These Three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Are Three Essential Components of One God. They Are One the Way Our Soul, Our Body, and the Things We Do Are One (Continued)

We are all capable using the trinity within each of us to picture the Trinity in the Lord. In every one of us there is a soul, a body, and our actions. It is the same in the Lord. According to Paul’s letter to the Colossians, “All the fullness of divinity dwells physically” in the Lord (Colossians 2:9). Therefore there is divine trinity in the Lord and human one in us. It is a mysterious concept that there are three divine persons and yet there is one God, and although there is one God, he is not one person. Surely reason has nothing in common with this idea. It puts our reason to sleep and makes our mouths speak like a parrot. When our reason is asleep, everything our mouths utter is without life. When our mouths say things that our reason diverges from and disagrees with, our statements are bound to be foolish.

Nowadays human reason has been restricted in regard to the divine Trinity like someone chained hand and foot in a prison. Our reasoning power is like a Vestal virgin buried in the ground for extinguishing the sacred fire. Yet the divine Trinity ought to shine like a lighthouse in the minds of people in the church, since God with his trinity and with the unity in his trinity is essential to all that is holy in heaven and in the church. Making the soul one God, the body another, and the the actions a third would be exactly like turning the three essential components in us into three separate entities. Does this not amount to mutilating and killing us?

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 169

These Three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Are Three Essential Components of One God. They Are One the Way Our Soul, Our Body, and the Things We Do Are One (Continued)

When told that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the three essential components of the one God as our soul, our body, and our actions [are the essential components of human being], the human mind may still think that three persons play the roles of these three essential components, when in fact there could not be three separate persons. When, however, we see the Father’s divinity as the soul, the Son’s divinity as the body, and the Holy Spirit’s divinity (or divinity emanating) as action, and we see them as three essential components of one single God, then they become understandable. For the Father has his own divinity; the Son derives his divinity from the Father; and the Holy Spirit derives its divinity from them both. Since they share the same soul and essence, they continue one God.

If we call these three divine components persons, however, and assigned each one its own responsibility–if we saw the Father as assigning spiritual credit or blame, the Son as mediating, and the Holt Spirit as putting things into effect–then we would be splitting a divine essence that is actually unified and indivisible. We would have made none of the three fully God; we would have given each one only a third of the power–an arrangement that a sound intellect has no choice but to reject.

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 168

These Three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Are Three Essential Components of One God. They Are One the Way Our Soul, Our Body, and the Things We Do Are One (Continued)

The same three essential components–soul, body, and action–existed and still in the Lord God the Savior, as everyone acknowledges. The concept that the Lord’s soul came from Jehovah the Father is something only the Antichrist could deny, since the Word of both testaments calls him the Son of Jehovah, the Son of God the highest, and the only begotten One. The Lord’s primary essential component, then, is the Father’s divinity, like the soul in us. It follows that the Son whom Mary bore is the body of that divine soul; for what develops in the mother’s womb is the body that was conceived by and derived from the soul. This, then, is the second essential component. Actions make a third essential component because they come from both the soul and the body; for things produced have the same essence as the things that produced them.

The three essential components that are Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one in the Lord as our soul, our body, and our actions [are one in us]. This is clear and obvious from the Lord’s statement that the Father and he are one, and the Father is in him and he is in the Father. The Lord is also one with the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is the divine radiating from the Lord on behalf of the Father, as I have fully shown from the Word in Sections 153 and 154. To demonstrate this point again would therefore be an extra serving–it would be burdening the table with food after people are already full.

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 167

Notes:

Section 153: Published 5/17-5/18/2020

Section 154: Published 5/19-5/20/2020

These Three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Are Three Essential Components of One God. They Are One the Way Our Soul, Our Body, and the Things We Do Are One

In any given thing there are general essential components and there are also specific essential components. The general and specific components combine to make one essence.

In our case, our general essential components are our soul, our body, and the things we do. These components combine to make one essence, as you can see from the fact that one component comes from and exists for the other in an unbroken chain. We begin from our soul. The soul is essence of semen that originates us. Our soul not only initiates but also sequentially produces the features of our body. Then there are things we do, which come from both our soul and our body. Because one of these components produce another, and therefore the subsequent components are grafted onto and connected to those that came before them, it follows that these three components share one essence. This is why they are called the three essential components.

