Not a Human Invention: The Eternal Reality of the Triune God

If you’ve ever spent time in a deep study of the Scriptures, you might have noticed something—you won’t find the word "Trinity" anywhere in the pages of your Bible. For some, this is just a linguistic curiosity; for others, it has become a stumbling block, leading to the common assumption that the doctrine is a man-made tradition or a philosophical framework invented centuries later at the Council of Nicaea.

But is that the truth, or have we mistaken a label for the reality?

Not a Human Invention invites you to pull back the veil on the most profound mystery of the Christian faith. We are diving deep into the nature of the Godhead to discover that while the word may be a term of convenience, the reality it describes is woven into the very fabric of the biblical narrative from the opening chapters of Genesis to the final visions of Revelation.

In this episode, we move beyond the myths. We aren't looking at a late-stage invention; we are looking at the consistent, self-revelation of the Creator. We’ll explore how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not three competing gods, nor three separate masks worn by one deity, but the eternal, cohesive, and relational reality of who God has always been.

If you’ve ever felt like your understanding of the Trinity was shaky or you’ve struggled to articulate why this matters to your faith, this conversation is for you. Join us as we ground ourselves in the truth that our God did not wait for a council to define His nature—He revealed it to us through His Word, His works, and the coming of His Son. It’s time to stop seeing the Trinity as a difficult doctrine and start seeing it as the breathtaking heart of the Christian gospel.

Transcript

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This is the Berean Podcast, where we ask questions, examine scriptures, and seek truth. I'm your host, Andre Franklin, and I want to welcome you to another episode of the Berean Podcast. Why is it called Berean? Well, in Acts 17, 10 through 12, it says the brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. And when they arrived, they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica. They received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men. So these people examined the scriptures to make sure that what they were receiving was true. And that's what we are going to be doing on this podcast. So today we're going to be talking about the Trinity. Woo! What it is, uh where it came from, and why it's important. All right, so let's get to it. So many times uh language often has to catch up with complex reality. So, despite what you have heard or been taught, the the early church did not invent the Trinity, they invented a vocabulary to protect what they were already reading in scripture and experiencing in worship. Alright, so we're gonna go through some history. All right, we're gonna have a history lesson today. Alright, so the um earliest recorded use of a specific word to describe this threeness in God comes from Theophilus of Antioch around 180 A.D. Uh, if you write in Greek, he used the word trios, and that means a triad or a group of three. Interestingly, he used it to describe God, his word logos, and his wisdom. Now, the actual word trinity comes from the Latin Trinitas, but this was coined but by the North African uh uh uh theologian Tertullian, and this was around 200 AD. Tertullian was a lawyer by trade, so he used precise legal language, but he didn't just coin trinitas, but trace meaning three and unitas meaning unity, he also gave us the phrases one essence, three persons, una substantia, tres persona. He used the analogy of a root, a shoot, and a fruit, or a fountain, a river, and a stream to show how three distinct things can flow from the exact same source. Now, personally, I don't I don't generally explain the Trinity uh using anything in creation, right? But you get the idea. Um, he was just uh, you know, trying to break down um how he saw it, right? Then we have uh we have the great crises and the creeds. Um so in the the early 300s, there was a pastor named Arius. He began teaching that Jesus was a created being, the first and greatest creation of God, but not God himself. It was a famous tagline that he coined. It says, There was a time when the Son was not. Okay, now this sparked a massive crisis. If Jesus isn't God, Christian worship is idolatry and salvation is invalid. All right, so now we get to the council of Nicaea, and I know a lot of opponents to the Trinity love bringing this up. Council of Nicaea. This was in 325 AD, and Constantius, he called a council of bishops, many of whom were still uh who still bore the physical scars from from Roman uh persecution. They rejected Arius and affirmed that Jesus is Homeoseos. It's a Greek philosoph, it's a Greek uh philosophical term, right, that means of the same substance or essence as the Father. Then we fast forward to 381 AD, it's the Council of Constantinople. This council expanded the creed to explicitly affirm the the uh the divinity of the Holy Spirit, finalizing what we know as the Nicene Creed. So the early church didn't vote to make Jesus God, they used Greek and Latin terms to create a linguistic fortress, right, around the authority or the truths already found in