Why the Trinity? A Biblical Defense

One of the most attacked (if not THE most) doctrines of the Bible is the Trinity; however, as I hope to prove… God could not other wise reconcile sinners unto Himself.

The biggest argument against the Trinity is that it is hard to understand. This is not a legitimate argument quite simply because God’s character and His attributes are simply not dependent on our understanding of them. In my experience, Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses use this type of argument the most. To them it is “logically impossible” that God could be a Trinity. Again, man is in no place “make judgments” about the character of God. We are not capable of approaching God on our own, if we are to know anything about God HE must inform us.

In Salvation, God was reconciling the world unto Himself THROUGH Jesus Christ. The ONLY way salvation could be provided would be if God is the end and the means. Why? God is eternal and He is outside of time. His law therefore is eternal and has eternal consequences if broken. We are sinners who have broken God’s eternal standard, His eternally relevant law. Those who seek to be “logical” (not to say that is necessarily bad), try this logic… how could a FINITE creature, who has broken his eternal Creators eternal law, then be justified (considered blameless) before his Creator? We could not possibly justify ourselves. Since we have broken the eternal law, there is an eternal consequence that no amount of our “finitely valuable” good works could make up for.

With this in mind, the only possible way God could reconcile sinners to Himself would be through Himself. Only God could provide a way for us to be justified and thus saved from the consequences of our sin. Thus, through Jesus Christ was made an eternally valuable sacrifice that eternally paid the debt of our sin that we could never pay (in or own efforts).

So what is the “logical” flipside? If God, as many suppose, was a unity (versus a Trinity) He could not provide a JUST means of salvation. In the Bible salvation is a free gift that only needs to be accepted. God fully provided the end and the means thus God receives ALL the glory. We cannot share in His glory and by saying that by our works we were saved or “kept ourselves saved”, we would be attempting to share in glory that belongs to God alone.

Back to the flipside…

If God was a “unity”, how could he possibly reconcile sinners, who have broken His eternal laws, to Himself? Since (in this case) He is a Unity there would be no way for Him to justly pay the ETERNAL debt on sin. There are only two possibilities at this point.

The first possibility is a system of works. A system where the person who does more good than bad can then qualify to be saved and justified from his sin. Here are the problems with this view. God didn’t save this person. The person, by their own efforts, got themselves into heaven. The conclusion? If your works are involved in getting you to heaven, then God would OWE it to you. Does the eternal Creator of all things owe us anything? NO! Also, if our works could justify us in the sight of God, then God doesn’t get all the glory, He would have to share it with His creatures.

The second possibility is God just simply forgiving whom He wills without any regard to their works or any other “qualifications”. The idea here is for God to simply “sweep under the rug” any offences to His law that His creatures are guilty of. In this case, would God truly be just? Is He going to let someone like Hitler or Stalin go free on the simple grounds that He just “felt like it” or just “decided to”? This would not be a just basis for forgiving sin. Who would trust in that god?

Finally, it’s time to wake up to reality. We are rebels in God’s universe. We are hopelessly lost without His salvation. We can’t earn it and we can’t just hope we’ll make it… we must accept the free gift of salvation provided only through Jesus Christ.