1 Thessalonians 5:23,24

THREE IN ONE

‘I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

1 Thessalonians 5:23

I want you to think of body, soul, and spirit, three in one, in every child of man, in you and me. And yet each one of us is one.

I. Consider the language of the Apostle.—He speaks of the body, by which he would have us understand the animal life, the life that we share with the beasts, birds, and creeping things; this external form. But, next, St. Paul speaks of the ‘soul.’ What does he mean by that? The soul is the immortal part of our complex humanity; those powers of the man which are natural to him, and not known to be natural to the animals. But, though higher than the mere physical faculties, the faculties of the soul are not the highest or the noblest parts of the nature of man. Accordingly, and with a set purpose, the Apostle speaks of a third element in the constitution of humanity; a very different one, again, and infinitely surpassing the other two, and that is the ‘spirit.’

II. Corresponding to the threefold nature of man there is clearly visible the condition of unity in God, and of Trinity also in Him. We find, and ought not to be surprised to find, in Holy Scripture that three distinct consciousnesses and acts appropriate to each consciousness exist in the Godhead. The Unitarian and the Sabellian maintain that the unity of God consists simply in a unity of person, now expressing Himself in the Father, now in the Son, and now in the Holy Ghost. That is an error; that is heresy. We must believe that in the sense of exercising the power of consciousness and its various attributes, there are three powers of consciousness in which God is made known to us.

(a) He is the author of life, and in this aspect is the Father of all mankind; the Father of even more than mankind—of all creation.

(b) But the exercise of the consciousness of these powers and attributes of the Godhead are most eminently revealed to us in what we call the Person of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And this, not because of the accident of the Fall, an event which happened on one fatal occasion in the long-drawn days of eternity, ‘God … of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds … God of God, very God of very God,’ equal with the Father; as touching the Godhead, Whom the Unitarian considers to be only a divine humanity; we hold to be—not to have been—from all eternity the Humanity of Deity. Had there been in the Divine Being no humanity, I do not know how it would have fared with us. Certainly the redemption is the outcome of this humanity in the Deity. We speak of God’s justice, that is the humanity in the Deity.

(c) And yet Pentecost shows us a more intimate and closer relationship still, through the Third Person in the ever-blessed Trinity; the power and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Body is controlled by soul, soul by spirit, the spirit by the sanctifying influences of the Holy Ghost.

—Dean Maclure.

Illustration

‘It is beyond question that the doctrine of the Trinity is held by many to be so mysterious that, in their minds, it has been held to belong rather to the theologian and not to the everyday Christian. To this the teaching of our Lord’s life gives a clear and explicit contradiction, in the Holy Gospel according to St. John. No wonder the Unitarian has put himself to all kinds of shifts to dispose of this Gospel. I do not marvel that he should have done so, because, if you will read it with ordinary intelligence, you can never forget this, that the Lord Jesus Christ, Who wore your nature and mine for a season, if He asserts anything in that holy Gospel, Jesus asserts concerning Himself positively, the conditions that He was “coeternal and coequal” with the Father. Of the Godhead He assumes everything Himself. And He showed us, after His own departure also, that the Trinity and the coequality of God the Father, and God the Son, pertained also to God the Holy Ghost. The same attributes of Godhead are taken for granted all through the Epistles, and notably in the Revelation of St. John, where the Deity of the Eternal is represented constantly as triune, and invoked in those words in which we pledge God with all solemnity: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty.” ’