The Godhead

I will talk to the Father, and he’ll provide you another Friend so that you will always have someone with you. This Friend is the Spirit of Truth. John 14:16

The greatest mystery of all mysteries, only partially uncovered in the biblical revelation, is that God exists as a unified plurality of persons. The Godhead is a trinity. The absolute agreement of character and will among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is so complete that these three beings outwardly manifest as one.

Each member of the Godhead is revealed as having a distinct will, intellect, and personality. Each contemplates, chooses, and emotes. These indispensable characteristics of personhood confirm the members of the Godhead are separate beings. However, in terms of belief, vision, purpose, desire, and all other manifestations of individuality, they are in such perfect harmony that they become indistinguishable one from the other.

The triune God is revealed in the masculine sense and positioned in a hierarchy of prerogative and self-direction. Within the willingness of each member of the Godhead to serve and submit to the other, each confers authority upon the other two and thereby yields some part of His divine jurisdiction out of supreme love and deference for the highest good of the universe and of the Godhead themselves. Acquiescing to one another is voluntary and born out of the joy found in the divine wisdom that encourages such deference so the government of the universe and the unfolding of the eternal future can be accomplished with unqualified unanimity.

God is a spiritual being. He is invisible but not without substance. He is not anything of the abstract; He is concretely real but without form. His spirit is distinct from the entirety of creation. He is eternal, without beginning or ending, and wholly unaffected by the passage of time. Finally, He is infinite in capacity, intellect, and the expression of His character. These three attributes constitute God’s essential essence - uncreated, unchanging, and unfathomable. These are the natural attributes of God, aspects of His being that He has not chosen because they are not subject to the realm of choice. God cannot choose to be a spirit, eternal, or infinite. These attributes are who He is, not who He has chosen to be.

The essential being of God is the most unique substance in all creation in this dimension and in every other dimension that is or ever will be. God’s spiritual essence cannot be reproduced. It would be impossible for God to create a spiritual being made out of His essence. He can create spiritual life, as He has in the angelic and human races, but He cannot create divine essence. He comprises all the divine essence that has ever existed. There will not be more divine essence created in the eternal future.

The essential being of God is formless but not indiscernible. We can see the manifestation of the three members of the Godhead in scripture. In the heavenly realm, God the Father is enthroned and surrounded by an indescribable radiance whose brightness is unmatched in all creation. On earth, the Father appears as a fire burning within a bush near Moses. Later, the Father’s presence passes behind Moses, who cannot look upon the glory and live.

In the Old Testament, God the Son is the Angel of the Lord or the Angel of His Presence. He takes bodily form when he meets Abraham before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Father and the Son are both involved in the commissioning of Gideon. And, of course, the Son is incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth and walks the earth like any other human being.

God the Holy Spirit descended on the Messiah after His baptism in the Jordan River. The Bible records He came down like a dove, but He wasn’t in the form of a bird. The eyewitnesses saw a body of light floating down to Jesus in such a manner that it resembled a dove in size and flight. On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and other followers like small flames of fire.

Incredibly, the Son of God took on a human form that will be His body forever. In this sense, He is called the firstborn because He was the first to be transformed into an immortal body following His resurrection. This same immortality awaits all believers upon their deaths. Our resurrection bodies will become immortal; our spirits will be eternally alive.

The human mind can’t comprehend to any degree the notion that God has always existed and will never cease to exist. Human beings live within the definite confines of beginnings and endings. Things that we begin proceed in real-time; they don’t pre-exist in the forever past. Likewise, things that we end are finished with a certain finality and don’t linger forever into the future. God’s eternal existence is a first truth that cannot be distilled to more elementary levels.

In the same way, God’s infinity is beyond the reach of reason. God is unlimited with His ability to think, create, and relate. He is limitless in His relationship to wisdom, truth, and love. Everything about His life is unbounded. By who He is, God is omni-capable. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.

Omnipotence is unlimited power. God can do anything that requires strength or effort. He is the Almighty, supreme in accomplishing His purposes throughout creation. He can create at will, unobstructed by any constraints that might limit His intention. Creation testifies to the astounding power of God with the existence of a universe that spans seven trillion light years; with the event horizon of a black hole (Phoenix A) so massive it utterly dwarfs the outer regions of our solar system; with the infinitesimally minute strings of light that constitute the most fundamental construct of physical reality; with an unimaginably diverse natural world of plants and animals; and with the creation of human beings who one day will inherit and rule over the entirety of the kingdom of God.

While God’s power is unfettered throughout the universe, it is not unrestrained concerning the moral creation. Here, God’s power to implement His desires and plans must contend with the independent power of the human will and the inclination to thwart divine ministrations. The human will is not subject to God’s power unless it comes under divine providence. God cannot coerce the human will to respond positively to His love and truth without contradicting human freedom. A human can resist all divine influences for an entire life and ultimately be lost to perdition forever. No amount of divine power can prevent such a man or woman from choosing freely to live separated from God in everlasting darkness and agony.

