Revelation 1:1-8
You may be seated. Turn in your
copy of God’s word to the book of Revelation chapter one. Our
reading will be verses one through eight. I mentioned earlier, we’ll
be thinking today about the doctrine of the Trinity, father, son,
and Holy spirit. and we will look at it from a
theological perspective. I want to use Revelation 1 to
show us that God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit
are in the scriptures, most clearly in the New Testament. I am not
going to preach through Revelation 1, 1-8. We did that a couple
summers ago, so you can look that up, listen to it. We will
be using some of the things said in this passage to help us understand
who is our God, one God, three persons. Need to be careful here. I don’t want to fall into heresy.
Before we read God’s word, let’s go to him in prayer. Pray with
me. Lord, you are our eternal God. You have spoken in various
times and in various ways to your people in the past. In these
last days, you have spoken through your son, the incarnate word.
We ask now that you open the mouth of your servant to proclaim
that word. in the power of the spirit. And
we pray this same spirit will open the hearts of those who
hear those who have assembled that your holy gospel might be
received and written on our hearts. Even as you have promised to
do hear us and help us in the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.
This is the word of the living God. Revelation chapter one,
verses one through eight. the revelation of Jesus Christ,
which God gave him to show his servants the things that must
soon take place. He made it known by sending his
angel to his servant, John, who bore witness to the word of God
and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. Blessed is the one who reads
aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear
and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near. John to the seven churches that
are in Asia, grace to you and peace from him who is and who
was and who is to come. And from the seven spirits who
are before his throne and from Christ Jesus, the faithful witness,
the firstborn of the dead and the ruler of the kings of the
earth. to him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by
his blood and made us a kingdom, priest to his God and father,
to him be glory and dominion forever and ever, amen. 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. I am the Alpha
and the Omega says the Lord God who is and who was and who is
to come the almighty. This is the word of the living
God for us. I don’t have to state the obvious to you, but I will
anyway. We are living in increasingly
godless days. it seems to get worse and worse.
Every day we wake up, we hear the news and we hear that gas
has risen. I think it’s going to hit five
bucks a gallon. Um, but I think for long before
all this inflation business, we have awakened every day to
realize it’s getting more godless by the day, by the penny, by
the gallon, whatever measurement you want to give it. It has Increased
this world has in godlessness day by day. And so we might ask
the question, is God dead? Is God gone? Is God irrelevant? And I suggest to you the same
about God is true of the sun. Just because there is a solar
eclipse does not mean the sun has ceased to exist. It simply
means the clouds have covered it. Think in my lifetime, a couple
solar eclipses have occurred. I mean, full ones, not partial
ones. A handful of solar eclipses have occurred where there has
been darkness in the daytime. Now, does that mean the sun has
burned up and exploded and gone away? It does not. The sun has
existed since God spoke and created the light, which rules the day.
And so is God dead? Is God gone? Is God irrelevant? No, he still exists. But mankind
in his wickedness continues to suppress the truth about God,
continues to say over and over, God does not exist. God is dead.
God is gone. God is irrelevant. Those who
believe in God are well living with crutches. God is the opiate
of the masses and on and on. Philosophers and atheists and
others have told us that thus is so. But dear friends, God
is. God always has been and God always
will be. The question is, do you know
him? And are you increasing in your
knowledge of our great God? Today is, in many church traditions,
Trinity Sunday. I noted that we don’t typically
follow the church calendar, but I kind of had a little interest
in hitting Pentecost last week, even though I think we touched
on it in Acts several weeks ago, but also Trinity Sunday. And
I’ll give you a little secret. Part of it’s because I’ve been
out of town. I thought while I was at the beach, I could think
on Pentecost. And while I was at Synod this week, General Synod
meeting, I could think on the Trinity. And so that’s the method
behind the madness. But the more I thought about
the Trinity, the more I thought about this subject, it got rather
exciting. So I thought back to my studies in seminary and how
we were told over and over and over the greatest gift that God
can give us as a church is himself. That is the greatest gift God
can give his church, his people, is himself. And so he has made
himself known. But do you know him? Are you
increasing in the knowledge of our God? There is a God and he
can be known. And not only can God be known,
he has made you with a capacity to know him as well as to glorify
and enjoy him. Little trick there. What is the
chief end of man? Y’all know that question. And
you know the answer. Remember, if a pastor asks you
any question, the answer is always Jesus or to glorify and enjoy
him forever. Right. Those are the two. You
never go wrong with those. But what is what is the chief
end of man? Why did God make you for his own glory? And so
we ought to know the God who made us and we ought to enjoy
that God. But there’s another little task
we might add on to that. The more we know God, the more
we worship and enjoy him, the more the world will see him. Our task is to make the invisible
God visible. And so the church serves at his
pleasure and we bear his image in the world. So this subject
of the Trinity is of great importance to the Christian, but it’s of
great importance to the evangelism, to the missions of the world. Sinners suppress the knowledge
of God. That’s what the book of Romans
tells us. The truth about God is plainly known. He’s plainly
displayed in creation. The heavens above declare his
glory. The stars, the firmament say
there is a God. You can’t help but hold a baby
and touch those little fingers and look at those little wiggly
toes. You can’t help but go to the ocean and see a little ecosystem,
fish, crabs, whatever. You can’t help but look at creation
and say there is a God. But sinners suppress that knowledge.
