Dear Friends in Christ Jesus who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever,
Last Sunday was Holy Trinity. Since the sermon last week was about fathers and families, we will concentrate on the Holy Trinity this morning as you might have guessed with our confession of the Athanasian Creed.
The Bible’s doctrine that the one true God is three persons distinguishes the orthodox Christian faith from all other religions; not only those that openly deny the Trinity but also those who hide behind the false claim that their cult is part of Christendom.
Without belief in the triune God, there is no forgiveness of sins or eternal life after this temporal life. “Whoever wishes to be saved must above all else, hold to the true Christian faith…whoever does not faithfully and firmly believe this cannot be saved.”
Jesus taught the Pharisee Nicodemus about the persons and work of the one true God. Our Savior’s lesson includes one of the first passages we learned as children, John 3:16. That about sums it up:
The True God is Essential for Eternal life. God the Father so loved the world. God the Son came into the world. God the Holy Spirit creates and sustains saving faith in the Son.
Who is God? He defines himself as the great “I am.” He alone exists. He has made known his eternal power and divine nature by what he made. “God is love.” He has made that known in this. “God so loved the world.” God commands us not to make for ourselves other gods.
To deny the essence of a thing, is to deny the thing. To deny the essence of God, as he exists, is to deny god.
God the Father so loved the world. So describes the quality and extent of God’s love. God’s love to this extent and in this quality is essential for eternal life. In eternity, his nature of love so loved the world that he did not destroy his creatures who rejected him but gave the promise of a Savior who would restore their right relationship with him. God so loving us is his motivation for our justification.
God’s love for his fallen world including us is not a merely passive feeling or aspect of God’s nature. God so love the world is love in action. God gave his one and only Son. God the Son came into the world.
The true God is essential for eternal life because God the Father so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son who came into the world. He came in the person of Jesus. Jesus carried out the work of our redemption that we could not do for ourselves. No one can redeem himself or her neighbor. None of us can offer up his or her life for the forgiveness or salvation of ourselves or any another person. Christianity is the true saving faith because it is the only one in which God saved lost sinners. Every other religion expects me to save myself in the false assumption that such a thing is even necessary, possible, or evendesirable.
God had to come under the law to keep it for us. God had to be born of a woman so he could suffer and die as payment for our sins. As both God and man in one person, the true God carried out the essential obedience for our eternal life in heaven. That obedience is ours through the good news of Christ and through faith that gospel creates.
God the Son came into the world as his Father sent him. He came to satisfy the demand for perfect love of God and neighbor. He came to satisfy God the Father’s justice by collecting the wages of our sin, which is death. God the Son is essential for eternal life because he lived and died as “the righteous for the unrighteous.”
Since there is not a single person for whom Jesus did not come, you can know God the Son came for you in the living action of God’s love. You are forgiven all of your sins and there is a place reserved for you in heaven because God the Father so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. And, that one and only Son came into the world, the child of the Virgin Mary, born in Bethlehem
A religion that denies that Jesus is equally God with the Father and the Holy Spirit is a false religion. The denial of that truth was one reason for the creed that bears Athanasius’ name. The church has used this confession of faith since about the ninth century and it is among our Lutheran Confessions. John put it just as pointedly in his first epistle, “No one who denies the Son the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also.”
The true God is essential for eternal life because without him caring about our salvation, loving us in Christ for salvation we would be lost. But in addition by nature I neither know nor care about who he is or what he has done. I cannot know him or care. It is only by God the Holy Spirit that I know the true God and believe in what he has done for me. While Christ has died for all, it is only believers who have eternal life. There is great depth in this simple passage, John 3:16 and only careful interpretation of Jesus’ words lead to the truth of what he is saying. Jesus is not only saying what God the Father and he have done but also inviting us with these words to put our trust in God and not in ourselves.
God the Holy Spirit gives us saving faith as a gift. Faith is not of ourselves. Faith saves us because it holds Christ not because it is a good work I do. My faith is only as good as the object of my faith. Whoever believes in God’s one and only Son, Jesus Christ, is saved.
The true God is essential to eternal life. Without God the Father there would be no love for us. Without God the Son there would be no redemption for us. Without God the Holy Spirit there would be no faith in that redemption and therefore no salvation.
St. Augustine was contemplating the Holy Trinity one day as he walked along the beach. He saw a little boy trying to fill a hole in the sand with a seashellhe kept dipping into the ocean. It suddenly dawned on Augustine that he too was trying to do the impossible by understanding God’s essence.
Let God be God. Trust in him. You will never be ashamed. Amen. <SDG>