This is a confusing topic.

The trinity is the heart of my faith. Three faces…..one entity. I won’t pretend to say that I understand it fully. But, I will offer my thoughts.

In practice we can divide the human experience into three phases. The God phase. The Jesus phase. The Holy Spirit phase. This is based on the dominant phase of the Trinity that we are exposed to during each time period. This is not exclusive. All three faces of the Trinity are present all of the time. But, depending on the era, one face is dominant.

During the time covered by the Old Testament, the primary face of the Trinity that we saw was God. God told us what to do in very detailed and concrete terms. We called this “the law”. It really made very little sense to us. It still doesn’t. But, God backed it up with miraculous events and we obeyed……or tried to obey…….some of the time. The most striking feature of this time period was that God kept his distance. He lived in a tent. Only one priest was allowed to enter the inner room. Anyone else who approached God was destroyed. Burn incense the wrong way and you were zapped. We were repeatedly told to fear God……..or else. With few exceptions, anybody who tried to get too close……too “chummy” with God died……and it was not pretty. In a word, God was distant. The emphasis in our relationship was that we were on a far lower plane than God. We were in a parent/child relationship…….seen but, for the most part, not heard. We lived by the law. We were guided, not by the carrot, but by the stick. We were children…….toddlers. There was a clearly defined line between us and God and we crossed it at our peril.

During the New Testament era, we were introduced to Jesus. He made it absolutely clear that he was God…….by what he said and by what he did. He made it so clear that he was crucified for it. But, Jesus was drastically different from the Old Testament God. He was approachable. He was God; but, he was also a friend……he was also human. You could walk up to Jesus and talk to him……… hug him……even kiss him……and not be incinerated. Jesus taught us a new way to relate to the Trinity…….a far more intimate way. This way was centered on love rather than law. Instead of God’s children, we became Jesus’s friend. The stick was replaced by the carrot. The Jesus phase lasted only three years. But, it completely redefined our relationship with the Trinity. We found ourselves drastically closer to the Trinity. We were taught to live by love rather than the law. We became adults…….young adults.

And then, Jesus was gone…….at least physically.

We are now in a new era. The post Jesus era. The era of the Holy Spirit. And I have to admit that I am struggling. I think that the defining feature of this phase is distance…..how far are we from the Trinity…….more importantly, how far do we choose to be from the Trinity. In the God phase of the Old Testament, we couldn’t be in the same room with God……we couldn’t even be on the same mountain. In the Jesus phase, we could sit down and eat, we could touch, we could talk with the Trinity. But now, in the Holy Spirit phase, the Trinity lives inside of us. God lives inside of us. Jesus lives inside of us. The Holy spirit lives inside of us. All three……all of the time…..God the parent, God the friend. God the spirit. In our hearts, we have the information. We have the power. We have the resources. We have no excuse.

But do we have the will?

In a way, the responsibility for our relationship with the Trinity started out in God’s court, Jesus passed it to us, and the Holy Spirit says to us. “The responsibility for your relationship with the Trinity…….with us……is in your hands”. We can feel it, we can be guided by the spirit, we can act on what we know in our hearts……..or we can ignore it.

The ball is in our court.

Three faces of the Trinity…….three eras.

But, the Bible teaches that even this era of the Holy Spirit will end. There will be another era, yet to come. I don’t have a good understanding for what this future era will be like. My best guess is that some of us will be even closer to the Trinity than we are now…….and some of us will be much further away. This future era will be timeless…….eternal.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever. the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

Jesus, explaining the Holy Spirit. John 14:16-17, ESV

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

The arrival of the Holy Spirit. Acts 2: 1-4, ESV

Relax, I haven’t fed a “one armed bandit” or visited an “adult” business. Cindy and I are eating at great restaurants and seeing some great shows…….including a Chicago concert. This, incidentally, was our first date….almost 50 years ago. We are staying at a very nice hotel and the place is not only beautiful, it is spotless. If you drop a napkin on the floor somebody scurries by and picks it up in minutes. At night, landscaping crews manicure every plant. A cleaning crew shampoos the carpet at the front door every night. The carpets in the casino are vacuumed several times a day. A maid sterilizes our room every day while we are out.

But, the dirt is just under the spotless patina. Everywhere you go, there are images, some of them 5 stories tall, of half or fully naked women. The images of men fortunately are only half naked. The hotel room has a well stocked minibar. In addition to salty snacks, it has a full compliment of hard liquor………and a nice selection of condoms. Just in case.

A prostitute recently killed a “customer” in the fancy hotel we are staying at. I’m told that this happens every day in this spotless city. The only reason that it made the news is that the customer’s wife is suing the hotel for negligence. The locals are outraged……..not by the murder, but by the lawsuit.

I have been struck by how much effort the businesses and people here go to……to maintain the veneer of beauty…..to keep the dirt covered up…..to make “sin city” look nice. The amount of money that they spend on clean-up and maintenance is staggering.

And that got me thinking. How much of my energy……how much of my resources…….do I spend covering up the dirt in my life? How hard do we work as a society…….to gloss over our failures? How hard do we work to redefine our sin out of existence……to put lipstick on the pig.

Anger, jealousy, greed, hate, dishonesty, lust, disrespect……the list goes on:

A poor family crosses our border illegally, looking for a better life……we worry that they are using up our resources. We cover our reaction with a veneer of justice when greed is at the core of it.

