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The Trinity is one of the great theological mysteries. There are some who think that because we believe in monotheism, one God, we cannot accept the concept of the Trinity. Yet the Bible teaches that the Godhead consists of three divine Persons–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–each fully God, each showing fully the divine nature (see Matthew 3:16-17).

The Father is the fountainhead of the Trinity, the Creator, the first cause. He is the primary thought, the concept of all that has been and will be created. Jesus said, “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working” (John 5:17).

The Son is the “Logos” or expression of God–the “only begotten” of the Father. If you want to know what the Father is like, look at the Son. In John 14:9, Jesus said, “He that has seen me has seen the Father.” The Son of God is the agent of creation and our redeemer.

The Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, proceeds from the Father and is worshiped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. The Father, as prime mover, brings forth the creative thought. The Son, as agent of creation, expresses that thought. The Spirit activates the creative word and relates it to that which is created. He inspired the Scriptures and empowers God’s people. He takes the things of Jesus and brings them to our remembrance. John 16:8 tells us that He convicts the world “of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.”

All three Persons of the Godhead are eternal. The Father exists and has existed forever. With Him always existed His expression, the Son. Always the Father loved the Son, and the Son loved and served the Father. From that relationship of love arose the Spirit of God, who is eternal and has existed forever. There was, therefore, not a time when there was only the Father, then later the Son, and still later the Spirit. They all three have existed from before there was anything that could begin–three distinct Persons all functioning as One.

There are trinities in nature. Light can be divided into three primary colors; yet light is one. A prism will reveal the individual colors separately that are unique yet unified. An example of a trinity in nature which is sometimes given erroneously to explain the Trinity is the transformation of water to steam or to ice. The problem with this illustration is that water becomes either steam or ice, but does not at the same time remain water. This type of thinking leads to a heresy called modalistic monarchianism, which maintains that the Father changes into the Son or into the Spirit–different modes of the same being but never the three beings at one time.

Upon the occasion of Jesus’ baptism, however, all three persons in the Trinity were present and active. The Father spoke from heaven, the Son was fulfilling all righteousness, and the Spirit descended upon the Son like a dove (see Matthew 3:16-17, Mark 1:9-11, Luke 3:21-22). The existence of the Trinity is a mystery that one day we will understand clearly. For now, we know that the Bible teaches it and Jesus revealed it, and the Christian church from the beginning has confessed and safeguarded this precious truth.

Theologians have tried to describe God in many ways.

He is the substance of all human virtues. He is all-wise and all-knowing. He can do anything and everything we cannot do, and He is everything good that we would like to be. So we say that He is omnipotent (all-powerful) or omniscient (all-knowing) or omnipresent (present everywhere).

On the other hand, we can describe God by contrasting Him with our human limitations. For example, we are mortal, but God is immortal. We are fallible, but God is infallible.

God is a Spirit: Eternal and ever-living. He has no beginning or end. He is a Person who is totally self-aware–“I am”–totally moral–“I ought”–and totally self-assertive–“I will.” He is the essence of love, and He is loving. He is also a righteous judge–totally fair and just.

God is the Father of all creation, the Creator of all. He is all powerful and sustains the universe. He exists outside of the universe (theologians call this transcendence), yet He is present throughout the universe (theologians say He is immanent) and is its ruler. He exists in nature, but He is not nature, nor is He bound by the laws of nature as the pantheists assert. He is the source of all life and everything that is. (For biblical references on the character and nature of God, see Deuteronomy 7:6-8, Psalm 147:5, Isaiah 43:3, 66:1, Jeremiah 32:17, John 4:24, Hebrews 1:3, and I John 4:9.)

The best description of God is the name that He gave for Himself to the early Israelites, Yahweh. Yahweh is usually translated Jehovah or LORD. Scholars believe that this is the hiphil tense of the Hebrew verb “to be” and literally means “He who (causes everything) else to be.”

People can know the reality of love, but science cannot prove love. People can know the reality of God, but not through scientific research.

But what can be known about God–His eternal power and deity–can be understood by everyone because God has revealed it within them (see Romans 1:18-20, 2:14-15). In other words, God has given mankind the ability to learn about Him from His creation, and to some He has given a special revelation of Himself through apostles, prophets, and Jesus Christ Himself.

We can deduce clearly from all the created things that there has to be a Creator. Someone said that the chance of man’s being an accident is about as reasonable as walking into a scrap-iron yard, finding a Boeing 747 jetliner, and saying, “Look how those pieces of iron flew accidentally together and formed that airplane.” We are very, very complicated. For example, the neurons and nerve paths from each human eye to the human brain number some five hundred thousand. There is just no way that could happen by accident.

As we see the sunsets, the regularity of the seasons, the laws of nature, we are drawn to the fact that there has to be an intelligence behind all of it. The Bible goes on to say that people suppress the truth, because their deeds are evil (see Romans 1:18-21). They do not want to believe what is clearly shown to them.

God also reveals Himself through special revelation: The Bible. Prophets of God who have walked with Him have had special revelations. They have written these down over many years to form the book we call the Bible.

Finally, the supreme revelation of God is Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus was God come to earth. He came in fulfillment of two thousand years of Jewish history, and His coming was precisely as foretold by the prophets. He came among us and showed us what God is like, so we could know Him better. As He told His disciple Philip, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

To sum things up, we can know God from the general revelation of creation, and we can know Him from the special revelation of those who have known Him–and especially from the life and words of Jesus Himself.

People who say there is no God must realize that atheism takes a great deal more faith than does belief in God. Faith in God simply makes more sense! When you consider scientific theories regarding the beginning of the cosmos, you are struck with the fact that there have been at least ten major “cosmogonies” during the last two hundred years. Man is continuously changing his theory of how it all came to be. As our knowledge expands, we shift and shift and shift. But so far, no one has ever come up with anything better than the biblical account that there is a creator God who, in the beginning, made all that is.