We have been studying the “Trinity” for quite some time now, the following diagram representing the correct Biblical balance between asserting there is only one God & God being three persons, a difficult idea to comprehend, admittedly. Indeed, it has proven to be so difficult to understand that, instead of just accepting the Bible’s plain testimony to the fact, as I have showed you in these articles, people, through the ages, have conformed God to their own ideas & made Him fit into something they can understand.
First, the most fundamental way to misunderstand the Trinity is Tritheism, which states that Christianity teaches there are three gods (held by both Jews & Muslims). Second, at the other end of the spectrum, there’s the heresy of Sabellianism (named after its earliest proponent, Sabellius, in the 3rd century AD), which teaches that there is one God who merely functions in three ways, namely, He revealed Himself as Father in creation the universe & giving the Law, as Son in redemption, & as Spirit in the Church age. This view is still propagated by Oneness Pentecostals. Both Tritheism and Sabellianism fail to maintain the biblical balance between the one reality of God & His eternal existence in three persons. The third error is to simply deny the full deity of the Son & of the Holy Spirit (say they are not God), & to say, instead, that they were at some time created by God. This is the heresy of Arianism (after a teacher named Arius, who lived about A.D. 256-336), & it is still held today by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
So . . . , shall we accept the plain yet difficult teaching of Scripture, or agree w/Jews & Muslims, Pentecostals or Jehovah’s Witnesses?! I should not be a difficult choice, my friends. God has revealed the truth to us!
