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