Matthew 28:19, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. And thus we have a foundation for the doctrine of the Trinity. Other events in the scriptures that support this include all three being present at the Creation, the Lord’s Baptism and His Resurrection. We note Jesus claiming to only do what He sees His Father doing, and later promising to send the Comforter.
This naturally raises the question; are there in fact three gods merely acting together? Of course, this would be contrary to the scriptures which plainly state that God is one and that there are no other gods. Do we profess three entities, or are we contemplating three aspects of the one being? Do we merely assign titles to the different aspects according to their roles? Can the Son simply be considered an aspect of God which was manifested in our physical reality? And what differentiates the Holy Spirit from God being Spirit (John 4:24)? Is the Father how we consider the ‘mastermind’ and ‘guiding intelligence’ of the One. Why should we contemplate God being symbolised in three parts?
In Genesis 1:26a we read, “Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness”. St Paul in his letter to the church in Rome, describes through chapters 6, 7 and 8 three aspects of humanity: the flesh, the mind, and the spirit. Reverse engineering if you will back to our Genesis verse, we should be able to conclude that God is of a similar likeness. Thus we may be able to consider God as the Mind, the Body, and the Spirit, correlating to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Like us as an individual being, so God is one.
Colossians 1:13-18, “1:13 He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, 14 in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. 18 And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence.” These verses inform us that Jesus is the image of God, and that Jesus was responsible for the Creation, and is head of the ‘body’. Thus we can say that Jesus was part of the ‘Us’ when God spoke in Genesis 1:26, and along with the Holy Spirit and the Father constituted the Godhead we call the Trinity. But what of His ‘body’?
It is estimated that there are some 37 trillion cells which together form your body. Each cell has its own peculiar role to perform, be it: muscle, nerve, blood, brain, bone etcetera. Considering Genesis 1:26 again, is it feasible that the ‘body’ of Christ is the totality of humanity, each of us fulfilling our role. St Paul in Ephesians 5:30-31 says, “For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”. If we deem God as being revealed by the three facets of Father, Son and Spirit, then should we not consider ourselves as an aspect of the Godhead through our inclusion in the body of Christ. Thus we can say that the ‘Us’ in Genesis 1:26 included You-manity.
In James 1:23-24 we read, “For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was”. Jesus is our mirror; for when we look to Jesus we should see our own divinity. And as such we are expected to act in the power and authority as is our true nature. Therefore, when we read that ‘God is one, and there are no other gods beside Him’, we must of course include ourselves as an integral part of that Oneness.
