equality of the three persons, all possessing deity, and then this apparent subordinationist character of the triune being of first rank, second rank, and third rank. Now it's that tension in Origen that would lead, in the next century, to the fourth stage I want to mention, the famous Aryan controversy. If, as is sometimes said, the Reformation is Augustine against Augustine, it might be said that the Aryan controversy is origin against origin. That is to say, the subordinationist element in his thinking leads eventually to the full-blown subordinationism of Arianism. Arianism teaches us that origins position cannot be held together without denying that the son is equal with the father. not only in terms of the origin of deity, but in terms of the possession of existence. And so, the Arian school came to conclude, in contrast to what Origen said, there was a time when Jesus was not. And they even dared to appeal to Proverbs 8. the exact text that Orthodox Christians used to support the idea that the Logos was from eternity. But they used it to support the idea that the Logos was actually a part of creation. Now the Arian view was of course condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and subsequent councils as well. And the conciliary theology that developed from that did two things. First, it spoke of the second person of the Trinity as Son rather than as Logos in terms of its emphasis. And it more narrowly defined Homo Ouseus as by very definition to be consubstantial with the Father. So, Homoousius came to denote being identically the same substance rather than merely the vague idea of being generically the same substance. Now, That helped to safeguard the principle of the deity of each person of the Trinity, while at the same time denying the idea that there are three gods. If you say the Father, Son, and Spirit are merely generically the same substance, you open up the possibility for three gods, don't you? But if they're identically the same substance, one and the same usia, They're only one God, though they are three in person. Now it's in light of this controversy that continued within that context that the great Athanasius made contributions to the defense of Christological orthodoxy. And Athanasius argues with a startling but powerful simplicity But if the son is not regarded as eternal, neither can the father be regarded as eternal, for they are homoousius. The eternity of the son and the father are coterminous and codependent. And that leads us then to the fifth stage, worthy of mention here in church history, found particularly in the writings of the Cappadocian fathers. Basil of Caesarea, 329 to 379, and his brother Gregory of Nyssa, 335 to 395, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, 324 to 390. The major feature of the Cappadocian fathers is their stress on the equality of the three divine persons. And yet, rather strikingly, they sustain this view within the context of what would become a characteristically Eastern emphasis on the father as the fountainhead of the Deity of the Trinity. But the Cappadocian Fathers taught the recognition that the Father is the fountainhead of Deity ought to move us to speak of the derivation of the Son and Spirit from and through the Father. Nevertheless, the greatness of the Father with respect to the Son and Spirit is limited to the order of the persons and the dignity. It is not inclusive of their nature. Now, it's within that context that Basil of Caesarea stresses the eternality of the generation of the sun. And remember that principle goes back to origin. But in speaking of the generation of the Son, he indicates that that generation is ineffable in character, and therefore determined not by human analogy, but by divine reality. In other words, here in the discussion of the Cappadocian Fathers, we reach that point where the early Church emphasizes that the Son is the Son of the Father. and therefore is generated of the father." And Basel refuses to entertain speculation about what the generation of the son might actually mean. We speak about it, he says, not to understand the content, but to safeguard all false implications when that generation is denied Now, Basil also did more than anyone else before him to glorify the Holy Spirit along with the Father and the Son on grounds that he is equally, truly, and fully God with the Father and with the Son. And when we turn to Gregory of Nazianzus, We find similar emphasis that although we speak about the profession of the Spirit from the Father, what we mean by procession is as ineffable in relationship to the Father-Spirit relationship as generation is in relationship to the Father-Son relationship. Now, Gregory of Nyssa adds to the discussion by stressing the significance of the homoousian. He stresses that the three persons participate in the same substance, not in a weak sense of one below the other, but in one and the same substance in the strong sense. There are not three, that is, each of whom in a manner isolated from the others possesses the Uzziah of God. The ultimate mystery of the Trinity, writes Gregory of Nyssa, is that there really is one, but the one really is three. There are not three who are analogous to one another, but there are three who are one, and one who is three. And that brings us then to the sixth period, the sixth stage of Augustan and the Augustinian tradition. By the fourth century, the Church emphasizes then the following elements in the doctrine of the Trinity. Number one, the one identical usia in the Godhead. Number two, the distinctiveness of the three persons. And number three, the co-equality