I think sinners are a lot like cats. Y’all know I don’t like
cats. But cats make good sermon illustrations.
Cats, you ever notice a cat will stick its front half of the body
under the couch? And it thinks just because it
can’t see you, that you don’t exist. But as you stand there
and watch the cat, the back half of it is wagging its tail and
having a great old time thinking, I have denied you as God, right? You do not exist. There is no
God. And that’s a lot like the non-Christian
world. They stick their head in the sand and say, there is
no God. But can they just wish him away, say him away? They
cannot. No, God is, God exists. And God sees the back half of
you sticking out from under the couch. You think your head is
under there denying him, but no, he sees the back half and
he will judge you. And so you can name yourself
an atheist. You can proclaim yourself an
agnostic. You can even call yourself, what
is becoming increasingly popular today, you can call yourself
a nun. Now that’s not a N-U-N who lives
in a convent at a Roman Catholic institution, right? A N-U-N is
something different, an N-O-N-E. When you are given the opportunity
to check your religious box, you can now put nun. And so a
nun is becoming one of the greatest, increasingly growing categories
of religious preference in the United States, in fact, in the
world. And so you can proclaim, I’m
an atheist, I’m an agnostic, I am a nun, yet God is, and he
is always and forever. So if sinners suppress knowledge,
how can righteous people, how can even, well, even unrighteous
people know God? Well, God can be known in two
ways. He reveals himself to everyone, Christians and non-Christians
alike, in creation. I mentioned Psalm 19, the heavens
above declare his glory, the stars above. The firmament day
to day pours forth speech. There is no voice. There is no
language. There is no nation. There is no place where God is
not known. God makes himself clear in creation. But the second way God reveals
himself, and it’s an important way, he reveals himself in the
scriptures. We call the first general revelation.
God can be generally known through creation. It’s not enough to
save, but it’s enough to hold you accountable. I am here. And
you deny me. But scripture in particular reveals
the particulars about who God is and what he’s done, most especially
the saving work of Jesus. So if you want to be saved, you
must know who God is as he’s revealed himself in the scriptures.
You can’t say, oh, I see the stars. There’s a God. I believe
in him. That’s that won’t save you. You need to read the scriptures
that say you’re a sinner. There is a savior. He is Jesus.
And so come to faith in him, receiving him. and resting in
him alone for your salvation. We also can learn about God through
what we call our secondary sources, our creeds, our confessions,
our catechisms, are written to instruct our minds and our hearts
who God is and what he has done. We know from our reciting the
Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, maybe our children’s catechism,
our shorter catechism, that God is one. Deuteronomy chapter six,
the Lord your God is one. But we know there are three persons,
the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit. And so to speak of one person
is to speak of all three. To speak of God is to speak of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now we sometimes work out this
three persons, one God thing in our mind in different ways.
We say, God the Father is of, None. He’s eternal. He’s not created, was not made. Then we speak of the son and
say he was eternally begotten. He was begotten of the father,
but he’s never had a beginning. You know what a mind twister
is, right? Well, you know what a tongue twister is. It’s Peter
Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers and you say it fast over
and over until you screw that up. Well, you know what a mind
twister is. It’s something that’s true, but your mind cannot grasp
it. That’s why I’m not a mathematician. That’s why I’m not an engineer.
You go with what you know. Now, should we all know about
the Trinity? Of course. Will we all understand the Trinity
equally? No, but God, the father is of none. The son is eternally
begotten and the Holy Spirit is eternally proceeding from
both father and son. That’s how we think of God. That’s
how we understand him from our creeds, our confessions, our
hymns, our catechisms. Our shorter catechism ask a couple
of questions. First, what is God? God is a
spirit. Infinite, eternal and unchangeable
in his being, his wisdom, his power, his justice, his holiness,
his goodness, his truth. Are there more gods than one?
