A Mystery Revealed: 31 Meditations on the Trinity

By Ryan M. McGraw

In A Mystery Revealed, Ryan McGraw peels back the curtain on how the Trinity forms the foundation for everything from evangelism to corporate worship. As he follows the Trinitarian shape of Scripture, McGraw brings this heavenly doctrine down to earth for the average Christian to experience.
These 31 meditations trace the biblical storyline in a month, drawing us closer to the blessed persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Complete with questions for reflection to reveal the glory of the Triune God.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reformation Heritage Books
• Release date: May 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781601789334

Ryan M. McGraw

Ryan M. McGraw (PhD, University of the Free State) is professor of systematic theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and has pastored in several churches. He has written nearly thirty books, focusing on weaving the Trinity into doctrine and life.

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1

TRINITARIAN GRAMMAR

What We Know about the Triune God Already

Everlasting Father, God of the spirits of all flesh, we praise You in the name of Your Son, asking for the Spirit to make us mind the things of the Spirit. We ask You to help us understand what we believe as we pray, worship, and seek the lost through faith in Your Word. Guide us by Your light that we may be light in the Lord and as the Spirit of Truth leads us into the truth. Amen.

The Bible is the greatest story ever told. It has heroes and villains, plot twists and character developments, disappointments and joys, and everything that we would wish for in a great epic. Most of us reading this book also know the author. God’s story is relevant to us because it is a true story about who God is and what He does to save people like us. We either know Him already or need to know Him. All of us need to know Him better. The greatest yet often most underappreciated thing that God revealed about Himself is that the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This book is about getting to know Him.

If we are born of the Spirit and believe in God through Jesus Christ, then we already know Him. Whether or not we can articulate the Trinity well or see the Trinity all over the Bible, the Trinity is the vocabulary and grammar shaping our devotion. We begin the Christian faith like little children learning to speak. Children learn English by hearing it spoken and by speaking it themselves. First they learn words, then they learn what they mean, then they learn how to put words into sentences, and gradually they learn the grammar that they need to speak better and more clearly. The Trinity is the grammar shaping the language we use to relate to God before we become self-conscious about it or skilled in using it. We often learn to hear the Bible and to speak to God and others in Trinitarian terms before we learn how and why those terms work.¹

Most of the meditations in this book seek to help us learn to speak about God more accurately and clearly so that we can learn to devote ourselves to Him more fully. Learning a Trinitarian grammar to shape our devotional vocabulary can open up the Bible to us in ways that we have never seen before. This chapter begins with what we already know about the triune God and how we show it in our prayers, evangelism, and worship. The second chapter shows how the Trinitarian grammar of the church helps us to read God’s Trinitarian story better. The rest of the chapters draw from the first two, pressing us to know God better, focusing on Bible texts in which all three persons of the Trinity appear. Joyful doxology is the goal of it all.

What, then, do we already know about the triune God? We know that we need the whole Trinity to pray. We pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. At least, we know parts of this equation by experience. Jesus taught us to pray, Our Father (Matt. 6:9). And our Father promises to give good things when His children ask Him (Matt. 7:11). Yet we know more than this. Do we not pray in Jesus’s name (Matt. 18:19–20; John 14:13)? Are we not even willing to fight for the right to pray in Jesus’s name when, for example, the military puts pressure on chaplains not to do so? Whether we realize it or not, praying in Jesus’s name is a confession that, in obedience to his command, and confidence on his promises,² we ask for mercy for His sake. Christ is the only way to the Father (John 14:6), and we know we need Him when we pray. We need a Mediator to overcome our sin and to bring us home to God as members of His family. Because Christ is the only one fit for and appointed to this glorious work, we defend the right to pray joyfully in His name.³

What about the Spirit? Do we not pray for the Spirit too? The Holy Spirit is the sum of the good things that the Father promises to give to His praying children (Luke 11:13). We need to pray for the Spirit, and our prayers are actually in the Spirit (Eph. 6:18; Jude 20). Even when we are not aware of it, the Spirit helps us pray (Rom. 8:26–27). Sometimes we get a bit off base in our prayers, just like a child makes mistakes in grammar. For instance, do we sometimes teach children to pray, Dear Jesus, instead of, Our Father? While we can pray to any or all three divine persons, does addressing Jesus instead of the Father sometimes imply a suspicion that Jesus is approachable while the Father is not? Do we think that Jesus is loving, kind, and near, while the Father is distant, moody, and wrathful? Despite such practices, we nevertheless often instinctively know the right way to speak to God. We know the Lord’s Prayer, and we know how to approach our God. Other chapters in this book will make these ideas clearer. The point here is that we already depend on the whole Trinity in our basic practices of prayer.

