The Trinity is a complicated subject, but at the same time a very important one. I never quite realized the full weight that the Trinity caries until this week. No religion other than Christianity believes in the Trinity. It is what holds Christianity together. To deny the Trinity is to deny Christ and to deny Christ is to deny truth.
One cannot simply accept Jesus as the Son of God without accepting the Trinity. You might say that a person can believe in Jesus and at the same time not in the Holy Spirit, but this simply can’t be.
John 14:16
I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; 17 that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.
Here we see Jesus acknowledge, and even promise the coming of the Spirit. If Jesus is perfect and without sin we can depend on his words to be true. With this proof we can say Christ proves the existence of the Trinity.
The Trinity is a tricky subject to explain to even the highest of scholars and theologians, especially to those who don’t recognize that there is even a God at all. How can we explain that there are three persons in the Trinity, yet at the same time there is only one God? I believe that this is something that we as humans in our limited thinking will never fully understand, but that’s not our goal. To quote a friend of mine, “We are not called to be able to fully explain and wrap our minds around the Trinity, but rather, we are called to acknowledge it.”
But for now we can try to explain it in the simplest terms. A very common analogy that is used amongst Christians goes a little like this: There is an egg. This egg has three parts: the shell, the whites, and a yolk. Similarly the Trinity has three parts but is one, just as the egg. Now this isn’t the strongest argument, but there is truth behind it.
There is one God.
The Father is God.
The Son is God.
The Spirit is God.
The Father is not the son or the Spirit.
The Son is not the Father or the Spirit.
The Spirit is not the Father or the Son.