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 166

There is a divine Trinity, which is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Continued)

Nevertheless, left to itself reason is utterly unable to see this Trinity. How are we to understand its three parts? Are they three gods who are one God in essence and name? Are they distinct qualities of one underlying material, meaning that they are just qualities or attributes of a single God that have names? Or is there some other alternative?

The only good advice tells us to turn to the Lord God our Savior and read the Word under his supervision (since he is the God of the Word). Then we will be enlightened and see truths that even reason will acknowledge.

If you do not turn to the Lord, even if you read the Word a thousand times and see a divine trinity and a divine unity there, the only understanding you will get will be that there are three divine persons, each of whom is individually God; and therefore there are three gods. The common sense of all in the whole world finds this conclusion repulsive, however. Therefore to avoid being abused, people have come up with a strange compromise: although there are in fact three gods, the faith insists that we not say three gods; instead we must say there is one God. Furthermore, if we do not wish to undergo a barrage of verbal hostility, our intellect has to be especially imprisoned in this regard and held in chains under obedience to faith–from now on, according to the Christian leadership in the Christian church, this has to be the holy way.

Such is the paralyzed offspring that was born as a result of not reading the Word under the Lord’s supervision. Any of us who do not read the Word under the Lord’s supervision read it under the supervision of our own intelligence; but when it come to objects in spiritual light, such as all the essential teachings of the church, our intelligence is [as blind] as an owl[in daylight]. In that case, when we read about the Trinity in the Word and we get the impression that although there are three, still they are one, it seems to us like a response from an oracle. Since we do not understand it, we chew on it, because if we put it straight in front of our eyes it would be a puzzle. The harder we worked to solve the puzzle, the more we would entangle ourselves in darkness, until we began to set our intellect aside as we thought about it, which is like setting our eyes aside in the act of seeing.

To put it briefly, when we read the Word under the supervision of our own intelligence (which we all do if we do not acknowledge that the Lord is the God of heaven and ear line, and turn to him and worship him alone), we are like children playing a game of blindfolding their eyes and trying to walk in a straight line. They believe they are walking straight, although step by step they turn increasingly to one side, till they come around to the opposite direction, bump into a stone, and fall over.

If we red the Word with our own intelligence, we are like sailors navigating without a compass, who steer their ship onto the rocks and perish. We are like someone out walking through a large field in a thick fog who sees a scorpion but thinks it is a bird; in trying to catch it and pick it up, the person is fatally stung. We are like a seagull or an osprey that sees a tiny part of the back of a huge fish under the water, so it flies down and attacks, but its beak becomes stuck and it is dragged underwater and drowns. We are like someone who goes into a labyrinth without a guide or a spool of thread; the deeper we go in, the more we forget the way out.

If we read the Word under the supervision of our own intelligence rather than under the Lord’s supervision, we think we are a keen-sighted as Lynceus and have more eyes that Argus, when nevertheless inwardly everything we see is false and nothing true. As we convince ourselves of this falsity, it looks to us like the North Star, and we point all the sails of our thought toward it. By then our eyesight for truths is not better than a mole’s: if we see truths at all, we bend them to favor things we ourselves made up–we distort and falsify the holy contents of the Word.

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 165

There is a divine Trinity, which is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

It is very obvious in the Word that there is a divine Trinity, which is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Take the following passages for example:

The angel Gabriel said to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will descent upon you and the power of the Highest will cover you; therefore the Holy one that is born from you will be called the Son of God.” (Luke 1:35)

Here three are named: the Highest (who is God the Father), the Holy Spirit, and the Son of God.

