Bridehood Saints

By George Douglas Watson

Chapter 26

Thoughts on the Trinity.

 

There never has been, and there never can be, a deep, thorough, strong religious experience and character except in those people who have clear scriptural views of the most glorious Trinity, and the distinct personalities of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

God, of necessity, is the eternal foundation of all good, and in the nature of things He must be the beginning of all sound doctrine and all thorough religious experience, and people who have unscriptural views about God can never in the world be perfectly correct, either in their experience or in their lives. An error concerning God will, of necessity, produce crookedness all the way down through faith and life and experience. The man that is not perfectly right with God is most certainly not perfectly right with anybody else in creation. And, on the other hand, when a soul gets right with God, it will very soon and very readily get right with everybody else.

All heretical religion in the world is crooked concerning the Divine Trinity, and this makes it crooked in everything else. You cannot find a single person on earth who is a Unitarian or Universalist or Mormon or Swedenborgian or Spiritualist or Christian Scientist or Millennial Dawnist or Seventh Day Adventist or a believer in any other of the modern heresies, that is sound in his faith concerning the God of the Bible in His three Divine Personalities.

The name of God in the first verse in the Bible is in the plural form and signifies Godhead, and the three Divine Persons are implied throughout all Scripture, and expressly taught in many Old Testament passages, and most luminously brought out in the New Testament. I have found several cases where Christians were in the dark and seemed to have some chronic trouble in the soul, and many times by searching questions I have found they were not sound in the faith concerning the Bible revelation of God. I actually found one case where the person thought that all the worlds in space had a separate God, and that the Bible God was only for this world. The other day I found an old lady who had been in the Methodist Church for fifty years, and who did not really believe that the Holy Ghost was a personality, and no wonder she was in the dark in her experience. If preachers had the discernment to talk with their people, they would find very few in the Church that had Bible views on the three Divine Persons and that believed in all the perfections of God as set forth in Scripture. I have found Christians who thought they were very smart, who did not believe that God absolutely knew all things in His foresight from the beginning, but thought He was ignorant of some things until they came to pass. There is a thousand times more darkness in the minds of Christian people concerning Bible truth than most people have any conception of. We never have a clear view of God except as revealed in the Bible and opened up to us by the Holy Spirit, and apart from God's Word there never could be a man on earth who would have a correct view of God. The teaching of the Bible is that all the Persons of the Godhead exist from eternity in the bosom of the Father, and apart from the Father there can be no eternal Son and no eternal Spirit. Just as all the light of the sun and all the heat of the sun, which are two separate forces, proceed from the bosom of the sun, and are of the same substance with the sun, so the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit have their eternal origin in the eternal Father, and proceed from Him, and are of the same substance and glory with the Father, having the same attributes and distinct only in their personalities.

Every human being that has been born) of Adam had his potential existence in his body when he was first made. Eve came forth from Adam and yet was a distinct personality, and then the child born of Adam and Eve proceeded from Adam and was potentially in him when he was made, but of a distinct personality.

There is only one God, or one Godhead, whose substance is that of pure, infinite, eternal Spirit, and the Father and Son and Holy Ghost are not three Gods, but three persons making one God, in substance, one glory, one infinite perfection, without beginning and without ending. False religionists say they cannot understand the Trinity, but the reason is because they do not believe, for there is no understanding of Divine things except on the condition of faith. I believe absolutely what my Bible says about God, and it is on the basis of that faith that I have had for years a perfect, cloudless, satisfactory vision of God in His three Divine Persons. Saint Paul says it is "through faith that we understand," and a man who has no faith will never understand, either in this life or in the life to come. Everything concerning God is perfectly clear to perfect faith.