Omnipresence is the unlimited connection to all creation at all times. God is everywhere all at once. This ongoing, never-ending proximate relationship to all reality means that nothing in the created realm can escape God’s surveillance or superintendence. Nothing is beyond God’s reach. In heaven, the Spirit of God will be closer to us than our next breath. We will experience spontaneous thoughts and feelings with God. He will know our minds immediately, and we will know His heart instantaneously. The Second Person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Himself, will appear to us as soon as we call upon Him, and the Spirit Himself will be living in and with us in a friendship of the soul that cannot be equaled on earth.  

The exception to this notion that God’s presence prevails everywhere is hell itself. In this domain, the Spirit of God has departed from those living in the trauma and anguish of rejected truth. These lost souls sense nothing of God’s presence. They are utterly despondent in selfish depravity and, in this state, are hopeless to ever see or feel the Divine for all eternity.

Omniscience is the unlimited knowledge of all that transpires throughout creation at any moment. This knowing encompasses all that is ongoing within the physical and chemical realms of inanimate entities throughout the universe - all of the elements and processes that make up everything from the subatomic to the mega-gigantic. It includes the continuous recognition of the animate creation - all the wanderings of the birds, fish, and animals in the sky, sea, and on the land in this world and all other worlds. It includes the penetrating observations of the entirety of the moral creation - all the thoughts, intentions, and engagements of the angelic and demonic beings dispersed throughout the kingdom of God and of the men and women He has placed on this earth.

God’s knowledge is absolute and complete. He knows all that can be known of all that is knowable - all facts that attach to every aspect of creation in this dimension and all other dimensions, including the comings and goings of every human being. Of course, God’s knowledge of the eternal past is perfect and perhaps stored in heavenly book repositories for the saints to explore forever. God’s understanding of the future is nuanced. Since it is not absolute or perfect, it is as complete as is necessary for God to impose a sovereignty upon the world that does not interfere with future human choices.

God relates to the past, present, and future the way we do. The past is over for God and us. It doesn’t exist in any form except in memory. God’s recollection of the past is flawless, but He doesn’t live in or interact with the past any more than we do. The present is the here and now for God as it is for us. Here, the dynamic domain of living illustrates who God is and who we are. Life is lived in the present - not in the past or the future. God remembers the past but lives in the present, and only contemplates the future.

For God and us, the future as an actuality does not exist. The future exists in the abstraction of hopes and dreams that may or may not come to pass, but as an existing truth, the future is only an imagined concept. No doubt God has unimaginably magnificent plans for the kingdom of God for all eternity, but those plans have no manifestation of realization in the present. They remain ideational until those plans enter the present reality of God so that He can actualize them in the present according to His purposes.

Indispensable to fully understanding the Godhead is coming to an accurate comprehension of the concept of time. Platonism, coupled with Augustinian theology, has concocted the idea that God lives in an Eternal Now where the past, present, and future are all before Him as concurrent realities. God lives in the past and future as fully as He lives in the present. In this conception of God’s existence, time is not linear but circular. God’s relationship to the circularity of time means that everything is current. For God, there is no distinction between what has been, what is, or what will be, even though He refers to Himself in the book of Revelation as the God who was, who is, and who is to come.

Somehow, Christian scholars millennia ago decided that a God who experiences duration the same way as we do could not be a supreme being. As the Almighty, He had to exist outside of time because time itself was not an abstract thing but a created thing. Time could not be uncreated because only God Himself was uncreated. So, time became a concrete reality that was in all respects always present before Him. The past, present, and future were all alive before Him as though He were continually interacting with each one at that moment.

The idea that time does not exist for God as it does for us is a formulation from Eastern mysticism. The result of this absurdity is that God becomes incomprehensible to us. Our reality is that thoughts, words, and actions are sequential, but in God’s world of Now, His thoughts, words, and actions are not successive but continuously attendant. In our world, we respond to the things and people around us, but God doesn’t respond to anything since all His thoughts, words, and actions towards anything are as eternal as He is. His relationship with us is not contemporary in reaction to what we are experiencing. Instead, everything about His association with our lives has been articulated in the eternal past. In this unintelligible conception of time, we are left with a God to whom we cannot relate.

The truth is that time is not a created entity but simply an eternal principle of reality. Time is duration. One thought is followed by another; one word is followed by another; one act is followed by another, and so on. In real-time, God looks upon me, hears my prayer, considers His options, and decides on an answer. All of this takes time, and it’s all durational. The Bible knows nothing of an eternal now God who comes into and out of time at will. The scriptures depict a God who is continually transactional with the human race. The choices God makes are in response to the choices we make. Personality requires time or duration as we know it, not as foolish mystics and misguided intellectuals have postulated it to be.

As of today, God has already lived for an eternity. It is implausible that after an eternity of living, God decided to create our world and our universe to inaugurate His plan of populating His kingdom with sons and daughters made in His image. God is creative and purposeful and must be occupied with meaningful acts that bring Him joy and satisfaction. Why would he have waited for eternal ages to commence His plan to create the human race? What could have occupied His time in eternity past while He waited for the universe to form and our solar system to emerge?

I can only speculate that God has not been idle. His creativity is infinite and immense, and He would not be inclined to be disengaged in the forever past. God must have been planning and working to His complete capacity through the ageless eons of time. He must have been creating universes and other worlds in other dimensions. The showcase of God’s eternal past will be an incomprehensible journey of discovery, and the disclosure of His plans for the future will be breathtakingly spectacular.