When Jesus was baptized, behold the heaven opened and John saw the Holy Spirit coming down like a dove upon him; and a voice from heaven said “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:16-17; Mark 1:10-11; John 1:32)

The Trinity is even more obvious from the Lord’s words to his disciples:

Go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name if the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (Matthew 28:19)

The Trinity is also obvious from these words in John:

There are three who testify in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. (1 John John 5:7)

Further evidence besides these passages is that the Lord prayed to his Father and spoke about him and with him; and he said that he was going to send and had sent the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, in their letters the apostles frequently mention the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These sources clearly show that there is a divine Trinity, which is the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 164

The Divine Trinity

We covered God the creator and creation; then we covered the Lord the Redeemer and redemption; lastly we covered the Holy Spirit and the divine action. Because we have covered the triune God in this way, we need to cover the divine Trinity as well. The Trinity is well known to the Christian world, yet in other ways it is unknown. Only through understanding the Trinity can we gain a just idea of God; and in the church a just idea of God is like sanctuary and the altar in a church building. It is like the crown on the head and the scepter in the hand of a monarch sitting on a throne. The entire body of theology depends on it the way a chain hangs from its hook. Believe it or not, we are even allotted our own place in heaven depending on our idea of God. It is like a touchstone for testing the quality of gold and silver, that is, the goodness and truth in us. There exists no goodness in us that bring salvation except the goodness we have from God; and there exists no truth in us whose quality does not come from that core of goodness.

For us to see the nature of the divine Trinity in full perspective, the explanation of the Trinity needs to be divided into points as follows:

1. There is a divine Trinity, which is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
2. These three, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, are three essential components of one God. They are one the way our soul, our body, and the things we do are one.
3. This Trinity did not exist before the world was created. It developed after the world was created, when God became flesh. It came into existence in the Lord the Redeemer and Savior Jesus Christ.
4. At a conceptual level, the idea of a trinity of divine persons from eternity (meaning before the world was created) is a trinity of gods. This idea is impossible to wipe out by orally confessing one God.
5. The apostolic church knew no trinity of persons. The idea was hatched by the Council of Nicaea. The Council introduced the idea into the Roman Catholic church; and the Roman Catholic church introduced the idea into the churches that have since separated from it.
6. The Nicene and Athanasian views of the Trinity led to a faith that has perverted the whole Christian church.
7. The result is the abomination of desolation and the affliction such as has never existed before and will never exist again, which the Lord foretold in Daniel, the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation.
8. In fact, if the Lord were not building a new heaven and a church, the human race would not be preserved.
9. Many absurd, alien, imaginary, and misshapen ideas of God have come into existence from the Athanasian Creed’s assertion of a trinity of persons, each of whom is individually God.

Now these points will be elaborated one by one.

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 163

Our Spirits Are Our Minds and Whatever Comes from Them (Continued)

The same thing happened to Zechariah when an angel was with him and he saw a man riding among the myrtle tree (Zechariah 1:8-9); when he saw four horns and a man who had a string in his hand for measuring (Zechariah 1:18, 2:1-2); when he saw Joshua the high priest (Zechariah 3:1, 6); and when he saw four chariots with horses headed off between two mountains (Zechariah 6:1-3).

Daniel was in the same state when he saw four beasts rising up out of the sea, and many details about them (Daniel 7:1-8); and when he saw battles between a ram and a goat (Daniel 8:1-14). He was in a vision when he saw those things (Daniel 7:1-2, 7, 13; 8:2; :1, 7-8). In a vision he saw the angel Gabriel and spoke with him [Daniel 8:15-27].

The same thing happened to John when he wrote the Book of Revelation. He said he was in the spirit on the Lord’s day (Revelation 1:10); he was carried off into the wilderness in the spirit (Revelation 17:3); and he was on a high mountain in the spirit (Revelation 21:10). He was seeing things in a vision (Revelation 9:17).

Elsewhere [in the Book of Revelation] he says that he saw the things he described. For example, he saw the Son of Humankind in the middle of seven lampstands. He saw a tabernacle, a temple, an ark, and an altar in heaven; a book sealed with seven seals and horses that came out of it; four creatures around a throne; twelve thousand chosen people, some from every tribe; a lamb on Mount Zion; locusts rising up from an abyss; a dragon and its war with Michael; a woman giving birth to a male child and running away into a desert because of the dragon; two beasts, one rising up out of sea and another out of the land; a woman sitting on a scarlet beast; a dragon thrown into a lake of fire and sulfur; a white horse and a great supper; the holy city of Jerusalem coming down, with details of its entrances, its wall, and the wall’s foundations; a river of living water; and trees of life producing different types of fruit every month; and so on.

Peter, James, and John were in the same state when they saw Jesus transfigured, as was Paul when he heard ineffable things from heaven.