the scriptures to protect the flock from dangerous distortions. Now, Arius was one of many uh pastors or uh teachers who came up with with uh different heresies, so but specifically um Arius was one of the uh the main pioneers of Jesus was created, okay. So when you hear people say that the church created the Trinity, you can tell them that their information is incomplete. So while the church did invent the word, right, they by no means created the concept. Okay, so the word came out of the concept, all right. And the truth is God revealed himself to his creation, and his creation simply responded, right? This is what we see. Now, let's look at why they came to this conclusion. And here's the part that's gonna be fun, all right. So we're gonna get into the scriptures now, and we are going to break down what they saw, okay? Um, but let's go back to the beginning. All right, now the Old Testament, I wanna be clear, it doesn't explicitly say, I am God and I am a Trinity, as some opponents would like to say, right? So as we go through scripture and we begin to put the pieces together, you will begin to see that there is something going on with God that is definitely different from what we were taught. All right. So we start in uh Genesis 1 and specifically uh Genesis 1.1. Alright, so it says in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Okay, so the Hebrew word for God is Elohim. In Hebrew grammar, the EM ending is plural, it's like adding S in English, yet it is paired with singular verbs. Right from verse 1, there is a grammatical hint of a plural unity. Now, people will say that Elohim, the word Elohim is the entire heavenly council, which means God and the angels, which is true, right? However, we will see in a second why context challenges that argument. In Genesis 126, it says, Then God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle of over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. Now the opponents of this concept will say two things. The first point they'll say is that God is speaking to the angels in this verse. So when God says, Let us make man in our image, he's speaking to the angels. But the problem we run into this is that angels do not create, they are created. So God's speaking to the angels to say, Let us create would be an inaccurate interpretation, because angels cannot create. And that let us create involves unity. The second point they'll make is that God is speaking in the plural of majesty. You'll hear this. Okay? When Moses was writing the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible, the plural of majesty didn't exist. Not just for Moses, but for the world. Ancient Hebrew had no plural of majesty for pronouns. When a single person spoke, whether it was um uh uh you know King David or a Pharaoh or a pagan uh deity uh like Baal, they always used singular pronouns, I, me, and my. The plural us in Genesis was an extreme anomaly. So the us in Genesis 126 seems to be that God is speaking to someone else who can also create. We also see that the plural us in a couple of other scriptures. In Genesis chapter 11, verses 7 and 8, verse 7 it says, Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth, and they stopped building the city. Now, if you notice in verse 7 it says us, right? It says us, and then verse 8 it says the Lord. So we see that something is going on here. Now, while it's not the Trinity, as opponents will say, it's not the Trinity, they cannot deny that something is happening here. In Isaiah 6 8, it says, Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Now the prophet Isaiah lived and he ministered during the time around the eighth century BC. So Isaiah was writing right in the dead center of ancient Israel's history, roughly seven to eight hundred years before the New Testament events, and well over a thousand years before any concept of a plural majesty existed in the Semitic world. Now you notice what the verse says here. It says, Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord. The Lord said, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Again, not the angels. Angels can't create, and angels do not send. So let that concept marinate for a moment. Let it marinate for a moment. The Lord said, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? The arguments against these scriptures just don't hold up. So that was the linguistic argument for the plural nature of God. And there are others, but for time we will just we'll focus on those, right? Now we will get into scripture where the Lord or Yahweh interacts with or speaks of another figure who is also identified as Yahweh or divine. So in Genesis, we have the story of Lot. Mostly everyone knows about the story of Lot and uh, you know, about uh uh Sodom and Gomorrah and how they were uh going to be judged because of the sheer sin they lived by. So to get the better context of the story, I I want to urge you to read uh Genesis chapters 18 and 19, okay? Read the whole chapters of both of those, but for time purposes, I'll just quickly give the context, uh, but I want you to actually go back and read it, okay? Uh so the Lord appeared to Abraham in chapter 18, and there were three men who Abraham saw. So he welcomed them and he cooked for them, and they ate. Now, according to the story, we know that the other two men with the Lord were