According to Scripture, the Father sends His Son on a mission, and the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit on a mission, but no one ever sends the Father on a mission. The person of the Father is above all authority and all control and all command, and He is never sent on a mission. You cannot find one word m Scripture where the Father is ever sent anywhere or ever commanded or ever controlled or ever dictated to; but everywhere He is referred to as infinitely above command or all control. Jesus says that the Father will come and live in us, but He comes of His own accord, without being sent or commanded. On the other hand, the Father commands His Son, and sends His Son both before His incarnation and after His incarnation, and after His resurrection, and the Apostle tells us that at the end of this age the Father will again send His "Son back to this earth to bring about the restitution of all things. And we are told over and over that the Father, or the Son, or both of them together, will send the Holy Spirit, and Jesus has authority to baptize obedient believers with the Holy Spirit. Thus we see that the Son is under the authority of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is under the authority of both the Father and the Son, but the Father is above all, beyond whom there never can be any appeal throughout eternity.

Paul tells us that when the Father put everything under His Son He excepted His own self, so that the Father did not put Himself in subjection to the Son, but with that one exception the entire universe, even including the Holy Spirit, was put under the power of Jesus Christ, Another thought is that of divine necessity, God must act for His own glory; that is, the Godhead can never perform any act that is not for the glory of the Godhead, whether it be in creation or redemption or providence or judgment or revelation or imparted experience, for it is an infinite necessity that God act for the best — and the best is His glory. And yet, while this is true, the Scriptures reveal the Divine Persons as absolutely unselfish, and no Divine Person acts for His own person, but for that of another. For instance, every single Scripture bearing on that subject represents the Father as doing everything for His Son, and it was for His Son Jesus that the worlds were created, and the Father hath put all judgment in the hands of His Son, and the Father does nothing except for His beloved Son.

Then, on the other hand, every single Scripture on this subject represents Christ as doing nothing for His own personality, but everything for the Father. He came into the world by the Father, and when a boy He said, "I must be about my Father's business," and all His words He spoke not out from His own person, but as the Father gave them to Him, and His constant prayer was, "Not my will, but the will of the Father, be done," and we can not find one single instance where Christ acted for His own self, but for the Father and His glory.

Then again, every single passage on this subject represents the Holy Spirit as acting for the Son, and not one single act for His own personality, for Jesus said He should not speak of Himself, but speak of Christ and take the things of Christ and show them to believers. This is wonderful, beyond all the dreams of men.

The Bible not only gives us the most wonderful revelation of God of all the books on earth put together, but it reveals the three Persons of our glorious God as acting infinitely above all self-will or self-interest, showing that the inward impulse and essential character of each Divine Person is an ineffable love nature; unselfish to an infinite extent. Take all the sacred books of all the nations on earth, outside the Bible, all the poets, all the great teachers, of India, China, Europe, and the proud, ignorant know-nothings of modern thought, and all put together throughout six thousand years, they do not present one single thought about God that comes within a million worlds of the Bible revelation of the character of the Godhead. The reason why the majority of Christians have no clear light on the three Divine Persons is because they do not pray for the living God to reveal Himself to them in His true light. Oh, Christian, if you have not yet had a Bible view of the Trinity in the Godhead, I beg you to begin to pray for it, ask the Father to reveal to you His Son, like Saint Paul speaks of, and ask the Lord Jesus to baptize you with the Holy Ghost, as John the Baptist prophesied, and ask the Holy Spirit to make clear to you the Father and the Son and to bring you into a place where the living God will be an abiding reality in your heart and in your life.

One more thought on the Trinity is that according to Scripture it is the mission of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit to regenerate us, and then sanctify us, and then reveal themselves to us, and in the end to lead us back to the bosom of the Father from whence they came forth. One of the Apostles said to Jesus, "Show us the Father and it will be sufficient for us," and it is just that sufficiency that is in God's plan concerning us.

From the bosom of the ocean there is an evaporation that goes forth and is formed into clouds, which represents the going forth of the Son of God, taking the form of a man and living in flesh and blood; and then that cloud is rent asunder and poured out in rain upon the earth, which represents the crucifixion of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon our dry souls; and then that rain in streams and rivers flows back to the ocean, its last resting-place, which represents how the Holy Spirit, coming from Jesus, will renew our nature and take us back to the bosom of the Father, our ultimate home, our everlasting rest, the consummation of unspeakable glory.