among the three persons. Each of these three things has been established by the time of Augustine to counter an error. The first one, the identical usia, really is against tritheism. The distinctiveness of the three persons is against modalism. and the co-equality of the three persons is against ontological subordinationism. When Augustine comes along, 354 to 430, he in many ways sets the agenda for Trinitarian theology for a millennium to come. And in some ways, even until today. Because even recently, there's been people that have stirred the waters to return to the Augustinian tradition in a kind of fulsome way. Augustine emphasizes that there are three persons of one essence. But, he says in his book, the Trinitati, not, quote, not as each individual is in one person. That is to say, Augustine recognizes that when we use the language of persona in relation to the Trinity, we are using it in a sense different from the sense in which, for example, we speak about an individual's personality. He emphasizes the fact that the procession of the Spirit, of which the New Testament speaks, is a procession from both the Father and the Son. And he speaks of the Spirit in that connection, most significantly, as the bond of love between the Father and the Son. Now a special interest in Augustine's theology is his view that since creation is a creation of the Trinity, and rooted in the Trinity, we can expect to find the so-called Vestigia Trinitatis, the vestiges of the Trinity, in the created order. And Augustine looks for that, particularly in man, because man is the crown of creation. So he looks for remnants of God's Trinitarian existence in man as God's image bearer. He's saying, in effect, that wherever we look at God's creation, particularly at the higher dimensions of it, like man, we should see the trademark that will stamp everything with something like this, made by the three, or made by the three in one. The Trinitarian-ness of the creator ought to be reflected in his creation. And so Augustine did more than anyone else before him to explore in anthropology how we could get a handle on understanding the Trinity by looking at ourselves. And he did this in a great variety of ways, some of them which fall flat on their head, but there were two of them that have become most notable. The first is that he speaks of the Trinity or of God as love. And then he carries it over into the human analogy of the lover, the beloved, and the love between the lover and the beloved. As a kind of faint reflection of the Trinity. And whole studies, long studies have been done on that whole concept of Augustine. You understand the lover a reflection of the Father, the beloved reflection of the Son, and the love between the two, referring to that bond of love that he identifies as the Spirit. Now, you're going to obviously see problems there with only two people involved and three persons in Trinity, and yes, there are problems, but he's not saying that These are exact equals, but he's saying the Trinity exists and there's vestiges of Trinitarian stamps, trademarks on creation. This is one of them. Another example that Augustine makes a great deal of is his psychological view of human nature. When he speaks about the unity of an individual manifested in memory, understanding, and will. Memory, the memory, the understanding, and the will. And what he's trying to do, of course, with all these examples is to provide a handle for us to get hold of the significance of the Trinity. At times, Augustine, in many of his examples, fails to recognize that his analogy is more likely to lead to modalism than it is to Trinitarianism. But nevertheless, being influenced by his Neo-Platonic background, he did do more than anyone else before him in opening up for us God as love and allowing us to look into the inner nature of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Later on in the Augustinian tradition, especially a 12th century Augustinian by the name of Richard of St. Victor, Richard of St. Victor, provides us with what in many ways was the high point of medieval Trinitarianism. Richard borrows Augustine's notion of God as love and employs it by means of some hints first given by Gregory the Great and then later by Abelard. in such a way that Richard believes he can provide a kind of epistemological rationale for the Trinity. Richard taught that if God is love, then by logical necessity, God's unity in that love must be tri-personal. Put it this way, and many 20th century writers have picked up on this actually, Richard is saying the very fact that God is love opens up for the rationale for God being triune by necessity because love requires an object. If God had only one person, he would have no object to love from all eternity. But within that context of three persons, Love and the beloved in their participation in love requires a satisfaction of love. So that love must be directed beyond themselves, as it were, to another. So Richard sees that there is a harmony between these two principles in the biblical revelation. The principle that God is in himself love, that's the great Augustinian emphasis, and that God is triune. And these two principles brought together, Richard argues, makes the Trinity a coherent idea. And God is love a coherent idea. Now, you may respond that this is taking logic to a rather extreme point, and I would agree with that. But there is something that Richard puts his finger on here that is of importance in our understanding of the Trinity. And that is the fact that the Trinitarian being of God provides the coherence factor in our theology to the principle of