The topic of the trinity, our Three-In-One God, isn’t a new one to the Christian, but the answers to the seeker might be. How would you explain your three-in-one God to someone who wasn’t a Christian? It doesn’t make sense – neither does God’s love. There are plenty of unexplained things about the Christian faith that we simply accept. Our God says it; we believe it.
We briefly explored some analogies that people have used through the centuries to explain the trinity. The egg shell, white, and yoke doesn’t really work. Neither do the three states of water – liquid, ice, and vapor. St. Patrick’s three leaf clover isn’t bad, but it’s really no better. The author of our book, Prepared to Answer, offers this analogy that seems to work well. What do you think?
Imagine if we existed in only two physical dimensions, as if all we had ever experienced was our flatland of height and width and we knew nothing of depth. Now imagine that someone who existed in three dimensions tried to communicate to us a mysterious concept called a solid. Let’s say he tried to described a cube to us. “Six square sides” wouldn’t make any sense. He could certainly draw a cube on our flat surface, just as you can draw one on paper, but we would only see the lines, the squares, and the angles. “Yes, we know all about those,” we would say. But we would never perceive the cube, never see into it. When we say the person describing it is wrong…well…we’re wrong.
The point is not that God is like a cube. The point is this: Someone who exists in places where our thinking cannot possibly follow, beyond our dimensions of space and time, will almost certainly say things about himself that do not make sense to us. There’s nothing unreasonable about recognizing the limits of our reason, especially when it comes to God talking about God.
Want to hear more? Watch this Sunday’s Bible study from our series Not Sorry: Apologetics – What is your Three-In-One God?
Please click HERE for the Bible class slides.