Holy Trinity: Unity

In my twenties, I belonged to a group of church women who busted every negative stereotype of the ‘church-lady’. Rather than gossiping, they grabbed hold of the gospel and chose to live by it every single day. Instead of criticizing others, these ladies circled up and prayed mightily. They equipped our group with biblical knowledge, passing on all that they learned and lived.

And they pulled me right into their circle of love and leadership. They poured into me the way Paul envisioned spiritually mature women training younger women (Titus 2:3-5). Those ladies met my hunger for more of God with enthusiasm, wisdom, and great humility.

One thing I marveled about them more than anything was the way they prayed aloud. They incorporated Scripture into the words they lifted up to the Lord. They stopped what they were doing to pray for a person on the spot. They prayed with phrases that struck a chord of truth in my heart and spirit. 

One phrase they used in prayer has always held a bit of mystery and hope; it’s the idea of praying for a group’s ‘Trinity unity’. Never had I heard it before, and I’m fairly certain I haven’t heard it sense. But every once in a while I catch myself praying ‘Trinity unity’ for a couple or a family or a committee at church. It feels holy. And whole.

Now that I’m digging more deeply into the concept of our Three-in-One God, that truth is being affirmed. My spirit understood before my brain did that the Holy Trinity functions in such tireless togetherness that they are actually one. Three, yet so-at-one that they exist in perfect unity.

We humans have nothing on earth to compare this kind of unity. There is no relationship so at-one that it could match such symbiotic solidarity. Yet God has given us some significant clues to the unity of His Personhood that will not only aid our comprehension but will shape our relationship with God.

How to Know a Person. And God.

For all the Enneagram* has taught me, perhaps learning that I could not successfully determine other people’s personality types was the most revelatory. To assume I know a person means I think I can read their motives, their heart, their thoughts. And when I operate from such assumptions, I impose my own ideas onto them. 

So I’ve been learning to accept that I really only know a person to the degree that they reveal themselves – because on earth, only that person knows their inner workings, thoughts, and motivations. We can watch their behaviors and think we know them. We can hear their words and believe we have them figured out. 

But. We are not God. We’re not omniscient (1 John 3:20). We’re not able to know a person’s heart (Luke 16:15). God tells Samuel, and us, very plainly that we humans “look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

So until a person shares the deeper layers of themselves with us, we cannot know them fully. 

The same holds true for God. We know Him only by what He reveals.¹ 

Last week we talked about the ‘Progressive Revelation’ of God’s identity. He didn’t start the relationship off by telling Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob all that there was to know about Him. God knows that we can’t handle everything about Him – His thoughts, His ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). But we do have more tools than the Patriarchs did to know God, namely the Bible. God doesn’t change, so all of Scripture helps reveal truths about God’s identity. Progressively, Scripture reveals a fuller idea of who God is.

And the most significant descriptor of God is the first foundational truth about Him: God is one.^{1 & 2} The first Commandment states that fact, and the Shema reinforces the truth that there is only one God, and He is one entity (Deuteronomy 6:4). 

So, already we know that the three Persons of the Trinity exist in such perfect unity that they are One. 

Category Busters

Scripture has a beautiful way of helping our brains bust beyond our earth-bound boxes. In fact, as only God can do, He went before the revealing of His Three-in-One nature to lay hints of Himself that prepare our human minds for His category-breaking identity.

For instance, in the book of Proverbs, God is described as creating the world through His wisdom (Proverbs 3:19), but then Proverbs also portrays Wisdom as a person, as a co-worker with God (Proverbs 8:22–31).³ Both the descriptor and the person are seen as attributes of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. 

Another important attribute that the Old Testament uncovers about God’s identity is His glory. The Bible sometimes uses the adjective, glory, to describe God (Psalm 19;1), and other times glory is personified – as a person enthroned in heaven (Ezekiel 1:26-28).³ 

Then there is the attribute of God’s spoken word, as we see at Creation (Genesis 1), or even as His word spoken to people. But there are times in the Old Testament where God’s word appears as a person (Psalm 107:20).³ 

All three of these ways to see God come from the writers of Hebrew Scriptures who worked to show God in all His complexities, yet they weren’t describing multiple gods. Rather, inspired by the Spirit, they set out to help us see these varied attributes as both “God and distinct from God.”³ 

Our ancient forefathers model for us a mindset that helps prepare our modern brains for God’s self-revelation as Three-in-One. Each Person of the Trinity is distinct from each other, yet together they are fully God. 