the absolute self-sufficiency of God. The self-sufficiency of God, particularly in terms of how we exercise and manifest all those divine attributes. we've been talking about for more than a month. And moreover, exercises all those attributes in a consistently moral way in his love. God is not a divine narcissist who is only one person and continually looks upon himself in one person. But the love of God for Himself, said Richard, is the love of God within Himself, within His inter-Trinitarian being. And if God exercises His attribute of love between Father, Son, and Spirit, does He not exercise all His attributes within His own Trinitarian being? And only when you have a Trinitarian being then, or a plurality of persons in the Godhead, can you have this full exercise of the panorama of the attributes of God. And that is why Unitarianism can never work, because none of God's attributes, pre-creation, ever had anywhere to go. They have no context in which to manifest themselves. And so none of God's attributes inherently within himself are frustrated because they're all operative in this tri-personal context. Holiness, righteousness, goodness, love. And this actually is heavy stuff, of course, way beyond our comprehension. But it's actually helpful material for teaching about the self-centeredness of God. I've had trouble teaching about the self-centeredness of God to, say, catechism students. Explain to them God designed everything for His glory, God is absolutely good, and therefore for God to be self-centered is to be right, but it doesn't really explain the problem. But when you see God as Trinity, without a creation, Then you understand that for God to center upon God is really love. That the self-satisfaction of God is not a selfism, but is really a love relationship. And so it's difficult, isn't it, to say that God loves himself without placing that love in the context of the Trinity. Now, when we come to the final period, which we call Calvin and the Calvinistic tradition, things get fine-tuned by Calvin in helpful ways. Calvin was very concerned about the weakness of patristic theology in its teaching that Christ is divine, takes his origin as divine from the Father. Calvin argued, rather, that the Son is as fully autotheos, as fully self-divine as the Father is. And by parity of reasoning, so is the Spirit. Calvin says it's not the deity that the son derives from the father, but it's the sonship that the son derives from the father. And you could turn that around, Calvin says, there's a sense in which the father derives his fatherhood from the son. So Calvin's point is there is an absolute equality within the ontological trinity. Calvin abhors any idea of subordination in the ontological trinity. All subordination in the trinity, the persons of the trinity, can only be in an economic sense, can only be that the son, for example, was willing to submit himself to the father in his state of humiliation and take our human flesh. That of course is true. He's the servant of the father. Calvin strongly accents that. But ontologically, you see, all three persons are co-equal and co-eternal. And that is the view that has prevailed in Protestant circles and Reformed circles until today. And so Calvin serves as kind of a corrector. He puts a corrective there that helps the church from straying to the right or to the left. But really, as you can see, six of these stages were really worked out in ancient church history. And we may look back with gratitude now and say, how good God has been. to guide the church to this wonderful and glorious doctrine of the Trinity. All right, let me open it for, it's just a bird's eye view, and I know it's a lot crammed into a little, but, yes, Bert. Just when you spoke about Arianism and introduced it, you made a statement, which I missed. Which is what? You made a statement that I misread. You said Arianism teaches that the Trinity cannot, or you might have said something Okay. All right. Let me see if I can regurgitate that. Aryanism teaches us that origins exposition cannot be held together without denying that the son is equal with the father. Is that what you're looking for? Okay. Anything else? Alright, let's go on and look just a bit at communion with distinct persons. Speaking of the experiential dimension of the Trinity, come into this very profound area of communing, as the old divines put it, particularly the Dutch divines, but also some English ones like John Owen in particular, with distinct persons of the Trinity. I want to just give you a quick overview of John Owen's volume two, Communion with God, in this area. Speaking of communion with God, Owen says, quote, that communion with God is communion with each person of the Trinity individually. And he references a number of texts. One of the better texts he references is 2 Corinthians 13, 14, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all. Now Owen then goes on to safeguard what he's about to say by emphasizing that communion with one person of the Trinity is not to be understood as occurring in isolation from the other persons of the Trinity. You might use this example if you have three people standing side by side. And you put the spotlight on one person. It doesn't mean that there's not some light shed on the other two people standing on either side. And so he said, when I assign anything as peculiar or in me this whole distinct communion with any person, I do not exclude the other persons from communion with that soul in that very same thing. Only this I say principally, immediately, and by way of eminency, we have in such a thing or in such a way