There is but one only the living and true God. How many persons
are there in the Godhead? There are three persons, the
father, son, the Holy Spirit, or maybe the kids catechism,
who made you God? What else did God make? All things.
Why did God make you in all things? For his own glory. What is God? God is a spirit and does not
have a body like men. These, these creeds, these confessions,
these catechisms, they, the more we say them, the more we think
about them, they get in us. I remember several years back
when my grandfather was dying, he wasn’t the most religious
man there was on the face of the earth, but he did spend a
lot of time in church. And when he was near death, I
remember two things that he said, the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles
Creed. Those were things that after
a lifetime of week by week life in the church, that when it came
time to die, they were in his mind and on his heart. And in
some way, shape or form at his time of death, he was thinking
through how to speak to God and what to think about God. And
so there’s a method to our madness when we sing good hymns, when
we recite good creeds, when we say the catechism and learn these
things, it helps us so wonderfully. There’s another way to think
about the Trinity, the Godhead, and this is gonna be a little
stretch, but I think you’re up for it. When we talk about God
in our theology, we speak of him in two ways. We speak about
God ontologically. I’m gonna explain that. Don’t
worry. And then we speak of him economically. You get that high
gas prices, expensive groceries, you know what economics are,
right? We’ll come to that one in a second. But when we speak
of God ontologically, some of you who’ve taken philosophy or
something, you understand that ontology, You know, you got zoology,
biology, all that kind of stuff. It’s the study of, right? Ontology
is the study of being. It’s the study of essence. And
so when we think of the science of the reality of God, we say
in our brains, God exists in the heavenly places as he really
is. And it’s hard for human words
to capture it. So, You take a crummy camera,
you know, from 50 years ago, cameras of advanced, and you
take a picture of a pretty woman or a handsome guy, and what would
we say? That old camera doesn’t do him
or her justice. Well, it’s the same way. Our
human words, our human language cannot adequately explain who
God is. And so when we try to think of
who God is in his essence, in his being, we have to say to
ourself, he exists as he is and not as we think. And certainly
not as our inadequate words will explain. It has been said that
when God reveals himself to us, he’s like a an adult to a child,
prattling with his lips, speaking a language that little child
can understand. And thanks be to God that he
gives us enough. In fact, he gives us so much
in the word of God, so much about himself, our human minds, our
hearts can never exhaust. exhaustively know him in our
lifetime. We could read our Bibles every day. We could read theology
every day. We could memorize our catechisms, learn all the
hymns. We could say all the creeds, confessions, whatever, and we
could still get to heaven and say, Whoa, there is more to this
God than I ever thought. That’s what Paul says. We see
through a glass. darkly. And so there’s two ways
to think about God. There’s the ontological way,
the study of or the science of reality. Who is God really? But then there’s this economic
view of God. And I think you’ll understand
this. We say that God, the father, does this. God, the son, does
that. And God, the Holy Spirit, does
the other. And you’re thinking to yourselves,
didn’t he just say a few minutes ago that if we think of one,
we think of all three? And if we attribute something
to one that we attribute it to all three, that is very true.
But this word economy is a stewardship word. And you know stewardship,
who takes out the trash at your house at night. who sweeps the
floors, who does the laundry, who gets the groceries, who pays
the bills, who makes the money, who mows the yard. It’s a stewardship,
right? There’s chores to be done. And
we might say within the Trinity, within the Godhead, there are
chores, there is work to be done. And so we say that God the Father
is the one who has elected in his love a people for himself. He is the God of creation. He
is the God of love. We say of the son, his work is
the work of incarnation, his coming in the flesh. His is the
work of redemption, dying the death that we should have died.
But instead, in our place, he died for us. We say he is the
God of grace. And then of the spirit, we attribute
the work of regeneration, the work of sanctification. We say
the Holy Spirit brings us into fellowship. That’s why Paul’s
wonderful apostolic greeting, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God the Father and the fellowship of his Holy Spirit
be with or rest among you. See, we think of God’s work.
We think of God’s work in economic ways, in stewardship ways. Well, this this great God that
we know, love, serve, believe in can be thought of in all kinds
of ways, but he can be given all kinds of attributes. He is
the one living, true God. He is perfect. He is pure. He
is infinite. Not limited, right? In his being,
his glory, his blessedness, his perfections. He does not change. He is all sufficient. He is eternal.
He is incomprehensible. He’s loving, gracious, merciful.