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 157 (Continued)

Our Spirits Are Our Minds and Whatever Comes from Them (Continued)

Since our spirit means our mind, therefore, “being in the spirit” as the Word sometimes says, refers to the state of our mind when it is separated from our body. In this state the prophets saw the sort of things that exist in the spiritual world; therefore this state is called “a vision of God.” At those times, the prophets’ state was like the state of spirits and angels in the spiritual world. In this state our spirit can move from place to place while our body stays where it is (as is also true of our mind’s eye).

This is the state I myself have been in now for twenty six years, with the difference that I am in my spirit and my body at the same time, and only sometimes out of my body.

Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel, and John (when he wrote the Book of Revelation) were in this state, as is clear from the following passages: Ezekiel Said,

The spirit lifted me up and let me into Chaldea to the captivity in the vision of God, in the spirit of God. In this way the vision that I saw came over me. (Ezekiel 11:1, 24)

The spirit lifted Ezekiel up and he heard the earth tremble behind him. (Ezekiel 3:12, 14)

The spirit lifted him up between earth and heaven, and led him away to Jerusalem where he saw abominable things. (Ezekiel 8:3-4)

He saw four creatures that were angel guardians and various details about them. (Ezekiel 1 and 10)

Then he saw a new earth in the form of a new temple, and an angel measuring the temple. (Ezekiel 40-48)

At that time he was in a vision and in the spirit. (Ezekiel 40:2, 43:5)

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 157

Our Spirits Are Our Minds and Whatever Comes from Them

Our “spirit” really means nothing else but our mind. Our mind is what lives on after death. It is then called a spirit. If it is good, it is called an angelic spirit and later on an angel. If it is evil, it is called satanic spirit and later on a satan. For each of us, our mind is our inner self, our true self. It lives inside our outer self that constitutes our body. When our body is cast aside, which death does for us, we are in a complete human form.

people are wrong, then, to believe that our mind exists only in our head. Our mind is present in our head only in its primary structures. Everything that we think with our intellect and do from our will first emanates from these primary structures. In the rest of our body, our mind is present in extensions of these primary structures that have been designed to allow us sensation and action. Because our mind is inwardly connected to the parts of our body, our mind supplies those parts with sensation and and motion and also inspires awareness as if our body thought and acted on its own, although every wise person knows this is not how it is.

Now, because our spirit thinks with its intellect and acts with its will, and our body thinks and acts not on its own but with the help of our spirit, it follows that our “spirit” means our intelligence and our type of love, as well as whatever emanates from our love and intelligence and has an effect.

Many passages in the Word makes clear that our “spirit” means the nature of our mind. When I quote only a few of these passages, anyone will be able to see that this is exactly what “spirit” means. The following are just a few of the many:

And Bezaleel was filled with the spirit of wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge. (Exodus 31:3)

Nebuchadnezzar said of Daniel that there was “an excellent spirit” of knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom in him (Daniel 5:12).

Joshua was filled with the spirit of wisdom. (Deuteronomy 34:9)

Make yourselves a neww heart and a new spirit. (Ezekiel 18:31)

Blessed are the poor in spirit, because the kingdom of the heavens consists of such people. (Matthew 5:3)

I live among people with a beaten and humble spirit so that I may revive the spirit of the lowly. (Isaiah 57:15)

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. (Psalms 51:17)

I will give a cloak of praise to replace a constricted spirit. (Isaiah 61:3)

And so on.

“Spirit” can also mean the nature of a corrupt and unjust mind, as the following passages make clear:

He spoke to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit. (Ezekiel 13:3)

Conceive garbage, give birth to stubble; in your spirit, fire will consume you. (Isaiah 33:11)

A man who is wanderer in his spirit and who babbles a lie. (Micah 2:11)

A generation whose spirit was not steadfast with God. (Psalms 78:8)

A spirit of promiscuity. (Hosea 5:4; 4:12)

To melt every heart and constrict every spirit. (Ezekiel 21:7)

What has come up in your spirit will never be done. (Ezekiel 20:32)

Provided there is no guile in their spirit. (Psalms 32:2)

The spirit of Pharaoh was disturbed. (Genesis 41:8)

Likewise the spirit of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2:3). These and many other passages make it obvious that our “spirit” means our mind and its characteristics.

from True Christianity, Volume 1, Section 156