communion with some one person and therein with the others secondarily." That's a long-winded sentence, I think, saying what I just told you about the spotlight. And then Owen goes on and he proceeds to speak about what this communion is, what the focus of communion is with each person. He says first that we have the fellowship with the Father, particularly in love. The Father delights to bestow divine love on every believer. He focuses on John 16, 27, the Father himself loveth you. Now the way to exercise communion with the Father in love is to receive and return his love by faith through Christ. To receive and return his love by faith through Christ. As the believer rests in the bosom of the Father through Christ, he returns the Father's love in his heart to the heart of the Father from whom it originated. So the Father loves us through Christ, we taste of that love, and we return that love back through Christ to the Father again. And Onik goes on to explain that this return love consists of four things. Rest, resting in the Father. Delight, delighting in the Father. Reverence, reverencing the Father. in obedience, obeying the father. So we love the father by resting in his son, by delighting in the father himself, by reverencing his word and his work and his people, by obeying his law. Now, what happens when a Christian can't feel that love and can't commune with the Father as a distinct person in that way? Well, Owen says, he must then meditate on the nature of the Father's love. And he gives three pastoral guidelines. First, he says, the believer must remember not to invert God's order of love, thinking that his love, the believer's love, comes first. Second, he should meditate on the eternal quality and unchangeableness of the Father's love. And third, he should remember that the cross of Christ is a sign and seal of God's love. It's a cross that assures the believer that the Father's love wins the believer's love through the mediator. And those who return to the Father with these kinds of meditations will find reassurance of the Father's love and commune with Him in love. Secondly, Owen spends a great deal of time focusing on communion with Christ the Son. He says a special characteristic of fellowship with Christ is grace. Grace. Grace received by faith. Christ is the mediator of the new covenant, which is a covenant of grace. The believer receives grace by receiving Christ. John 1.16 says, of His fullness have we all received and grace for grace. So Christ is the essence of grace. Christ wins and woos believers as his bride, drawing them by grace. Owens says, to receive, embrace, and submit unto the Lord Jesus as their husband, Lord, and Savior, to abide with him, subject their souls unto him, and to be ruled by him forever. Owens goes on to say, this grace operates in the believer's fellowship with Christ, much like marital love. Hence the Song of Solomon. That gracious love cannot remain unexpressed in our spiritual marriage with Christ any more than it can in our earthly marriages. I believe that my wife knows that I love her with all my heart. She knows that I would prefer her above any other woman in the world. And yet, I tell her so, over and over again. When I tell her so, it brings delight and sweetness to her. Sometimes I even say, are you tired of me telling you? And she'll say, no, no woman ever gets tired of hearing so often that her husband loves her. Well, so we may say, the Lord Jesus Christ delights to hear His people say, Lord Jesus, we would have Thee and no other. Thou art to us the fairest of the fair. We love Thee who first loved us. Thy love is more than wine. Now in this love that flows to us by grace, there is no end to the gracious privileges believers enjoy. Owen puts it this way, the privileges we enjoy by Christ are great and innumerable. To insist on them in particular were the work of a man's whole life, not a design to be wrapped up in a few sheets of paper. I shall take a view of them only in the head, the spring and fountain from whence they all arise and flow. You understand what he's saying. He's saying, if I were to detail for you all the privileges we enjoy in this communion with Christ, my book would be too big. It would go on endlessly. So I'm going to focus on the fountain. What's the crowning privilege we enjoy? Flowing from grace. And what do you think he concludes? Our adoption. We are adopted by the Father for Christ's sake. Page 207 of volume 2. Through adoption into God's family, believers by grace commune with Christ as their brother. Christ is not ashamed to call them his family, for they have that kind of brotherly familial communion. At the same time, believers commune with him as a kind of elder brother, and they as kind of willing servants. They are servants, they are brothers, they are adopted children all at once. And that all through Jesus who was first born among many brothers and sisters. And surely the whole goal and movement of communion with God is that Christ might have brothers and sisters in whom he invests all the rights and the privileges and the advantages of belonging to his family. And so when we commune with Christ, we know God is our Father, Christ is our older brother, and that assures us that Christ belongs to us and we to Him. And then finally, Owen speaks of having fellowship with the Holy Spirit, communion with the Holy Spirit. The Father we commune with in love, the Son by grace, and the Holy Spirit, he says, in comfort, in comfort. He writes that the Spirit communes with believers in these ways. First, he helps the believer remember the words of Christ, teaches them what