Burchell, Graham: Unity Displayed by Deity

But when we come to unity amongst God's people, then we are looking, I believe, at a subject very dear to the heart of God. And we've tackling this topic in three ways. Tonight, I want to talk about unity as displayed by deity. And then next week, Greg will, um, be dealing with unity as desired by deity. And if Reg hadn't decided to go to California for a holiday, he would have been taking unity as demonstrated by deity, but I guess I have to do it, I think, unless anybody else wants to try it, please feel very free to volunteer. Oh, well, see me after. What are we talking about then when we talk about unity? The dictionary defines it as the state of being one, the state of being combined into a whole, or a combination or union of parts into a whole. And as we apply this definition to the local church, we find that it means the blending together of different personalities, of different, uh, gifts, without making a change in any of these things, by the way. And, and you know that when the Bible speaks of the church, it takes as an example the body, the physical body, and it shows how the different members of that body functioning together produce something that is lively and valuable. And I was thinking, most of you know, of course, that I have very high technical ability, and, uh, I was thinking about a car. Now, even I know what happens with a car. I've seen it on television. They make different parts in different places. And when you look at these parts, they look different. They function differently. But somewhere on along the line, somebody takes all these parts, and in a magical way that I don't understand, produce a vehicle which provides transportation for people from A to B. And I know enough about cars to know that if one of those essential parts go wrong, something in the car doesn't work, and it might even be the car itself doesn't move. And you're all aware of that, as I am. And if we look at those examples, we realize the value of unity in the church. And God doesn't change our personalities to any great degree. Well, now and again he takes a bit of sandpaper and rubs the rough corners off. He doesn't change the human talent that he's given us. He gives us different spiritual gifts, and yet in spite of those things, he expects us to come together and work as a unit. And there's no ifs, ands, and buts about it. I suffer from the same things as other people. Now and again, something upsets you, and you say, yeah, that's it, I'm not going there anymore. Or I'm not going to that meeting, or I'm not going to do this. And I've gone through that process. But you know that doesn't produce unity. And usually, in my own experience, I had it in a very real way when I lived in Africa over a matter that now is not, is dealt with in a much more gracious way. But I said, I'm not going to that place again. I don't agree, and I was right for once, as it happened. I don't agree with it, and I was very tempted to stay away, and the Spirit of God said to me, look, the Lord is aware of that problem, and if you remove yourself from the situation, you certainly will not in any way help it. And the Lord teaches us lessons through life like this, and and so what we're going to look at in the three weeks is not the things that divide us, but the things that unite us. And the major thing that unites us is this, that unity among his people is very special to God. Greg's going to be looking, I would suggest, at a very great degree next week to John seventeen, and he's hinted at that a couple of times. Five times in that chapter, the Lord Jesus says that they may be what? Let's go to Psalm one thirty three. This is the only occurrence of the word unity in the Old Testament. Very beautiful little psalm. I'm sure you're aware of it. I'm sure you, most of you, know the content of this psalm, but let's read it again. Behold. Wow, this is always a serious word. It means to look carefully. Consider in detail how good and pleasant it is for brethren. Notice there's the little B there, but we could still apply it with a big B, I guess. How good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. It is like the precious oil upon the head that ran down the beard, even Aaron's beard, and went down to the opening of his robes, as the dew of Hermon that descended upon the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life forevermore. Now, there's no doubt about it that this psalm has its, its, uh, origins in Israel. And if you l- follow the idea of unity among- in Israel, in the word of God, you'll find it a very interesting study. God desired that his people would be one. That didn't happen. They split up. But what he is saying here is this, that there's two examples that I want you to look at. The first occurs when Aaron is anointed high priest, and the oil is p- poured upon his head, and it runs down evenly down his body and covers everything. The dew that falls on Mount Hermon in the north of Israel also falls on Jerusalem in the south. And so they are united. The oil unites the, the body of Aaron, and the dew unites the nation of Israel under its cover. And when this happens, God commands the blessing. Now, in scripture, the oil and the dew speak of the Spirit of God. And I think what we can draw in a practical sense from this psalm, that it's the free operation of the Spirit of God that achieves unity. It's the free operation of the Spirit of God that allows someone with my personality to mix with someone of yours, with someone of my human abilities to mix with somebody with different ones. For those of us with different gifts, to work together in unity is only done under the operation as the Spirit of God covers us all. Then the ultimate end must be unity. Then God can bless. And I've often experienced where Christians have said, why are we not being blessed? And when you talk to them, there is some disunity. It may not be much, may be serious. But you know, where there's disunity, the Spirit of God is obviously not able to do his will, and blessing doesn't flow from the hand of God. God gives us little hints in his word too. For example, he says in Deuteronomy, thou shall not