In addition to prayer, we know we need the whole Trinity in our evangelism. Why is it that we want people to come to faith in Christ specifically? Because none can come to the Father without Him (John 14:6). He became man to bring men to God, and salvation is in His name alone (Acts 4:12). Do we not want people to know the Jesus whom we know and love as we seek to tell them about Him? Yet don’t we also pray that the Spirit would change people’s hearts (Acts 16:14)? Whatever we believe about God’s control over all things and how human free will fits into the picture, we recognize that we often hit a wall in our evangelism. No matter how great we think Jesus is, people just can’t seem to see it. So, what do we end up praying? We often pray that the Spirit would give us wisdom, but we also pray that the Spirit would change people’s hearts, because we know that we cannot do so. Do we see how the Trinity is always in the background of our evangelism?

Finally, we know that we need the whole Trinity when we worship. This point may not seem as obvious to us at first, but the triune God suffuses and surrounds our worship and praise, whether or not we realize it fully. If we pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, and if we tell people about Jesus, praying that the Father would send the Spirit to change their hearts, then don’t we come to God the same way in worship? The Father is seeking people to worship him in spirit and truth (John 4:24). When the Spirit leads us to worship God through faith in Christ, then the Father has found His worshipers. As we see, we keep coming to God in the way that we first learned to come to Him.

An even less obvious example is baptism. Like preaching, prayer, and the Lord’s Supper, baptism is an act of worship. Yet in baptism, God does all the speaking, and we do well to listen to what He is saying. We are baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19). There is one name enveloping all three divine persons because the one God is three persons. Baptism is also a naming ceremony for us. Just like the priests placed God’s name on His people when they blessed them (Num. 6:24–27), so the triune God puts His name on us and blesses us in baptism. Baptism tells us that we can only enter the Father’s family through faith in His Son and by the Spirit’s power. Even if we don’t know what to do with the Trinity much of the time, every time we see a baptism, God is reminding us of who He is and how He saves us. Sometimes we don’t hear as much about the Trinity in worship as we should. Our prayers, hymns, and sermons may present the Trinity clearly now and then, but more often through broken grammar or inconsistent speech about God.⁴ Yet baptism always speaks about God clearly.

We can read God’s story because we already know the author. The rest of this book is about learning a biblical grammar to carry our Christian vocabulary of devotion to new heights. Do you desire God’s light to shine on you more fully so that you might reflect His glory in your devotion more faithfully? Are you prepared to read these meditations with a posture of worship and with an aim to know God, make Him known, and know how to walk with Him?

Questions for Reflection

What do you know about the triune God? Use a definition of the Trinity such as Westminster Shorter Catechism (WSC) 6 to help you think through this question.

Why do we need the whole Trinity in our evangelism?

How does baptism remind us of the Trinity in our worship? What are some ways that we can make our worship more explicitly Trinitarian?

Further Reading

Sanders, Fred. The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything. 2nd ed. Wheaton: Crossway, 2017.

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1. Though I was unaware of it when I wrote this chapter, Scott Swain notes two other authors who use something like this grammar analogy. Scott R. Swain, The Trinity and the Bible: On Theological Interpretation (Bellingham, Wash.: Lexham Academic, 2021), 15.

2. Westminster Larger Catechism (WLC) 180.

3. These sentences are paraphrased from WLC 181.

4. For example, how many times have you heard someone pray, Father in heaven, we thank you for dying for our sins on the cross?

2

THE CHURCH’S TRINITARIAN GRAMMAR

What Others Can Teach Us about the Triune God

Oh God beyond all praising, our tongues stammer Your praise. We thank You for the gift of faith in Your Son through the gift of the Spirit. Grant us that we would learn to search the Scriptures to see Your glory, and let us learn from Your servants who have gone before us. Amen.

In some universities, students must take upper-level courses outside of their majors. This adds breadth to their knowledge and experience as they gain a glimpse of what others do in different fields. While the Trinity is essential to Christianity, some Christians have majored in it. Responding to various errors, the church has developed a rich set of words and distinctions to help us make sense out of what we learn about God when we read our Bibles. Becoming familiar with these terms and ideas before digging into Scripture is like learning the axioms of geometry before practicing geometric problems.

Summarizing the church’s Trinitarian grammar, this chapter provides the tools needed to practice, develop, and, at times, correct our Trinitarian grammar in the rest of the chapters. This section is admittedly denser than the rest of the book. However, readers who bear with this explanation of terms and steps toward Trinitarian theology will benefit more fully from tracing the devotional use of the Trinity through biblical texts in all subsequent chapters. I will borrow loosely from Scott Swain’s six steps toward a biblical doctrine of the Trinity, explaining key terms and modifying the last couple of points.¹

The Scripture behind each of these points will come later. For now, we need to understand what we are saying about God. First, there is one God. God is one essence. When we speak about boiling something down to its essence, we mean getting to the heart of the matter. Essence describes what a thing is. A stone is, in essence, a rock. Dogs are dogs; men and women are human beings. Yet God is not merely another category in the list. God is God.² If we ask what God is like, we might say, God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.³ This is not a definition but a description based on God’s self-description. As eternal and unchangeable, God is all of His attributes all of the time. He is not a sum total of parts but the true and living God who has life in Himself.⁴ In order to understand the Trinity, we need to understand that God is in a category of His own. He literally exists on a higher plane of being because He is a different kind of being than everything else. He is not quantitatively or measurably greater than we are; He is immeasurably great and qualitatively different from creation. The problem with thinking about God as sinners is that we tend to think He is like us (Ps. 50:21). We need to understand ourselves in light of God and not God in light of ourselves. When we question God’s wisdom, don’t we forget that we can’t know what it is like to know how all the minute details of every person’s life relate to one another, let alone to be in control of everything while never learning anything?

