"I urge you – by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit – by praying to God –" (v. 30)

For Reading and Meditation:     Romans 15:23-30

"God is One, yet God is Three. How can such a strange thing be?" These are the lines of a ditty that supposedly was sung by troops on the march in World War I. Theologians down the ages have tried to illuminate this doctrine for us, but it is an issue that will never be fully clarified until we arrive in heaven (1 Corinthians 13:12). Basically the doctrine of the Trinity is: God is One but with three distinct centers of consciousness. Around this truth a number of errors have been propounded. The first was the teaching that there are three gods. The Jehovah's Witnesses accuse present-day Christians of believing this, and say that we conceive of God as a body with three heads. That might be true of ancient heresy but it is not true of classic Trinitarianism. The second heresy taught that God is unipersonal and the other two Persons in the Trinity are simply manifestations of the Being of the one God. The third main error denied the equality of the divine Persons and regarded them as being of different rank. The historic Church formulated the Athanasian Creed which states that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity. What we must see, however, is that no words can fully explain the truth of the Trinity. "The creed is a safety net to keep us from falling into error," says one preacher, "rather than a verbal net in which to trap the truth." We use the term "Trinity" expecting not so much that in that one word the truth may be spoken, but that it may not be left unspoken.

Father, I see that life often presents me with facts which seem irreconcilable at one stage of knowledge - though better understood at another. Perhaps one day this great mystery of the Trinity may be cleared up. Meanwhile I simply worship and adore. Amen.