The Threeness of God is part His saving name

Sermon for the Festival of the Holy Trinity

Ezekiel 18:30-32  +  Romans 11:33-36  +  John 3:1-15

We confessed those striking words again today from the Athanasian Creed: Whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold the catholic faith. Whoever does not keep it whole and undefiled will without doubt perish eternally. And the catholic faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance. To be ignorant of the true God or to deny the true God is to perish eternally. But to know Him is eternal life, as Jesus once prayed to His Father in heaven: And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. And as you heard last week on Pentecost in Joel’s prophecy, cited by the Apostle Peter: And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved.

God’s name is more than just what we call Him. His name is who He is, everything He’s revealed about Himself. The name of the Lord, then, includes His oneness. You know how many gods the ancient Greeks and Romans worshiped, or how many gods the other pagans around the world have worshiped. A god of this and a god of that. A god for every occasion. A god to represent every desire—and every evil—of man. In contrast, Moses declared to the people of Israel: Hear, O Israel! The LORD our God, the LORD is one…You shall fear the LORD your God and serve Him, and shall take oaths in His name. You shall not go after other gods. The one God made the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. There are not three Gods or two Gods or many Gods. There is one God. You have to know that to know Him.

But there is also a unique Threeness—a Trinity—to the one God, revealed obscurely in the Old Testament, revealed clearly in the New (as clearly as we need it to be). The one God who created all things, who revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, is three distinct Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You have to know that to know Him. The Threeness of God is part of His saving name.

See how Jesus reveals God to us in His Threeness in today’s Gospel from John 3.

The Pharisee and ruler of the Jews, Nicodemus, eventually became a believer in Jesus, but he wasn’t yet. So he came to Jesus by cover of night and said, Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him. Nicodemus recognized that Jesus “came from God.” He had no idea just how right he was. As John’s Gospel tells us in chapter 1, Jesus was the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father from eternity. God of God. Light of Light. Very God of very God, as we confess in the Nicene Creed. He literally came from God the Father in eternity, and He also came from God the Father into the world through the virgin’s womb. No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. Where does the Father direct our attention? He points us to His Son. And where does the Son point? Back to the Father.

What does Jesus say in response to Nicodemus? “Yes! Good job! You’re right, I have come from God the Father. I’m the second Person of the Holy Trinity!” No. He doesn’t congratulate Nicodemus or offer a detailed explanation of the Trinity. He puts salvation itself on the line.

Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

The first birth, the one from our parents, counts for nothing toward a person’s salvation—toward entering the kingdom of God. The first birth, from our mothers, brings us into the world with the same sin and sinful corruption of our body and soul as our mothers and fathers were born with, back to our sin-corrupted father Adam and our sin-corrupted mother Eve. No one is born with true knowledge of God, true love for God, true trust in God, true fear of God.

Now, it’s true, everyone is born with a reflection of the knowledge of God. We call it the natural knowledge of God or natural law. Human beings know by nature that God exists, for as much as our arrogant age of pseudo-science tries to deny it. We have a general knowledge of right and wrong. We know by nature and from nature that God is good, wise, powerful and just, and that He punishes sinners, even after this earthly life is done. But that natural knowledge doesn’t make us love Him or trust in Him, nor does it reveal how we can enter the kingdom of God.

No, on the contrary, we are all born wanting to earn our own way into heaven, wanting to be God, to play God, to tell God what’s right and wrong, or to look for a God who agrees with us about what is right and wrong. That must be the true God, the one who agrees with me.

But no, the true God is the one who insists that you’re not good enough as you are, because we’re all born in sin. The true God insists that you start over from scratch, that who you are by nature must be completely put to death, and that a new man, a new person must arise from the ashes, being born again.

But being born isn’t something to strive for, isn’t something you do for yourself. You can’t remake yourself. You can’t change who you are. Someone else has to give birth to you. And Jesus explains how that happens and who it is who does it.

Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

The Father pointed us to His Son, to know the Father by listening to Jesus. Where does Jesus point? He points to the Spirit. The Spirit—the same Holy Spirit referred to in the Old Testament, the same Holy Spirit whose coming we celebrated last Sunday—He is the only one who brings people into the kingdom of God, and He does it through rebirth, otherwise known as “regeneration.”

Jesus ties that rebirthing or regeneration to water. Not just plain water, but the water that is connected to God’s command and included in God’s Word, the water of Holy Baptism that is applied in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit to those who have heard the Word of God and wish to be buried with Christ through Baptism into death. As Paul writes to Titus in chapter 3: But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. There again you see God in His perfect Threeness—”God our Savior,” that is, God the Father, “saved us through the washing of regeneration of the Holy Spirit, whom He,” the Father, “poured out on us through Jesus Christ our Savior.” The Threeness of God is part of His saving name.

But, aren’t we saved by faith alone? Yes we are. But where does faith come from? From hearing the message, the message that God the Father is willing to forgive sins for Christ’s sake, through the Spirit’s work of Baptism, which unites us to the death of God’s Son, who died for our sins. So faith clings to the promise which God Himself has attached to Holy Baptism.

The Spirit gives new birth. The Spirit gives life. But where does the Spirit point? He points to the Son. As Jesus told Nicodemus, As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.

Go back and read Numbers 21 if you don’t remember the account of the bronze serpent. Moses put a bronze serpent up on a pole so that the snake-bitten and dying Israelites could look up at it and be miraculously healed of the venom that was killing them. So God the Father sent His Son into human flesh so that He could be lifted up on the cross, so that all of us, dying in our sins, might look to Him in faith and be saved. The Holy Spirit is the one working in that message to actually turn our eyes to Christ so that we trust in Him and receive forgiveness and eternal life from Him. Again, the Threeness of God is part of His saving name.

How can God be one and three at the same time? How can each distinct Person of the Godhead be God, without there being three Gods? Put such questions aside and focus on how the one God reveals His Threeness to us in the Holy Scriptures. The Father sent the Son and points the world to Him as the One who bore our sins and suffered for us and won us a place in His kingdom. The Son, in turn, points the world to the Father who sent Him and who desires all men to be saved. Jesus also points to the Spirit as the Sanctifier who gives us new birth and entrance into the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit points the world back to the Son and works faith and preserves us in the faith by Word and Sacrament. Know God in His Oneness. But know Him also in His Threeness. It’s part of His saving name. And knowing Him, never stop calling upon His name for deliverance from every evil and from every trouble. For whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved. Amen.