angels. The Lord told Abraham he was coming to see about Sodom and Gomorrah and how their sin had reached up to heaven, and ultimately that they will be destroyed. Now the two angels went into the cities to get Lot and his family and to take them out before the Lord destroyed it. So here we are. We arrive in Genesis 1924, and it says, Then the Lord reigned on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. So the Lord is still on earth, and he rained down fire and brimstone from the Lord who is in heaven. Lord here is Yahweh, so an accurate way to say it is Yahweh rained down fire and brimstone from Yahweh out of heaven. Now it's clear again that something is happening here that shows that the Lord is not singular. And here's the key. Even the Jewish scholars believed as much. There is a theology called the two powers in heaven. Okay. Uh during the Second Temple, which is roughly 200 BC to about the first century AD, uh, Jewish theologians openly taught that Yahweh could manifest himself in two distinct ways simultaneously as an invisible, transcendent father in heaven, and as a visible, manifest figure on earth who carried Yahweh's actual name, authority, and essence. Genesis 1924 was one of their absolute anchor texts for this belief. So for ancient Jewish readers, this wasn't a typo or a poetic repetition, uh uh uh repetition. Uh, the grammar explicitly sets up two operational figures who both bear the divine name. The Yahweh on earth, the one who had just materialized as a man, ate a meal with Abraham in Genesis 18, and stood on the ground commanding judgment, and the Yahweh in heaven, the cosmic source from whom the fire actually fell. So ancient Jews didn't see this as polytheism, which is the belief in more than one God or many gods. No, they saw it as binatarianism. Binatarianism, which is one true God Yahweh operating in two persons. So before Jesus was born, believing in the two powers was considered completely mainstream Orthodox Judaism. Jewish writers looked at Genesis 19, 24, the Son of Man in Daniel 7, and who we'll get into in a minute, the angel of the Lord in Exodus, and they openly speculated about who this second visible Yahweh was. They called him the Logos, the Word, or the Metrochon, or the Memrah. Right? And then when the early Christians, who were almost entirely Jewish, began preaching the gospel, they didn't invent a new pagan concept. And I want to be clear about that. The early Christians were Jewish, and from the Jewish Christian, the word was spread to the Gentiles. But it is a Jewish faith. They grabbed this exact two powers framework and they said, Hey, you know that second visible Yahweh we've been reading about in Genesis and Daniel? You remember that? He just took on human flesh. His name is Jesus. Right? So when John wrote, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, every Jewish listener knew exactly what power he was talking about. Now, the transition comes from a famous rabbinic scholar. His name is Alan Seagal. He wrote a foundational book on this call Two Powers in Heaven. He proved through ancient rabbinic writings like the Mishnah and the Tophefta that it was during the second century A.D. that the Jewish rabbis officially declared the two powers teaching to be a dangerous heresy called Minut. They didn't ban it because it wasn't in the Old Testament. They banned it specifically because the Christians were winning the argument. The rabbis realized that if they kept teaching that Genesis 1924 showed two distinct persons called Yahweh, they were leaving the door wide open for Jews to convert to Christianity and worship Jesus as God. And that'll be another episode that we'll talk about. We'll deep dive into who Jesus really is because he is God. But for centuries, critics have told Christians, you guys invented the Trinity in the fourth century at the Council of Nicaea. And you'll hear that continuously over and over again. But history shows the exact opposite from the very people who believed in the two powers. So the idea of a plurality within the one true God was so deeply Jewish that the rabbis had to actively change their own theology in the second century just to distance themselves from the Christians. Christians did not invent the two natures of God. The rabbis abandoned it to avoid Jesus. Now we're going to get into a very interesting figure in the Old Testament, and that is the angel of the Lord. The angel of the Lord. In Hebrew, Malach Yahweh, it's is uh uh that is what it it translates from. So Malach Yahweh is the angel of the Lord. It's perhaps the most profound recurring signature of the triune God in the Old Testament. In our modern minds, we hear the word angel, right? And we think of a created being with wings like Gabriel or Michael. But in ancient E, um, um, in ancient Hebrew, right, the word Malach simply means messenger, right? It defines a functional role, not a biological nature, right? So when the text says Malach Yahweh, it literally means the messenger of Yahweh. But what makes this figure absolutely mind-blowing and an ironclad proof of the Trinity is a repeating pattern across the Old Testament where this angel of the Lord is spoken of as distinct from Yahweh, yet he speaks as Yahweh, he acts as Yahweh, and he accepts worship that only belongs to Yahweh. So we're gonna break down uh