Jesus, God, Holy Spirit, Heaven, Tri-What?

And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

As I mentioned in previous blog postings (Tripped Up: Getting to Jesus’ First Words), all that Jesus speaks is not theological in nature. Much of what He shares with us on the roads of His ministry are practical, life application teachings. He passes on to us in such a loving way, how to live to serve each other, to love the Father and desire to do His will. But sometimes when these crimson words appear it is in fact theological, and often times it is a message that is central to the orthodoxy of Christianity. Today’s passage is just such a case.

Here, as we continue to look at the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, we come to verse 17. “But wait! Those words are not in red!” if you are one of the people who have said or thought this, you’d be correct. They are not printed in red in those red-letter translations, but these words are no less divine.

At the baptism of Jesus we have a motley collection, not the least of which is John the Baptist himself. There is a large crowd of people at the river. As we previously discussed, the Pharisees and Sadducees are there as well. Who else is looking on? Who knows? The Jordan Valley is a central pathway to and from so many places and so many nations and peoples. Jordan, Syria, the Red Sea, Egypt are all regions that send people through the rift valley that contains the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the ports at the mouth of the Red Sea. Travelers, traders, soldiers and citizens would likely have been watching on, and were in for a surprise.

As Jesus came “up immediately from the water” (indicating the likelihood of a baptism by immersion), the heavens were opened to Him, He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and He heard a voice from heaven saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Let’s clarify this scripture a little. The image of the Holy Spirit ‘like a dove’ was seen. The voice from heaven (gr. fona, from which we derive our word telephone or phone today), was audible, and was physically heard. All this took place while Jesus was standing before the witnesses.

What we have here is an example of the triune God present at this event. Jesus was there incarnate, in a physical body, fully God and fully man. The Holy Spirit manifested Himself ‘like a dove’ and was physically seen. John the Baptist was told (John 1:33ff) that this was going to happen in a prophecy and watched it come to pass. The voice of the Father comes from heaven, to be heard by all who were there. Similar to the action of creation found in the book of Genesis, all three agents of the Godhead are present at this moment.

While you will not find the word ‘trinity’ in scripture, this verse, as well as many others work together to form the dogmatic doctrine that is the theology of the trinity; ‘God in three persons, blessed trinity’, as we have sang together for so many years. The trinity is mysterious, yet amazing! We have a hard time expressing it in human terms of understanding, equating it to the relationship of H2O in water, and an egg with its three parts of shell, white and yolk. But how foolish is this? While it may help us in a human intellectual fashion, we have just compared God to an egg! So you can see where the dichotomy of human understanding and the divine omniscience of God come into play.

Suffice it to say that, without address the trinity with a doctoral thesis, scripture is sound on this teaching and doctrine. Christianity rests in part on the trinity itself. It shows itself here in our crimson conversation of the day.

God loves us. He loves us enough to suffer His Son to be a human, to take on our sin, and our pain, and our punishment. God the Father desires us to know Him and the Son and the Holy Spirit in an intimate, fresh and real way, as the real people that they are. How blessed are we?