CHAPTER 2
The God I Believe In
What should it mean when we stand in church and say, “I believe in God”? Are we at this point just allying ourselves with Jews, Moslems, Hindus, and others against atheism and declaring that there is some God as distinct from none?
No; we are doing far more than this. We are professing faith in the God of the Creed itself, the Christian God, the God of the Bible—the Sovereign Creator whose “Christian name,” as Karl Barth put it, is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If this is not the God in whom we believe, we have no business saying the Creed at all.
Idols
We must be clear here. Today’s idea is that the great divide is between those who say “I believe in God” in some sense and those who cannot say it in any sense. Atheism is seen as an enemy, paganism is not, and it is assumed that the difference between one faith and another is quite secondary.
But in the Bible the great divide is between those who believe in the Christian God and those who serve idols—”gods,” that is, whose images, whether metal or mental, do not square with the self-disclosure of the Creator. One wishes that some who recite “I believe in God” in church each Sunday would see that what they actually mean is “I do not believe in God—not this God, anyhow!”
His Name
The Bible tells us that God has revealed himself, establishing his identity, so to speak, by telling us his “name.” This “name” appears in three connections.
First, God gave his “proper name,” Jehovah (or Yahweh, as modern scholars prefer), to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:13ff.; see also Exodus 6:3). The name means “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be” (ESV, text and margin).
It declares God’s almightiness: he cannot be hindered from being what he is and doing what he wills. Well did the AV (Authorized Version) translators render this name as “the Lord.” The Creed echoes this emphasis when it speaks of God the Father Almighty.
Second, God “proclaimed the name of the Lord” to Moses by delineating his moral character—“a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity . . . but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:5–7 ESV).
This “name”—you could call it a revealed description—discloses both God’s nature and his role. It is a declaration whose echoes reverberate throughout the Bible (see Exodus 20:5ff.; Numbers 14:18; 2 Chronicles 30:9; Nehemiah 1:5; Nehemiah 9:17, 32; Psalm 86:5, 15; 103:8–18; 111:4–9; 112:4; 116:5; 145:8ff., 17, 20; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Romans 2:2–6), and all of God’s acts that Scripture records confirm and illustrate its truth.
It is noteworthy that when John focuses on the two sides of God’s character by saying that he is both light and love (1 John 1:5; 4:8)—not love without righteousness and purity, nor rectitude without kindness and compassion, but holy love and loving holiness, and each quality to the highest degree—he offers each statement as summarizing what we learn from Jesus about God.
Three In One
Third, the Son of God told his disciples to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19 ESV). “Name,” note, not “names”: the three persons together constitute the one God. Here we face the most dizzying and unfathomable truth of all, the truth of the Trinity, to which the three paragraphs of the Creed (“the Father . . . his only Son . . . the Holy Spirit”) also bear witness.
What should we make of this? In itself, the divine tri-unity is a mystery, a transcendent fact that passes our understanding. (The same is true of such realities as God’s eternity, infinity, omniscience, and providential control of our free actions; indeed, all truths about God exceed our comprehension, more or less.)
How the one eternal God is eternally both singular and plural, how Father, Son, and Spirit are personally distinct yet essentially one (so that tritheism, belief in three gods who are not one, and Unitarianism, belief in one God who is not three, are both wrong), is more than we can know, and any attempt to “explain” it—to dispel the mystery by reasoning, as distinct from confessing it from Scripture—is bound to falsify it.
Here, as elsewhere, our God is too big for his creatures’ little minds.
Yet the historical foundation-facts of Christian faith—a man who was God, praying to his Father and promising that he and his Father would send “another Helper” (John 14:16 ESV) to continue his divine ministry—and equally the universally experienced facts of Christian devotion—worshiping God the Father above you and knowing the fellowship of God the Son beside you, both through the prompting of God the Holy Spirit within you—point inescapably to God’s essential three-in-oneness.
So does the cooperative activity of the Three in saving us—the Father planning, the Son procuring, and the Spirit applying redemption. Many Scriptures witness to this: see, for instance, Romans 8:1–17; 2 Corinthians 13:14; Ephesians 1:3–14; 2 Thessalonians 2:13ff.; 1 Peter 1:2. When the gospel of Christ is analyzed, the truth of the Trinity proves to be its foundation and framework.
It was only through the work of grace, which centers on the Incarnation, that the one God was seen to be plural. No wonder, then, if those who do not believe in the work of grace doubt the truth of the Trinity too.
But this is the God of the Creed. Is this, now, the God whom we worship? Or have we too fallen victims to idolatry?