THE WEDDING BAND & THE TRINITY

                                        THE WEDDING BAND & THE TRINITY

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Your wedding band is a sign of your covenant of marriage under God. At your wedding you verbally swore an oath before God and made vows to your spouse. You made a promise. Within the Godhead the eternal Trinity is in eternal covenant with Himself. Marriage reflects something of this. The Father and the Son have made a promise. They are swearing on oath Their eternal love for each other, making Their eternal vows before the Holy Spirit (who is included in Their love). The Three are One in this eternal covenant.

Now picture your wedding band sawn through and straightened. Like a short piece of gold (or copper!) wire, humanly speaking, the Father is at one end while the Son is at the other. The Holy Spirit is the “charge”, the power that eternally pulsates back and forth, communicating between the Father and the Son. Now, join the two ends of the flattened ring together. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in one eternal covenant, i.e., one eternal promise, (a Celtic triquetra knot!) symbolised in time by human Christian marriage.

Please note that we must not push or press human analogies of God too far lest we end up in the sea of heresy! When we who are finite engage with Him who is infinite, while we are looking, up we are prone to walk off the end of the pier and drown in the ocean! Therefore, be careful!

At a marriage ceremony the bride and groom turn to face each other as they repeat their promise, i.e., their vows, to each other in their oath before God. Each person breathes-out their words, back and forth to each other. The one is breathing out as the other is breathing in. The eternal Father speaks, breathes out His Word to His eternal Son who reflects them back to His Father. They communicate via Their eternal Holy Spirit who speaks to both the Father and to the Son. This has been happening throughout all eternity past (within the ontological Trinity).

With regards to creation (and the economical Trinty), in the Bible the Holy Spirit is referred by the Son as “the Promise of My Father” (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4).

The Triune God wishes to bring others into His eternal covenant. After His resurrection and before His ascension, Jesus, (the Son), breathed on His disciples, “He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22b). The Spirit is poetically referred to as “the Breath of God.” God breathed into Adam the “breath of life” when He created him (Gen. 2:7). When the last Adam died on the cross, He breathed out. “Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.’ When He had said this, He breathed His last” (Luke 23:46). Thus, “The dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7). This is also illustrated by the flood in Noah’s day, when those who, along with the animals therein, were spared, “Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died” (Gen. 7:22). Thus, like the tide ebbing and flowing, God breathes out and God breathes in. It is good to be included in God’s “breathing”!

God alone has incommunicable attributes, such as Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence, which belong only to Him. Therefore, Christians share only in His communicable attributes, such as love, holiness, righteousness, and knowledge of God.

We know God by way of analogy, what He is like more that what He is. We know Him through the things He has made read in the light of His written revelation with which the Holy Spirit illumines us.

At creation, the Father spoke His Word and Their breathed-out Spirit, the “Breath of God,” brought creation into being. All those upon whom and in whom His Spirit remains are included in the eternal spiration of God, i.e., the eternal “breathing” back and forth between the Father and the Son as the Spirit spirates between Them. This now includes those chosen by the Father, redeemed by the Son, and regenerated, renewed (and soon to be resurrected) by Their Spirit. These are the “Bride of Christ” and will attend the “wedding feast of the Lamb.”

All true believers are Christ’s bride. And, as such, are included in God’s eternal love-bond symbolised by our unbroken wedding band. He is one with us and we are one with Him.  “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in Me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in Me and I am in You. May they also be in Us so that the world may believe that You have sent Me. I have given them the glory that You gave Me, that they may be one as We are one – I in them and You in Me – so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that You sent Me and have loved them even as You have loved Me” (John 17:20-23).

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                We become believers when, like the two witnesses (i.e., the Spirit and the Word), the beathed-out Spirit works in our hearts with the written Word breathed-out by the Father. “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).

And just as “the spirit returns to God who gave it”, so the God-breathed out Word of God (which speaks of Christ the Word) returns to God. “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is My word that goes out from My mouth: it will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:10-11).

Put Christ’s eternal wedding band on your finger by repenting and believing in the gospel (Mark 1:15).