He’s long suffering. He’s abundant in mercy, goodness
and truth. He forgives iniquity, transgression.
and sin, he rewards those who seek him, and he will, because
he is most just and terrible, by no means clear the guilty,
for he hates sin. He is everywhere present, he
is almighty, he is all knowing, he is wise, he is holy, he is
just, he needs no one. He is the fountain of all grace,
he is the sovereign one, And I want to end our thoughts on
the Trinity by a couple of actions. Five for you, in light of these
truths, you should know the Trinity. You should serve the Trinity.
You should worship the Trinity. You should trust the Trinity
and you should live by faith in our triune God. You should
know this God who gives himself to you. If you have the word,
you have the greatest love letter ever written, where God says
to you, you are my child. I love you. And this is who I
am. And why do I call it a love letter? Because God has loved
you with an everlasting love. He’s overlooked your sin until
the coming of Jesus. And then he didn’t overlook your
sin. He laid it on him. at the cross. And so God is a
God that you should know. This is a love story where he
gives himself to you. We love stories about knights
in shining armors and superheroes and we love all those kinds of
heroic stories and they’re all great. But this is the only one
that counts. This is the one that will save
your soul. And so we should know this God who gives himself to
us. Well, how do we get to know him? Well, we read our Bibles.
We come to church. We learn our scriptures. We sing
our hymns. We say our creeds. We learn our catechisms. We do
Bible studies. We read the table talks the elders
provide for you. We do all that we can to get
to know this great God. And then we serve him. He is
worthy of our allegiance. He is worthy of our service.
His is a kingdom, an everlasting kingdom, and as His loyal and
royal subjects, we ought to seek to serve Him in all ways. I think
the most important response to this triune God, though, is that
we worship Him. The chief end of man is to glorify God and
to enjoy Him forever. God has made us for Himself.
He has made us so that we might worship and enjoy him. Not that
he needs that. That would be kind of narcissistic,
wouldn’t it? God does not need our worship, but worship is due
him because of who he is. And he needed, he didn’t need,
I just said that, right? He made us that we might worship
him. And so what is it for a Christian not to know God? That’s sin.
What is it for a Christian not to serve God? That’s sin. What
is it for a Christian not to worship the God who saved and
redeemed him? Oh, what great sin that is. And so we ought to worship the
Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit. Now a little trick
here, a little method to our madness. Hopefully every Sunday
when you come to worship and you look through your bulletin,
then you walk through the service beginning to end and experience
our service of worship, you should say, boy, that was Trinitarian.
We worship God the Father by the blood of the Son through
the power of the Holy Spirit. Now it may be clear and less
clear and more clear and greater and lesser in different ways
week by week, but you should leave here saying we worship
the triune God. We gave glory to the Father by
the Son through the Holy Spirit in that whole service. So we
should know, serve, worship God. We should trust him. He is our
life, our light, his decrees, his laws, his holy will will
stand. He is out for our everlasting
good and his eternal glory. And so, dear brother, dear sister,
I hope you know this God through the son who has made himself
known by leaving heaven and coming to this earth, taking on the
form of a man. He’s the second Adam, what the
first Adam failed to do. The second Adam, Jesus, the last
Adam has now done. Jesus has dwelled among us. We
have a high priest who can sympathize with us. We have a big brother
who’s gone the way before us. And as the great theologians
like to say, the dust of the earth, our form, our likeness
is on the throne of glory. Jesus, the son of God, the God
man is on the throne. And He dwells in us by His Holy
Spirit. What a privileged people we are. But I think here’s our problem.
If you had a million bucks in the bank and didn’t know it,
you’d live like you were poor. Oh, the gas prices. Oh, the grocery
prices. Oh, the power prices. Oh, the
gas, natural gas. You’d complain about it. But
if you knew that million bucks was there, you’d be, you know,
Got it. Not a problem. I think so many
Christians live as if there’s nothing in the bank. And God
has given himself to you. The eternal love of the father
through the eternal ministry of the son, through the greatest
blessing, the gift of the spirit is at your disposal. And so don’t
live like you’re broke. Don’t live as if there is no
God, practical atheism. Live by faith in the one who
has loved you, died for you, and worked to save you. Let’s
do pray together. Our God, you are merciful. You
are pleased to drop down from heaven and to speak to us through
your word. We ask that you would give us
all grace that we might not be just hearers of your word, but
doers also. Give us your grace by your spirit
that we may believe what has been proclaimed to us. We want
to bring glory and honor to your name and all that we do. We want
you to conform us to the image of your son, Jesus Christ. And it’s in his name we pray,
amen. We want to respond to our great
God by singing again about him. So stand and sing number 215,
give to our God immortal praise.