A child is unhappy with his life and believes he would be happier as she. We allow this, to the point of excluding his parents from the conversation, and we call it self actualization.

We allow terrorists to disrupt our campuses…….to attack Jewish students…….and we dress it up as free speech.

Our prime time television experience is littered with sex and murder. We call it entertainment……..and we pay for it by spending our money at the businesses that sponsor it.

We share a Facebook post that is riddled with lies and hate……..we tell ourselves that this will improve our society.

“Hate cannot drive out hate…..only love can do that.”
MLK , Jr.

Every one of us participates in one or more of these efforts to cover up the wrongs in our culture. And it is far worse than it was when I was young. I wonder what our culture will be like when my son is 70 years old.

God quietly reminds us:

Love God……Love everyone else.

The solution is that simple.

We are slowly but surely drifting away from these two bedrock rules for living.

We sit by and watch as our entire culture morphs into Las Vegas…….a veneer of beauty covering a core that gets uglier with every passing year.

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse— the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known.

Moses, Deuteronomy. 11: 26-28, ESV

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

Paul, 2 Chronicles, 7:14, ESV

You’ve all heard about the creation story. God created the universe in 6 days and then he rested on the 7th day.

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

Genesis 2: 2-3,  ESV , the description of the 7th day of creation.

I believe that every word in the Bible is important.  The words that are not there are important too. Did you notice anything peculiar about day 7? ……..anything different from the first six days of creation? I’m 71 years old. I have read or heard this verse a hundred times and I just noticed it today. The description of days 1-6 all end the same:

And there was evening, and there was morning —the sixth day. (or fifth day, etc.)

Each of the first 6 days ends with a statement that indicates that the day was complete…….that the day was over.

There is no such “completion statement” at the end of day seven.

Let that sink in.

For a little background, you might want to read my post on earth days, galactic days, and God’s day.

I believe that the absence of a “completion statement” after the description of day 7 is important.  What if day seven isn’t over? What if we are living in day 7. That means that we live in a time that God has blessed and made holy. Maybe God is resting between his creation and the “re-creation” of his world. That means that every day of our life is a Sabbath…….a day given to the Lord.

I’m not saying that God is taking a nap……that he is on “sabbatical.” There is plenty of evidence for God’s active  presence in the world today. It’s all relative. God was extremely active and involved in the 6 days of creation. He will be extremely active and involved in the end times as described in Daniel and Revelation.

He is relatively less active today. And we are a bit adrift. It was hard to ignore God when he was a cloud over the temple or a pillar of fire before Pharoah’s army. It will be hard to ignore him during the plagues of the end times. It’s much easier to dismiss him……to ignore him today……while he is resting.

But, we do so at our peril.

Sorry Neitzche……..God is not dead……..he may just be resting……….before his final act.

Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.

Revelation 1:7, ESV

Once, I had a conversation about creation with a secular humanist. She finally got exasperated. She chuckled and said, “surely you don’t believe in creation in 7 days”. The subtext was: “how could you be that stupid?” This was her “kill shot”. I said, “yes, God can do anything”. But I have struggled with this ever since. It is hard to reconcile the Biblical time line with the geological or cosmic time lines. Many souls are lost to God because of this particular conflict between Genesis and science. This is tragic. And it all comes down to the definition of “day”.

This morning I was sitting in a hot tub in Arizona …….at 4 am. The sky was dark and clear. The stars were amazing. I saw the milky way, several satellites, and a few meteors. Then I saw something I had never seen before, a large meteor. It was low on the horizon, unusual. It was very bright, unusual. It lasted a long time, unusual. Then it split into 2 meteorites, which is very unusual…….something I have never seen before. I took this as an omen……..you may call it a coincidence. To me, this said, “Pay attention…….important information is coming”.

And then the question about days came to mind. What follows is speculation on my part.

Genesis tells of God creating everything in six days. But what is a day? We assume that this means a 24 hour day on earth……the time it takes for one rotation of our planet. At least that is how I have always interptered it…….. until this morning. But in God’s universe there are trillions upon trillions of galaxies, stars, and planets. Each of them has a different rotation. Each of them has a day that is different from an “Earth day”.

Length of a day in earth hours/days/months/years:

 Jupiter day         10 earth hours

 Our moon day         1 earth month

 Venus day            1 earth year

 Milky Way day.     225 million earth years

So, how long a “creation day” is…..in “Earth days”….. depends entirely on your point of reference. It seems a bit presumptuous to assume that God uses the same reference point that we do. God was dealing with his entire creation. He could choose any day that he wanted. There is no Biblical reason to believe that he chose earth to define his creation day. If God chose a point of reference with a day of a few hundred million earth years, then everything changes. Suddenly, the Biblical time line agrees with the scientific time line. This also reconciles the Biblical time line with the fossil record and the geological strata of earth.

Suddenly, creation in six days is no longer a “kill shot”. Suddenly, observed scientific fact fits with the narrative in Genesis.

Something to consider, the next time a secular humanist laughs at you………for believing God.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Genesis 1: 1-5, ESV,

God describing the first day of creation…….Notice that God made the first “creation day” before he made the earth……..before the first “earth day” even existed. I am not sure what reference point God used to define his “creation day”. But, it seems unlikely that he used an earth that he had not yet created.