plow with an ox or an ass together. Now, I'm not a farmer, and neither have I had any experience of it, but you don't have to be clever to know that if you yoke those two animals together, you would very unlikely get a straight furrow. In, in biblical terms, one is a clean animal and one is unclean. One is fairly tall, the other is short. One is fairly patient and plodding, the other one will shoot off in all directions if you allow it. And in a very simple way, we have the idea too that if people are going to work together, there has to be unity. In Amos, we read this, can two walk together except they be agreed? Now, this is really talking about a meeting of the minds. How can people walk together in the same direction if there's not a meeting of the mind? The soldiers were leaving the local town to go to the First World War, and they lined up and they marched off to the station, and there was one very proud mother there who went to see them off. She was sad because her son was going to the war, but when she saw him all dressed in his uniform and drilling very smartly, she was proud. So when somebody said to her, well, did you enjoy as well as you could seeing Willie march off to the war? She said, sure. But she said there was one thing wrong. She said they were all out of step, except Willie. All out of step except Willie. Isn't that often with us too? You see, they're all out the step, except me. I used to enjoy, one of the things I enjoyed in the Navy was actually drilling squads. I love shouting at soldiers, sailors, and getting them to do things for me. But there's nothing better than seeing a drill squad in absolute precision. That's what God requires of his church. Now the Father is obviously, God the Father is interested in the church and its unity. The Lord Jesus is interested in the church and its unity, otherwise he wouldn't have prayed so much in John seventeen. The Spirit of God is interested in its unity because Paul could write endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. And so we have Father, we have Son, and we have Spirit. And this is the very example that God uses to display deity and to display unity within deity. And so if we're going to learn the pattern of deity, then God says, first of all, look at me, look at us. And boy, then we get problems, don't we? We call it the doctrine of the Trinity. And if there is a doctrine with which men have struggled since the early days of the church, this is it. The American philosopher Daniel Webster was once asked, how do you reconcile the doctrine of the Trinity with reason? And he turned to his question and he said, do you expect to understand the arithmetic of heaven? Because that's what we're looking at. You see, we have a Father God, we have a Son God, we have a Holy Spirit God, but we don't have three gods. We have one God, yet in essence we have three persons. And the divine riddle is this, that three make one, and one makes three, But not... And by the way, the word doesn't come in scripture at all. You won't find the word Trinity in scripture. I'll tell you in a minute where it comes from, but you won't find it in scripture. But the whole thing is permeated with it. For example, we read of God the Father doing something, and then we read of God the Son doing the same thing, and then we read of God the Spirit responsible for exactly the same thing. And, and we read through the scripture, and we find these personalities interchanging so quickly in the operation of the Godhead that we can be absolutely confused if we don't set it in order. Now, the word Trinity comes from a Latin word, trinos, which means threefold. It is never used to talk about three people. The correct translation of the Trinity is the threefoldedness of God. You see, to raise the fact of three gods would be polytheism. Saying there are many gods. And that would be to to claim that our God is three gods, would be but another form of polytheism and be equally blasphemous. The early articles of the church in England specified this. In the unity of the Godhead, there be three persons of one substance, one power, one eternity, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. And as we trace the activities of God presented in this threefold way, we find that their powers are the same, their characteristics are the same, their accomplishments are the same. And we read statements like the Son who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God. And Christ, God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself. I and my Father are one. And these are statements and illustrations that constantly flow from the word of God. And it begins in Genesis chapter one and the first five words. Can anybody tell me what they are? The first five words in Genesis chapter one. In the beg- this is a bit like school, everybody speaks the same and you can't understand who's saying what. In the beginning, God. Now here you have a contradiction, you see, because the the word God is Elohim, which is plural. Now, in Hebrew, there are three directions. There's singular, there's dual, where two people are involved, and there is, uh, singular. So we have a plural God undertaking a singular act. When you go farther into the story of creation, what do we read? Let us make man in our own image, and we've got three chapters into the Bible, and we're confused already. We come, we go right through to Revelation, and guess what? We're still confused. But we really have to put what's happening in perspective. Let me try in the few minutes left to me to do this. First of all, there can only be one God. Now, I'm not going to repeat the lecture that I gave on Saturday morning last year, where I went through the principles of the first cause. But we end up, when we go through the principles of the first cause theory, we end up with somebody having to start it all. That things did just n- did not happen the way that man thinks it does. There has to be somebody right at the beginning who was the first cause of everything, creation, emotion, intelligence, all those things had to start somewhere. And they started with God. The word father means originator. And therefore, when we speak of