The Holy Trinity

The doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to think of God not in singularity or individuality, but as a harmony of Persons or manifestations. This is best seen when we look at the Divine working in nature, and especially in that human life which is the crown of nature and which He has united with His own. The Jewish Church is often thought to have worshipped God only in His lonely, distant majesty. The word "Holy" by which He is so constantly described means "Separate"; and God was to them the Separate One, far removed in His purity from a sinful world. But there is another side to this teaching. Jehovah was separate or withdrawn from the world — not as a material world, but as a sinful world. Where sin is not, there He abides; and His people are a kingdom of saints — a holy nation. They go with Him, so to speak, into the place into which He is withdrawn, that He may abide among them. And, further, the psalmists and prophets never lost sight of the universal hope; they looked forward to the Gospel times, when the Lord of Israel should sustain the same relation to the whole world which He sustained to His chosen people in their time. Thus it is that Isaiah in our text represents the seraphim as saying of the Holy or Separate God that the whole earth is full of His glory. What is the glory of God? It is the glory of Love. We are not to think of God as One resting in the self-complacency of a solitary majesty, but as Love, which goes forth continually to its object. When we read the highest expression of the conscious union of our Lord with His Father, this doctrine of love again and again appears. "The glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as We are one: I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one." And surely it is a worthy conception of the Divine nature which the doctrine of the Trinity presents to us, when it makes us think of the Godhead not as chiefly glorious because of certain abstract qualities which a lonely individual nature might possess within itself, but rather as a fellowship which was self-involved and self-embraced in mystic, eternal love. This Divine love, I repeat, as being the very nature of God, was felt by the prophets of Israel to be dwelling in them, immanent in their nation. "The Lord his God is with him, and the shout of a king is among them." Observe what this teaching or this consciousness implies. It is that the Divine nature of love is the soul of man's social life, that this is the binding power which draws men together. By unity God realises Himself among men, or draws them into Himself, that He may live out His life of love in their relationships. In this sense it is that the whole earth is full of the glory of the Holy One. When, then, we treat of the Christian doctrine of the Church, or social union of men in God, we are guided by the experience of the older dispensation, which in this, as in all things, finds its completion in our Lord. If God was to the Jews Immanuel, God with us, in Jesus Christ He has come yet closer to us. The loving embrace of the heavenly Bridegroom has taken the human nature into God. The twain are one. He abides in us and we in Him.

W. H. Fremantle,