uh uh the couple of these um instances. So his first appearance was in Genesis chapter 16. Uh this was the encounter that um Hagar had with the angel of the Lord. Um, and again, read the chapter uh to get the story and to get the context and to just understand what is actually going on. Uh Hagar was Sarah's mistreated servant. Uh, she flees into the wilderness, and the angel of the Lord finds her by a spring. Now, the angel doesn't say, Thus says the Lord, I will multiply your descendants. He speaks in the first person. He says, I will multiply your descendants exceedingly. A created angel cannot multiply life. Only the Creator can, as we established already. Now, look at how Moses writes the conclusion of this event in verse 13. It says, Then she, Hagar, called the name of the Lord or Yahweh, who spoke to her, you are the God who sees. Not you are a God who sees, you are the God who sees. So Hagar is explicitly identifying the Malach Yahweh as Yahweh himself, and Moses validates it in the inspired text. Now we move forward into Genesis 22, and Abraham is on Mount Moriah, knife is raised over Isaac. We know the story. Suddenly the angel of the Lord calls out from heaven to stop him. And now look what the angel says in verse 12 Do not lay your hand on the lad, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from God. No, no, it says from me. Interesting. So Abraham wasn't sacrificing Isaac to an angel, he was sacrificing him to God. Yet the angel says, You didn't withhold him from me. Powerful. Now let's go to the next one. In Exodus three, now we have the angel of the Lord appearing to Moses. So so far we have Hagar, we have Abraham, and now we have Moses. So in verse 2 of Exodus chapter 3, so this is Exodus chapter 3, and this is the burning bush. It's the story of the burning bush. Okay. So in verse 2 it says, and the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. Now, but look at what happens just two verses later in verse 4. It says, So when the Lord or Yahweh saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush. Now remember, the figure in the bush is simultaneously identified as the angel of the Lord, Yahweh and Elohim. He then commands Moses to take off his sandals because the ground is holy, and proclaims, I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. So we see that he is not only speaking as God or on behalf of God, he is speaking, he literally says, I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Moses knew exactly who was talking. Now we go to Zechariah chapter three, and we are gonna see that there are two Yahweh's again. So you're probably wondering, how do we know this isn't just God changing costumes? Right? So let's go to Zechariah 3. Now here we see the high priest Joshua standing in heaven before the angel of the Lord with Satan accusing him. It says, And the Lord Yahweh said to Satan, the Lord Yahweh rebuke you, Satan, the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you. Now the speaker here is the angel of the Lord. Yet the text explicitly calls him Yahweh. And this Yahweh on earth looks up and appeals to Yahweh in heaven to rebuke Satan. Another instance of the two powers. It is a stunning, undeniable interaction between two distinct persons who both possess the fullness of the divine entity. The Old Testament shows that the angel of the Lord is Yahweh, and even the Jewish people agreed, as we pointed out. And now we come to the Holy Spirit. You have groups like Jehovah's Witnesses and others like them that call the Holy Spirit an it or an act of force. They do not believe the Holy Spirit is God. The Holy Spirit, I want to tell you, is not an impersonal force or electricity from God. He is fully Yahweh, and he possesses the three attributes of personhood. He acts with distinct purpose, and he speaks authoritatively as God. Again, we go back to the beginning. Genesis 1, verses 2, we start right at the cosmic beginning. Before anything else is formed, the earth is formless and void, and darkness is over the surface of the deep. It says, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Now the Hebrew word for hovering, which is rakaf, carries the connotation of a bird fluttering over its nest, actively tending to, guarding, and preparing the creation for life. An impersonal force doesn't hover with care, a person does. He is the divine agent executing the creative will of God because he is God. In Isaiah 63, we see that the Holy Spirit is grieved. Now you can't break the heart of a force. You can't grieve gravity or offend electricity. You can only grieve a person. In Isaiah chapter 63, verses 10 is where Isaiah looks back at the Exodus journey. It says in verse 10 of Isaiah 63, but they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit. Therefore, he turned himself to become their enemy. He fought against them. Isaiah explicitly attributes emotions and personal vulnerability to the spirit. Furthermore, in verse 14, he writes, As a beast goes down into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord caused them to rest. The Spirit is acting with an independent, comforting will to guide an entire nation to safety. Again, Holy Spirit is shown to be Yahweh. In 2 Samuel chapter 23, if you really want more proof or ironclad text where the Holy Spirit explicitly speaks and is identified directly as