As mind-blowing as this concept will always be for our finite minds, God seeks to help us embrace His Godhead by giving us New Testament descriptors of Himself – and they connect directly to the Old. For instance, the apostles call Jesus:

• the ‘wisdom of God’ (1 Corinthians 1:24)
• the ‘glory of God’ (Hebrews 1:3)
• the ‘Word of God’ (John 1). 

How incredible is it to watch Scripture unfold itself before our very eyes, connecting dots we didn’t even know existed!?! This is God revealing His truest nature, in the kindest of ways. He knows we will not fully understand Him because of our human limitations, so He helps exercise our thinking muscles in such a way that if we cock our head a little to the right and squint our eyes ‘just so’, we might see Him with more fullness – even if the picture remains a bit blurry.

But, friends, in the end, God doesn’t long for us to understand Him but to know Him. And those are two very different ideas.

Understanding. And Knowing

If we come at trying to understand God within our known categories, we’ll always fall short. In fact, we can even get it so wrong so as to end up with heresy.² 

For instance, if we try to place our mathematical constructs onto Jesus as He walked the earth, we’ll miss the fullness of His being – because 100% human plus 100% divine just doesn’t add up in our world. Yet Scripture is very clear that Jesus is equally both (Colossians 2:9; Philippians 2:6-8). 

When we read the Gospels, we witness the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day struggle with this very idea. They could not find any category of ‘God’ in which He’d leave heaven to live as a human, despite the fact that the Old Testament prophets described this very thing. The irony – the ones accusing Jesus of heresy were the ones guilty of it. And because they placed more value on understanding Law and upholding tradition than on knowing God, they not only missed the Messiah they’d been waiting for but were judged harshly by Him.

We can do the same thing to ourselves by placing a higher value on understanding God’s nature instead of getting to know God Himself. When we strive to make the math add up (100% + 100% + 100%…), we stress. We grow frustrated. Sometimes we’ll even manufacture a wild algorithm to force God into a box. That, or we doubt God. Neither is the holy option God longs for us.

As we strive for understanding, we can also grasp at ideas of the Trinity being like:

• Water, in its three forms – solid, liquid, gas
• An egg with its shell, albumen, and yolk
• A clover with its three leaves on one stem

While these analogies might help us scratch the surface of contemplating God’s three-in-oneness, none of them are exactly like Him. All comparisons fall apart at some point, and that leaves us incomplete in our view of God. So, it’s important to recognize our instinct to find a box to put God in. While it’s natural to want to feel comfortable in our ‘understanding’, any earthly category is a dangerous limitation and even a mis-understanding of who God actually is. 

It’s also important that we cease thinking of the Trinity as an ‘add-on’ to God’s description – because His Triune nature is actually who He most deeply is.⁴ God “is Father loving His Son in the fellowship of the Spirit.”⁴ Father, Son, and Spirit are “not parts of God nor are they mere attributes of God.”¹ They’re not even distinctions of God’s being; rather, they are distinctions in God’s being.¹ In other words, God is not defined by His three Persons – He is them. 

So while it might feel as though we are splitting hairs, we do want to make sure we’re seeing God as clearly as possible. Because if we don’t have a healthy grasp of the Trinity, we’ll be tempted to see One Person of the Trinity as higher or stronger or better than the other Two. Or we might inaccurately think of God as shifting in modality, Son in this moment, Spirit in the next.² 

To be sure that we look at God as He is, we must always go back to Scripture. In our reading, we find names of God that help us know Him as Provider, Protector, All-Powerful. We discover passages that reveal Him as Wisdom, Glory, and Word. We even find that God, while singular, is also an “eternal community of love” that works as One (John 17:22-24).³ 

And it’s this core context of love that aids our knowing God most – because it reveals that He exists within love and from love and for love.² The Holy Three has always existed as they are now – as in, before Creation – and everything they do is with a perfect unity of mind and will and heart, all of which is sourced by love (1 John 4:7-16).² 

Embracing the love-centric, Triune truth about God’s identity helps us step away from striving to understand what is beyond us and, instead, lean into the rhythms of getting to know God personally and intimately. As we do, we’ll know Him as the One who extends His love to us as Father, who sacrifices Himself in love for us as Son, and who dwells within us with love as Holy Spirit. 

Imagine it with me – such knowing is like the Trinity pulling us right into their circle of love.

Trinity Unity.

