Knowing the Trinity Through Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ’s public ministry spans a short three years, during which he relentlessly shatters the shibboleths of the religious pundits of his day. Jesus challenges persons to surrender everything they hold dear -- including their own families -- to follow him. He is bent on changing their mind-sets, their beliefs about God’s purposes, God’s nature.   

What does Jesus want us to understand and find delight in, opening our deepest being to discover?

With consistent passion, a passion for which he is ultimately sentenced to death, Jesus witnesses that this present world finds its origin and fulfillment in a Triune Creator whom Jesus calls the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who love human beings and desire to be loved by them, these three Persons who exist as one God. And as Jesus reveals his own divine identity, he says, so he reveals the Father and the Holy Spirit.

How does Jesus witness to these mysteries?

Jesus startles the Samaritan woman at the well. He tells her things about her life that she is trying to hide. And startles her into saying, “Sir, I can see you are a prophet.”

A response that is startling in its own right, for Samaritans accepted no prophet after Moses but the one they viewed as the Messiah (Deut 18:18).

Jesus goes deeper. He reveals to her that God is the Father who seeks worship in spirit and in truth.

She responds tentatively: “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

His answer? Surely astounding. “I that speak to you, I am” (Jn 4:26; Morris, NICNT, italics ours), his use of “I am” asserting identification with the name for deity that God revealed to Moses (Ex 3:14; Jn 8:58).

Here is Jesus, pointing to his eternal pre-existence before his incarnation as Christ. His declaration of “I am” confirms deity as well as personhood, revealing that through Jesus, God is experienced as the divine Thou, who possesses identity, thought, will, and personality, and with whom it is possible to have a conversation, even at a Samaritan well.

And the Samaritan woman believes in him. So taken with Jesus’ person, his mission, and his interaction with her, this Gentile woman at the well becomes his first evangelist.

Peter is given more opportunity than the Samaritan woman to see Jesus Christ in action, hearing him preach the Gospel of repentance from sin, heal those afflicted with physical diseases or demonic possession, and work miracles like feeding five thousand people after teaching them about the kingdom of God.

So when Jesus turns to Peter one day and asks, “Who do you say I am?” Peter practically shouts, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus gives an unexpected response. He does not say, “That’s good, Peter, I’m glad you finally get it.” Or, “Well said, my good and faithful servant.” Instead, Jesus replies, “Blessed are you, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17).

Peter only knows this truth because the Father revealed it to him, Jesus is saying, providing witness to the Godhead itself, the inner, intimate workings of the Trinity, and the importance the Triune God places on being understood by their created, by individual human beings. 

Jesus and His Father

Jesus talks about his Father in heaven all the time, often to the annoyance of his listeners, particularly the Pharisees who don’t want to hear that Jesus models his behavior on his Father, the Lord God Almighty; his Father to whom Jesus prays constantly, with loving respect, certainly, but also with a strong sense of his individual identity as the Son of Man. “Father,” he says, “glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began” (Jn 17:5).

So tangible, reciprocal, and intimate is the relationship between the Father and the Son, and so revelatory of God’s identity, that Jesus says, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27); “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6); and “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30).

Jesus and the Holy Spirit

What a difficult concept to get across, since the disciples must have been bewildered, and Jesus hard-pressed to explain in terms they might comprehend. When I leave you, (surely the most painful thought ever for them), Jesus says, “the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (Jn 14:26 NKJV).

Certainly this makes more sense now, with the advantage of the New Testament as a clear explication of the Trinity in action, but even today the concept of the Holy Spirit is difficult to grasp, rather like seeing the effect of wind that whips up sand into swirls, or brings clouds scudding across the sky, but never seeing the actual wind itself.

Yet the concrete impact of the Holy Spirit’s presence in Jesus’ earthly life is definitive and palpable. When Jesus is in trouble, in pain, the Holy Spirit is there; when Jesus needs power to heal, the Holy Spirit provides it; when Jesus rejoices, he rejoices in the Spirit (Lk 10:21). And when Jesus departs from this earth as a human being, the Holy Spirit comes to impart his Word to the world.

It’s a team effort, this Trinity, these three distinct, individuated Persons in one overarching consciousness of the Triune God. You are in good hands in this Life Together with the Holy Trinity!

For more on how to experience the Holy Trinity in your life of Christian faith, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY