UI – Part 169 – Islam & Trinity (III)

Distinct and Indivisible

We will start with simple botany.  The root and the tree are not separate.  From the root emanates the tree.  One cannot exist without the other.  Critical to understand is that they are indivisible yet distinct and joined as one.  This is a useful analogy.

Applying the analogy this is also the case for the Word of God as the Son of God.  One emanates from the other and are in unity, One.  They are indivisible yet distinct.  Distinct one from another but inseparable – the Father, the Son, the Spirit.  Each one but also as One in unity.

Mathematically the Father is the Whole.  The Son is a derivative and component of the Whole.  “My Father is greater than I.” ( John 10:29, 14:28).  The Holy Spirit is also a component of the Whole.  All three distinct in personality.

Not Alone at Creation

That God did not act alone in Creation is in Genesis (1:26), “Then God said let us make man in OUR image, in our likeness, and let them rule over …”

Also in Gen 3:22 it reads “The man has now become like one of US, knowing good and evil.”

Was God as “our” and “us” at once the Father, the Son, and the Spirit speaking in the plural?

The answer lies in the Son of God as the Word, the logos at creation with the Father.  The Spirit was also present, the breath of life breathed into mankind.  The Spirit would sanctify man from all other things or creatures created.  Sanctify, to be clear, means: to set apart to a sacred purpose or to religious use.[i]

God as Father commands.  His son, inseparable, executes the order.  In substance they are the same, and as Tertullian claims, in “personality” they are distinct.

Polytheism

In Scripture, the God of the Bible, there is no polytheism.  God the Father would not suffer, not die on the cross, but have his surrogate, his being in substance, as the one who carried out the Father’s Plan of Salvation for all mankind.  The divine did not die on the cross.  The invisible God did not die on the cross.  The human and visible Son of God died on the cross.  In the Resurrection his divinity was made known.

The gentiles at the time of Christ were idol worshippers with multitudes of idols and/or gods.  After the resurrection of Christ many continued to falsely worship other than the Savior.  They had not been exposed.  Muhammad recognized this.  His goal was to establish a focus on but one God, calling his god, Allah, and to make sense of the necessity of only One, not many.  He was not fully prepared or properly schooled to share the Wisdom of God the Father.  He preached as a prophet, as a prophet of his own making without the foundational truth or logos of the Creator.  He distorted the relationship between God as the Whole, his Son and the Paraclete as man’s reminder.  As a true prophet he would have had the necessary Wisdom imparted by God.

As the Ray cannot be separated from the Sun, so the Son cannot be separated from the Father

Tertullian cleverly provides an analogy of the sun, a ray (beam), and sunbeam.  This relates to God as Lord, the Son as Lord, and the Son as God.

“If the Father and the Son, are alike to be invoked, I shall call the Father ‘God’, and invoke Jesus Christ as ‘Lord’.”  But when Christ alone (is mentioned), I shall be able to call Him ‘God’ …. For I should give the name of ‘sun’ even to a sunbeam, considered in itself; but if I were mentioning the sun from which the ray emanates, I certainly should at once withdraw the name of sun from the mere beam.  For although  I make not two suns, still I shall reckon both the sun and its ray to be as much two things and two forms as of one undivided substance, as God and His Word, as the Father and the Son.” [ii]

Knowing

Who can be unaware that the things which are impossible with man are possible with God?

The Final in this series next week…………

Grace and Peace