Second, the Father, Son, and Spirit are the one God. Westminster Larger Catechism 11 wisely reminds us, The Scriptures manifest that the Son and the Holy Ghost are God equal with the Father, ascribing unto them such names, attributes, works, and worship, as are proper to God only. In other words, the Scriptures show us repeatedly that even though there is one God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are each God. Some people naïvely demand direct proof texts that say, Jesus is God, or, The Holy Spirit is God. We will see in this book that there are some texts like that. Remember, however, that the Bible is a divinely inspired story. What does this mean for understanding how God reveals Himself? It means that it is more common for Him to show who He is by giving us names and attributes that say something about His distinction from creation, doing things that God alone can do, or receiving divine worship. Where we see a person in Scripture create the world, sustain it by His power, change hearts, receive worship, and take divine names and titles, it should be obvious to us who that person is.

The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are one in essence. Is this enough to believe in the Trinity? Not quite. Father, Son, and Spirit might represent one person revealing Himself in different ways at different times. Or, if the persons are distinct, then we might be tempted to think that three people are in the category of God if we did not know already that there is one true and living God. If this is so, then what else do we need to know to reach the Trinity?

Third, the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct persons. Does this term mark the point where you struggle the most with the doctrine of the Trinity? You are not alone. The Eastern and Western churches struggled for adequate terms to describe what distinguished Father, Son, and Spirit in God. Eventually, the Western church settled for saying that God is one in essence and three in persons, but defining person was a rough road. In the early Middle Ages, Boethius (477–524) defined a person as an individual substance of a rational nature.⁵ For better or worse, this definition shaped Western theology for a long time. Substance sounds to us like essence, which might imply either three beings or three gods. However, the important idea here is that personhood is nature individuated.⁶ To illustrate, humanity is not personal, but human beings are. I am a different person than you are, though we are both human beings. Human nature is individuated in us, and we are also separate individuals. However, things are different with God. Only God exists in the category of God. The church reasoned that if there is one God, and the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are God, and these three are distinct from one another, then They must exist (or subsist) in the same divine category.⁷

Individuated nature in God cannot result in three distinct people, but these personal distinctions must exist within God. The persons are intrinsic or inherent to the divine nature. Divine personhood describes an incommunicable quality between the three persons.⁸ This means that the Son is all that the Father is, except Father. Likewise, the Spirit is all that God is essentially, with the exception of Father and Son. While we must distinguish substance and person in God, we cannot separate them. The Father, Son, and Spirit are divine persons, and we cannot think of the one God without thinking of the three persons who are God. These persons are distinct from one another, as the church commonly states, only by relations of origin. Our problem in understanding the word person when we talk about God is that we project our understanding of human persons onto God. There is an analogy between God and us, since He made us in His image. But we can’t put the analogy the wrong way. We are the copies, and He is the original. Eternal divine personhood is normal, and we are the newcomers.

Fourth, persons in God describe relations of origin.⁹ Let me explain. If all we did was show that there is one God, that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one God, and that They are distinct persons, then why speak of Father, Son, and Spirit, instead of Son, Father, and Spirit, etc.? Order in God’s works reflects relations of origin among the divine persons. God works from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit, so that we might come to God by the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father. Another way the church has put this is that persons in God are relations of opposition, meaning that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one in essence but distinct only in person. Yet persons are relations of origin too. The relations of origin describe the processions of the Son and the Spirit from the Father. The church has called these processions eternal generation and eternal spiration. This point is highly important for making sense of how the Bible reveals the Trinity.

Processions describe the order in which the persons are God in light of Their eternal relations to each other. The Father sending the Son reflects the Son’s eternal procession from the Father. As He has life in Himself, He has granted the Son to have life in Himself (John 5:26). The self- existent God cannot communicate autonomy to creation. Yet the Father can communicate His own autonomy to the uncreated Son. The church calls this procession eternal generation. In eternal generation, the Father communicates the whole deity to the Son without beginning or end. This is why the Son is a person distinct from the Father; He is the only begotten God (John 1:18). There was never a time when the Son was not, and there was no time in which God the Father was without God the Son. Their personal names imply each other; no eternal Son means no eternal Father, and vice versa. So it is with the Spirit. As the Son has all that He has from the Father, the Spirit has all that He has from the Son (John 16:14–15). Yet the Spirit’s procession differs from the Son’s, making Him a distinct person. The Father sends the Spirit to the church (John 14:26), but Christ also sends Him (John 15:26). This double procession of the Spirit is called the filioque (and the Son), in which the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Spirit’s procession from Father and Son together is the only thing making the Spirit a distinct person from the Son.

These processions mark an order of subsistence in God rather than an order of authority