Explaining the Trinity?

Question

I was watching a program the other day about the ark of the covenant. did you know that there were two other boxes inside the ark? there was the ark, a box made of wood inside of it, then another box made of gold placed inside of the wooden box. Altogether there were three boxes. this is another way to explain the Trinity. Any thoughts?

It was Perry Stone that I was watching with Rod Parsley.

There are so many different ways to explain it, but it really does take the Holy Spirit to make it real to us personally.

Answer 1

Very interesting. When God visited Abraham to tell him that he would be father there were three of them. Another way to visualize the Trinity is us. We are made up body, mind and spirit.

Answer 2

I believe in three parts of the same whole being. The parts act together yet remain in physically separate locations from each other. That is the Trinity of 1 God, 2 Jesus, and the 3 Holy Spirit...the Holy Spirit links the other two parts of the being together.

Answer 3

The best thing I have run across is from a Biblical Greek textbook discussion of John 1:1...

Biblical truth of the divine nature of Jesus is very often distorted or confused with ancient heresies on both sides of the truth.

Some confuse it with Arianism. That is, like the JW "translation" renders John 1:1, “… the word was a god.” The polytheism here should be obvious.

Others confuse it with Sabellianism, or assert that Jesus and the Father are exactly the same “person.” This side leaves us with a crazy guy running around talking to himself.

Neither of these views represents true Biblical teaching. John 1:1, the passage I cited above, holds the key to understanding these three opposing points of view, though many English translations render it rather poorly. In the quest to understand this passage, it is very helpful to understand a minor point of Greek (the language in which John was written) grammar. To that end, here is an "Exegetical Insight" from a Biblical Greek textbook. The author examines John 1:1 and explains the differences between Arianism, Sabellianism, and BIBLICAL TRUTH very well. Focus on the meaning, the technicality of the form is unimportant, just know that there is no question about the form John used:

The nominative case is the case that the subject is in. When the subject takes an equative verb like “is” (i.e., a verb that equates the subject with something else), then another noun also appears in the nominative case–the predicate nominative. In the sentence, “John is a man,” “John” is the subject and “man” is the predicate nominative. In English the subject and predicate nominative are distinguished by word order (the subject comes first). Not so in Greek. Since word order in Greek is quite flexible and is used for emphasis rather than for strict grammatical function, other means are used to determine subject from predicate nominative. For example, if one of the two nouns has the definite article, it is the subject.

As we have said, word order is employed especially for the sake of emphasis. Generally speaking, when a word is thrown to the front of the clause it is done so for emphasis. When a predicate nominative is thrown in front of the verb, by virtue of word order it takes on emphasis. A good illustration of this is John 1:1c. The English versions typically have, “and the Word was God.” But in Greek, the word order has been reversed. It reads,

και θεος ην ο λογος
‘kai theos en ho logos’ = “and God was the Word.”

"We know that “the Word” is the subject because it has the definite article, and we translate it accordingly: “and the Word was God.” Two questions, both of theological import, should come to mind:

(1) Why was θεος ‘theos’ (God) thrown forward?
and
(2) Why does it lack the article?

In brief, its emphatic position stresses its essence or quality: “What God was, the Word was” is how one translation brings out this force. Its lack of a definite article keeps us from identifying the person of the Word (Jesus Christ) with the person of “God” (the Father). That is to say, the word order tells us that Jesus Christ has all the divine attributes that the Father has; lack of the article tells us that Jesus Christ is not the Father. John’s wording here is beautifully compact! It is, in fact, one of the most elegantly terse theological statements one could ever find. As Martin Luther said, the lack of an article is against Sabellianism; the word order is against Arianism.

To state this another way, look at how the different Greek constructions would be rendered:

και ο λογος ην ο θεος
‘kai ho logos en ho theos’ =“and the Word was the God” (i.e., the Father; Sabellianism)

και ο λογος ην θεος
'kai ho logos en theos' =“and the Word was a god” (Arianism)

και θεος ην ο λογος
'kai theos en ho logos' =“and the Word was God” (Orthodoxy).

Jesus Christ is God and has all the attributes that the Father has. But he is not the first person of the Trinity. All this is concisely affirmed in και θεος ην ο λογος 'kai theos en ho logos'." (Literally, "and God was the Word.")

-Daniel B. Wallace, Dallas Theological Seminary.

Wallace is quoted in "Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar,"
William D. Mounce, Copyright © 1993 by William D. Mounce.

I transliterated (spelled with English letters) the Greek in the original and supplied a literal translation of Greek where necessary. -- συνεσταυρωμαι

Answer 4

Trinity
Why did God’s prophets not teach it?
WHY, for thousands of years, did none of God’s prophets teach his people about the Trinity? At the latest, would Jesus not use his ability as the Great Teacher to make the trinity clear to his followers? Would God inspire hundreds of pages of Scripture and yet not use any of this instruction to teach the Trinity if it were the “central doctrine” of faith?

Are Christians to believe that centuries after Christ and after having inspired the writing of the Bible, God would back the formulation of a doctrine that was unknown to his servants for thousands of years, one that is an “inscrutable mystery” “beyond the grasp of human reason,” one that admittedly had a pagan background and was “largely a matter of church politics”?

The testimony of history is clear: The Trinity teaching is a deviation from the truth, an apostatizing from it.

Answer 5

I agree that the Holy Spirit is the key element to convicting souls unto Salvation. TRINITY : God, the Father, Jesus, the Son and the Holy Spirit. That is all that the trinity is equalling one God-head. Many don't understand this that is why it takes the Holy Spirit to bring that revelation.

Answer 6

Very nice way to explain the Trinity.

Or it could be explained this way.

Think of the trinity as 3 stars in the sky. They are all stars but have their own individual make up and identity yet they are all planets. One shines bright, the second shines brighter and the third shines the brightest.

Answer 7

There are many 3 part signs in the OT that recall the trinity.