Yahweh, we look at King David's final words. And then commands him, Go and tell this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand. Who was actually speaking to Isaiah in that room? Now, fast forward, the Apostle Paul gives us the answer in the New Testament in Acts chapter 28, verses 25 and 26. Paul is preaching to the Jewish leaders and quotes that exact passage from Isaiah 6. Look at how Paul introduces the quote. Now, the Holy Spirit spoke rightly through Isaiah the prophet to our fathers, saying, Go to this people and say, hearing you will hear and shall not understand. In Isaiah 6, the speaker is explicitly called Yahweh. In Acts 28, Paul explicitly says the speaker was the Holy Spirit. This isn't a contradiction. It's a perfect triune revelation. The Holy Spirit is the Yahweh of hosts who sat upon the throne in Isaiah's vision. In Hebrews, the writer reveals that the Holy Spirit is Yahweh again. Hebrews chapter 3, verses 7 through 11 says, Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as when they provoked me, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, where your fathers tried me by testing me and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was angry with this generation and said, They always go astray in their heart, and they did not know my ways, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. Notice how the Holy Spirit is speaking here. When we look at the Old Testament, we aren't just seeing God the Father operating solo. We see a beautiful divine uh uh uh union of uh uh symphony, the father wills it, the word or the angel of the Lord speaks and manifests it, and the Holy Spirit breathes life into it, hovers over it, and indwells the prophets. The Holy Spirit isn't God's energy drink, he is the third co-equal person of the Godhead, and he has been speaking, grieving, and saving his people from day one. So as we see in the scriptures, before we even get to the old test uh of the new testament, there is a uh uh revelation of who God is, uh and he reveals himself as Father, as the angel of the Lord, and as Holy Spirit. So as we understand and as we see that this is a biblical concept, it is not something that was created by man to uh lead the people astray. It was actually solidified by the scriptures so that people would not be led astray. All right. So, as we close out today's episode, I want to take a moment to pull back and bring this right into your room, your car, or your headphones. On this show, we talk about a lot of different concepts, truths, and ideas, and you'll see as we go forward, uh, this is what we talk about, this is what we do. But at the end of the day, everything we discuss lands at the feet of one ultimate reality, and that is your relationship with the creator of the universe. The baseline of human reality is that left to our own devices, we are carrying a weight we were never meant to bear. We try to build our own ladders of good deeds, uh uh uh uh self-improvement or moral effort to prove we are enough. But those ladders leave us exhausted and falling short of a holy God. The scriptural reality is that our sin separates us from him, and the trajectory of that separation is spiritual death and judgment. But the message of Jesus Christ, the true Ewangelion, the good news is that while we were completely stuck in our brokenness, God climbed down the ladder to get to us. Jesus stepped into our reality, took the death sentence we owed, died in our place, and rose from the grave to conquer the curse once and for all. It is a royal announcement of a finished victory, and it demands a response. You cannot hear the truth of Jesus and remain neutral. The Bible says there are two things needed to step off a track of brokenness and onto the path of eternal life. Repentance and faith. Now, repentance isn't just saying I'm sorry because you feel bad. Repentance is a U-turn. It is looking at your self-effort, your sin, and your rebellion and saying, I am walking away from that. I am done trying to be my own savior. And faith isn't just an intellectual belief that Jesus existed. Faith is trust. It is casting the entire weight of your eternity onto his finished work. It's saying, Lord, I'm letting go of my own strength and I am trusting completely in your rescue. I cannot do this alone. I know that you can. If you are listening to this right now and you know you are still carrying the weight of your own past, your own guilt, or your own sin, you don't have to wait until you clean yourself up. Christ died for you exactly as you are. Right now, right where you are, you can cry out to him. You can surrender your life and put your total trust in the King who died and rose again for you. The Bible promises that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Don't leave this episode carrying a debt that has already been paid for. Step into the victory of Jesus today. If you made that decision today and you've followed the call that you've been hearing for a long time, or if you want to know more about what it means to follow Jesus, please reach out to the Berean Podcast at Outlook.com or find a Bible-believing church in your local area this week. Until next time, the battle is won. The king is on the throne, and that is the good news. Less opinions, more scripture, let the Bible speak. This is the Berean Podcast.