they mean, he glorifies Christ, He spreads the love of God in the Christian's heart, convinces the believer he's a child of God. He seals faith in the Christian, anoints him, assures him, adopts him, grants him the spirit of supplication, and in all these ways, comforts him. He's the consolation. in the soul, subjectively, as Christ is objectively at the right hand of the Father. How blessed is that people who come to commune with the triune God in their persons, to know God, not just as judge, but also as Father, as elder brother, as sealing comforter. to be sealed by the Holy Ghost, not only, but with the Holy Ghost, resting in Him, who seals His own person to His people on the grounds of His sealing Christ within them. And Christ, in turn, is sealed by the Father. John 6, 27, for Christ hath God the Father sealed. And all this communion with the Triune God takes place, of course, within the domain of the covenant. So that the believer can then say, with David, he hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure. 2 Samuel 23 verse 5. In this covenant, you see, the son not only rests in the father's love, but the father rests in the son's love, and both father and son rest in the spirit's love, and the spirit rests in the son's and father's love. We read in Zephaniah 3.17, he will rest in his love. And he brings a believer to rest in that same fatherly, meditorial, sealing love. And that's a foretaste of eternal glory, isn't it? So that one day when we come into glory, and we see the love of the Father, and the love of the Son, and the love of the Spirit, we will cry out, the half of it was not told me." Communion with God, the living God, is the consummate fruit of the Gospel. David Clarkson writes, he that hath communion with God is in heaven while he is on earth. This is the gate of paradise that puts us into the suburbs of heaven. Communion with God prepares us for that endless face-to-face fellowship that we will one day enjoy with our triune God. And ultimately, of course, words fail us to describe this. Hell-worthy sinners like you and me, brothers, communing with the triune God. Who can comprehend it? We could better say, as the old Scottish divines were fond of saying, "'Tis better felt than telt." Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable, how unspeakable is this sacred communion. In sweet communion, Lord, with Thee, I constantly abide. My hand Thou holdest in Thy own to keep me near Thy side. You know, there's so much about the Trinity that is so difficult. I remember so often as a boy, my dad was a catechism teacher every year for 40 years, and each year he'd get to that doctrine of the Trinity, and he'd say to us, now I have to teach about a doctrine I can grasp so little of. This is the hardest lesson in the whole catechism book. It should be so. God is God after all, and we are man. And yet how precious a doctrine it is, how precious it is to know this triune God. Puritan Thomas Adams wrote this, it is rashness to search the Trinity. Godliness to believe in the Trinity. Safeness to preach the Trinity. but eternal blessedness to know the Trinity. Well, that leads me then to this conclusion, that the Trinity is significant in a great variety of ways. I'm going to just list a few practical applications after this conclusion as well. Thomas Archimpus says at the beginning of his imitation of Christ, what will it avail thee to argue profoundly of the Trinity if thou be void of humility and are thereby displeasing to the Trinity? Is the doctrine of the Trinity Really, to just be a kind of cerebral doctrine that has no implication for Christian life? That's the way many so-called Christians seem to take it up today, for all practical purposes. Whether God is triune or whether He's monadic, monadic makes little difference in the minds of many today. Let me suggest to you, some very important things. Number one, I've already hinted at this, but the doctrine of the Trinity provides us with the context in which we are to understand the fullness of the exercise of God's attributes. The exercise of God's attributes ad intra, that is, within God's own being, before all worlds began, provides us with a proper window through which we may view the eternal beatitudes of God, contrasting them with all the forms of monism and unitarianism that are impersonal and arid. It keeps the attributes of God from becoming static and depersonalized. Secondly, the doctrine of the Trinity is foundational to and pervades all our knowledge of God and His interaction with the creation. One divine put it this way, with reverence, there is no loose canon in the Trinity. In all the activity of God outside of Himself, all persons of the Trinity are engaged Yes, there are economic operations in the Trinity. One person is more engaged in one thing than another. But even then, for example, in the incarnation of Christ, the Father wasn't born as a human, nor was the Spirit, but they were still engaged. Christ received his body from the Holy Spirit, and so on. So the whole Trinity is very involved and it's fascinating, isn't it? And comforting to understand that the Trinity is involved in our salvation intimately. All three persons at work, all three persons active. What a blessing. All the punctuation marks in the narrative of redemption emphasize the role of the Trinity. You could take every aspect of Christ's redemption. Think of His baptism. The Father speaks from heaven. The Spirit comes down as a dove. And Christ is baptized, all three persons involved. Think of His death. The Son lays down His life. He does so, Hebrews 9 tells us, in the power of the Spirit. And