God the Father, we are speaking of God in his capacity as the one who began everything. Whatever it was, he began it. As I said, the word father means originator. And so we build up this picture of a God who begins everything, and we realize, of course, that God is fundamentally eternal. He's omnipresent, he's omniscient, and we build up this picture of this tremendous supreme being who has every characteristic that is possibly t- possible to have, and we would say, quite honestly, how would we get to know this God? You see, if God is everywhere, how can he be located anywhere? Therefore, we have the problem of Job nine. Job wants to argue his case before God. He's fed up with his friends, and he wants to go before God and argue his case. And if you read Job chapter nine, you'll realize the trouble he had. He says, I can't see him to start with. He can walk past me, and I don't even know he's gone. I can't answer one out of a thousand questions. His knowledge is far greater than mine. And you remember that when he comes to the middle of that, towards the end of that chapter, he says, oh, if there's only somebody that could put his hand upon us both. Well, one of the things we gather from Genesis one is this, that God is serious about creation. God did not create things just for a whim. When God made creation, he made it for a purpose. And we get an inkling of that purpose when he makes man after his own image. But you see, if we have this tremendous God who we cannot understand in any form or another, how can we know what he wants to do? And so his purpose for creation has to be communicated to us as men. And so the second person of the Trinity comes now into effect, because we read of the Word becoming flesh. We read of one who dwelt in the bosom of the Father. He hath shown him forth. And so our search to understand God does not take us all through the universe. Our search to understand God focuses us on one person, and that is the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And he is a God who is both infinite and finite in the sense of being a man. He is a God who is omnipresent and eternal, and yet can be seen and appreciated locally. And so every characteristic that is present in God the Father appears in God the Son. But it doesn't now appear in a way that confuses us. It appears in a way that we can understand. Because there walks before us a man. A man who was God. And we can now see the plan and know the plan of God for creation. It was that man might be in fellowship with himself. And the God that we sought to know, and who was so far from us and so difficult to understand, is now seen in, in presence in a man. So we have the Father, who is the originator, the beginner of all things, and we have the Son, who is the manifestation of that God. And so, because Christ came, there is nobody that can say we cannot see God. And Job was answered in Jesus Christ because God sent in our midst someone Someone of of him. himself. And I think I mentioned before, if you study the word from in John's gospel, you'll find a whole variety of them, but one of them says, I came from the Father. I came from his essential being. I am God. No, we have a God in heaven who is so immeasurably beyond our understanding or thinking. We have that God then taking on human form, so now we can see him, hear his words, read about him in, in, in the biblical history, and know that he was God. But there's one further step. How is that God, who we can now see in the person of Jesus Christ objectively, how is he going to become subjective? In other words, how is that God now going to be understood by us inside, not through visual understanding and outside understanding. And that can only be done by the Spirit. It's the Spirit of God who has all the character of God, who comes into human lives at the moment of conversion and acceptance of Christ. Once we accept that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who died to save us, then God, that same God who we couldn't see and couldn't understand, now comes in, and we know he's there subjectively now because he comes in as a person and a personality and dwells within us. And without those three presentations of the Almighty God, we really would know very little about him. Someone who says we have the Father in generation, the Son in declaration, and the Spirit in appropriation. So the doctrine of the Trinity, by the way, apart from being difficult, is something that, although man struggles with, he's got an inward feeling that it's right. Because of the way that we were built, there is that inward feeling that it is possible that there is a God, and we can know him. And if man was left alone without the influence of Satan, men would gravitate towards God because of what is in them. But Satan has damaged that sensibility to God, and so man doesn't come unless God seeks him out. And so we could read that the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. No, we don't have three gods. You think of Genesis one one, just for a moment, we'll digress. Think of Genesis one one when they decided to make the earth. You got three gods, how are you going to do it? Are you going to say to one god, well, look, you look after the sea, and another god, you're going to look after the earth, and uh, number three, you'd better look after the atmosphere. You know what happens when a committee gets together, don't you? As I told you before, a camel is a horse produced by a committee. But, so you, can you imagine what a mess there would have been of creation if, in fact, we had three gods? No, we had one God. Who suggests himself to us with these three personalities. Each, each could stand on their own feet, if I could put it that way. Each acceptable as God. But thank God, it's one God. And in the end, when everything is finished, what's going to happen? God the Father is going to put everything under his Son's feet. His Son is then going to take it all and present it back to the Father, as Paul says in one Corinthians fifteen, that God might be all in all. It's one God, and so he's quite at liberty to say to us, I want unity amongst you because I've shown you unity in the Godhead.