Father God, love comes from You because You are love. So it makes sense that within the Trinity your very existence is love. It helps us understand that because of this perfect love, the Trinity never knows disagreement or competitiveness or manipulation. Love is so pure among You that there’s no room for any of our human foibles. You are three yet One. As our Father, You have birthed us in and from your love. And You have demonstrated your love for us by sending your Son to die on our behalf. You’ve even given us your Spirit as evidence of such love binding us to You, of You dwelling within us. God the Son says that the love You have for Him creates bonds of Oneness for You – and for us. Because when we love You and other people, we are being brought into the bonds of eternal love. Lord, we confess that too often we strive and grapple and fail at fully understanding You. So, right now and moving forward, we choose to watch for all the ways You reveal yourself in Scripture, to receive all that You share with us by way of your Spirit, and to know You better with every passing day. We long to live in Trinity Unity with You! In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
(inspired by John 17:20-26; 1 John 4:7-16; Colossians 3:14)

Resources: I love sharing with you the books, podcasts, articles, and anything else that has inspired, encouraged, or taught me. These are humble offerings with no expectations.

• *The Enneagram is an ancient typing system that helps us identify our core motivations and personality type – not to put us in a box but to help us see ourselves more clearly. So that we can grow and mature. So that we might have compassion and better understanding of other people. I can’t overstate how impactful the Enneagram has been for my own sanctification journey over the last few years, but I will say if you dig in with earnestness, you will be busting some of your own boxes and assumptions! All for the good! If you’re at all curious, I have historically gained the most understanding from two books: The Road Back to You and The Path Between Us. This website is usually pretty helpful, as well. I will say that most Enneagram coaches aren’t huge fans of the Enneagram tests. They’d rather us peel back our layers to discover our core motivations, fears, and responses so that we get the clearest picture of ourselves. Funny, isn’t it. We usually don’t even see ourselves clearly without God’s help!
• 1 – Darrell Johnson’s book, Experiencing the Trinity ^
• 2 – Tara Leigh Cobble’s book, The Joy of the Trinity: One God, Three Persons^
• 3 – The Bible Project video, “The Trinity Explained (Without Pretending It’s Simple)” 
• 4 – The Bible Project podcast episode, “The Trinity and God’s Identity”
• We have a new series-Spotify-playlist, Holy Trinity! It’s a true mix of ancient and modern, of hymns and spiritual songs. It’s an hour-and-a-half of Trinity immersion and worship! There’s a great hymn, “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name,” that lifts up God’s holy name, and by the final stanza, we’re worshiping in Trinity Unity!
  Holy Father, Holy Son,
  Holy Spirit, Three we name thee,
  Though in essence only one,
  Undivided God we claim thee
• Each Wednesday I upload a “Teacup” teaching video that carries on the topic here. You can find all the videos on my Facebook Author Page, Instagram, and YouTube.
• Many of you have found me on Substack. Thank you so much! And, if you’d like to listen to (rather than read) these weekly posts, you can do so on Substack. It’s easy to see and use the audio bar across the top of each post. While you’re on Substack, check out the ministry I’m blessed to be part of, the Devoted Collective.
• My monthly newsletter, The Abiding Life, goes to email inboxes the first week of each month to those who have subscribed on my website. I also post them on Substack. My most recent edition can be found there, and you can subscribe for future newsletters on Substack, here.

Rhythms: As my newsletter’s title infers, we seek to develop an abiding life in this space — a place where we can get informed but also be transformed as we learn to abide in God’s presence throughout our days. I like to think that developing rhythms is one way to aid us in our desire to become more Christlike.

• For this series, our rhythm of focus will be seeking to know God better in the reading of His Word and with the help of His Spirit. It’s good and right to ask Him for His help each time we desire to read with His eyes, to understand with His mind — so we begin there. Then we invite Holy Spirit to lead and reveal as we open Scripture and read. Each week I’ll put a verse or passage before us to read, to contemplate, to wrestle with. But I invite you to do your own investigating of the Word, for it is in such pursuit that you’ll meet the Living God smack dab in the middle of His Word. I’d love to hear what you see and learn and wonder about!
  • This week, our passage is Deuteronomy 6:4-5. This is the Shema, a prayer that Jews recite twice daily as a constant reminder that God is ONE. These verses are a part of our spiritual heritage — it’s so important to us that Jesus quoted the Shema verbatim when a teacher of the law asked Him what the most important commandment is (Mark 12:29-30).
    
    “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

• We’re all called to share the truth about who Jesus is. One way you can do that is by sharing this site and telling others your own stories of faith experiences. May we use our whole selves to tell others about our holy God!!

Featured art by FalcoMagnus — a picture of the country Georgia’s Gergeti Trinity Church!
“All the Bits and Pieces” Photo by Sahand Babali on Unsplash.
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