in doing so, we're told elsewhere, He does so in obedience to His Father. Or think of His resurrection. He says, I have power to lay down my life and take it up again. He's raised by the power of the Spirit, Paul says in Romans 1, 3 and 4. He's raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, says Paul in Romans 6. And we read that He raised Himself from the dead. What a comfort to know that every aspect of my salvation is safeguarded by the entire Trinity being active out of love for my salvation. And thirdly, the New Testament teaches us that the entire Trinity is active in applying that redemption. So much is involved in salvation, in the general application of redemption. Think of Romans 8, 3 and 4. In the actual revelation of the Gospel to us, think of 1 Corinthians 2, the first 10 verses. In the fellowship with God into which the Gospel brings us, think of the Trinitarian involvement in 2 Corinthians 13, 14. I just read to you, the grace of the Father, the grace of the Son, the love of the Father, communion of the Holy Ghost. And on and on it goes. In the progress of faith, Jude 20 and 21, we see the Trinity active. In the experience of sanctification, 1 Corinthians 6, 17 through 20. In bringing us to true worship, Philippians 3, 3. In our responsibility for worldwide evangelism, Matthew 28, 18 through 20. Wherever you look in the New Testament, You only need to begin to scratch the surface of any aspect of life with God and you'll discover the reality of the Trinity and the ongoing work of the Trinity. The entire primitive gospel of the New Testament Church at every point depends on the Trinity. Without the undergirding of the Trinity, all would collapse. So to be a Christian, is to live within the context of Trinitarian fellowship, undergirded by Trinitarian power, and to participate in Trinitarian blessedness. And thus we conclude by saying that two quick applications. God's triune personality undergirds all true religion. The 1689 Confession, Baptist Confession, says, the doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and our comfortable dependence upon Him. And secondly, God's triune personality regulates all true religion, all our saving experience, all our spiritual gifts and service. God's Trinity unity permeates every aspect of true Christianity. We read in 1 Corinthians 12, there are diversities of gifts, but the same spirit. Differences of administrations, but the same Lord. Diversities of operations, but the same God, which worketh all and in all. Those references are to the three persons of the Trinity. God is at work, brothers. Also in your future ministry, the whole of your ministry rests upon this solid, glorious, awesome, incomprehensible Trinity. And as you lift up the name of Christ, the Holy Spirit will join your preaching and will glorify your Father which is in heaven. Let it be your delight. Let it be your privilege all your lifetime. to proclaim the Trinity. Any questions or comments? Yes, Jason. I'm just wondering why systematic theology, theologians have come down on the prelocile theology, proper Christology and sociology. Yeah, of course, that's really Kelvin's approach, isn't it, in the institutes, a Trinitarian approach. In the course in Prolegomena, it's a long time ago you took that, but we did address that question, the different possible approaches to systematics and the advantages and disadvantages. At that time I stressed that one of the great advantages of following Kelvin's order is to have everything in a very neat way packaged according to the doctrine of the Trinity. But one of the advantages of following the traditional six loci with a prolegomena is that certain doctrines are rather difficult to package under the Trinity. So even Calvin, of course, does the Trinity, and then he has this fourth book on the Church. And it doesn't allow itself very well to have eschatology fit in, for example. The sixth loci is approach that is a bit more comprehensive in terms of taking in all the doctrines of scripture. But who could tell? Maybe you have to be the one 20 years from now to write a new systematic theology in which you merge the loci approach with the traditional loci approach with the Trinitarian approach. I think there's room for something of that nature. On the other hand, within the loci approach that we use now, there is, maybe the fatherhood of God gets a little bit of a short shrift in theology proper, but of course Christology and Soteriology, there's a great focus on second and third persons of the Trinity. But theology proper, I mean, Look how long we spent this semester with the attributes of God. You're really dealing with the Father there in a sense, too. So I think it's there. It's just not quite as tidy as Kelvin did it. There's pros and cons. Yes, Bert. In terms of preaching and referring to the triunity in God, I went to refer to thy or he. Would it be correct to say that we refer to God as Thy when we are encompassing His presence and He when we are speaking of His being? Or should we be cautious how we approach that? Because we approach His diversity through His unity, because He is a three-in-one God, I think the norm should be the He. If you're particularly preaching in an area where you're talking about the different persons and you're comparing one person to another in that limited context, I think you can say they. But in prayer, I would always say he. Well, I didn't realize this would take quite as long as it did. I thought we'd get into the doctrine of divine decree. Sorry about that, but I think our time is up. So we will begin the divine decree next Wednesday then.