Last week, we continued in our study on the attributes of God. We actually began a study on the Trinity, which is not technically an attribute of God, but it's indirectly related to that, so I wanted to cover this because there's some other attributes that relate. Actually, all of them do. Last week we showed the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity. And that message was something that you needed to pay attention to, to think through, try and follow me. I know sometimes that's difficult. But this week we'll probably be going through much of the same. But my prayer has been that we can wrap our heads around this and see why this doctrine is important. We do have wide latitude as Christians as to what we believe about many of the doctrines in the Christian faith. We are not going to agree on all the doctrines, but we We don't have any latitude on the Trinity. This is a non-negotiable. To be a Christian, you have to believe in the Trinity. You have to have some understanding of the Trinity. The Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity is really what divides Christians from all other cults and Christian sects. world religions. Christianity is unique. It's the only world religion that is Trinitarian. It separates us from Judaism, from Islam, from Jehovah's Witnesses, from Mormons, and Unitarians, just to name a few. And unlike many today, the early church knew that error concerning the Godhead was fatal to one's eternal destiny. which is why the early church formulated many creeds and confessions. And as Satan has marshaled an all-out attack on the one true God, as he did back in the early church, and he attacked the deity of the Son of God and the deity of the Holy Spirit in those early centuries, after Christ's death and resurrection, the church responded by formulating creeds and confessions that reflect biblical truth, particularly about the Godhead. And as we said last week, to dismiss these creeds and confessions as antiquated or irrelevant or unnecessary, as many do today, is really to dismiss our theological heritage. I gave you some other reasons why it's dangerous to do that. ignore or reject what the church has handed down to us. But last week we began by looking at first the definition of the Trinity. Christianity asserts that there's one God, which makes Christianity monotheistic. One God. But it also asserts that there are three persons within The one God. No more, no less. Three persons who are individually 100% God. That's what makes us Trinitarian. So as Christians, we're not tritheistic. We don't believe in three different gods. We assert that there is one God existing, or to use the terms of the early church, subsisting in three persons. We believe that the plurality of persons in the Godhead does not contradict the oneness of the divine essence or the divine substance. We do not have one God existing or subsisting in three, we don't have one God who is existing or in his essence, three persons. who are three different substances. We don't have three different gods, three different entities with each a different substance. So, God then is plural in His subsistence, His existing in three persons, but He's one in His substance or essence. So, Christianity asserts also that the three persons are co-equal. We don't have one who is more God than the others. All three persons are co-equal in all the divine attributes. Each person is distinct, unmixed with the others, and that all the attributes that each one possesses cannot be less than 100% of the attribute in each person, nor can they be communicated to the other persons. So, each person also equally has the same divine substance or essence in common with the other persons and possesses 100% of that divine substance. which is not diluted, compounded, or divided. So, how one God can exist in three persons and each person be 100% God, have 100% of the divine substance, I can't figure that out. I don't know anybody else that can. But to believe anything differently, to deny that, would constitute grave error. God is one God existing in three Persons. So, working definition that we gave you last week is, in the nature and substance of the one true God, there subsists three different Persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are in each Person 100% God. We also looked at, secondly, the attributes related to the Trinity. We said that there are mainly two primary attributes, although all the attributes relate. These are incommunicable attributes, which means they belong only to God. No other being has these attributes. And the first one is unity. God is, by essence and nature, a unity. This refers to his singleness and his uniqueness. There are no other beings like God preventing us from falling into the air of tritheism, or polytheism, where we have other gods who are just like God. The unity of God then refers to his substance. If he was three substances, he would not be a unity, so he's one substance. Nowhere can it be more clear than in Deuteronomy 6.4. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, he's single. That's a reference to his unity. Or as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 8.4, there is no other God but one. So, secondly, simplicity. God is simplicity. It refers to his uncompounded, unmixed, indivisible substance. We're familiar with compounds where different elements are combined and mixed together to give us a compound. God is not a compound. He is not a mixture of different things. He's one thing. God is not like men or angels who are compound creatures or complex creatures. We are complex. God is not. He is simple. We have bodies and souls. Angels have bodies and souls. We have physical bodies. They have spiritual bodies and souls. God doesn't have a soul or a body. God is spirit. That's it. Pure spirit. One essence. He's not a compound. So, simplicity of God is also the reason why we don't believe in three gods. You can't. If he's just one, he can't be three different substances. So because he is single in his substance, he is simplicity. But I told you last week that we would look at a brief history of the Trinitarian Controversy. Hopefully you'll find this enlightening. Hopefully it will help you more in your understanding of the Trinity. The Trinitarian Controversy was at its height during the third and fourth centuries. AD, or 4th and 5th centuries, I'm sorry, the first three centuries led up to it. And I want to talk about this for a minute so we have some kind of context of what the early church hammered out for us that really is of eternal value. So I want us to look at, thirdly, the history of the doctrine related to the Trinity. I don't believe we should study any doctrine without knowing its history. I think it's very informative when we do historical looks at doctrines. We'll first look at what the Orthodox Church believed primitively about the Trinity. First Century Church didn't have a complete understanding of the Trinity. They didn't have a complete theology of the Trinity in the first century. This took several centuries to grow and to mature. And then after we look at this primitive belief about the Trinity, we'll then look at more sophisticated statements about what they believed when the controversy heated up. There was a controversy over the Trinity in primarily the fourth and fifth centuries. Now, although the church of the first two centuries was not as sophisticated as it was in the fourth and fifth century, and then, of course, after that, amazingly, it was very specific in what it believed about the Trinity, or the triunity of God. It was simple, but it was clear, and it was accurate. As early as the mid to late first century, we're talking about in the time of the apostles. We're talking about the church outside of Scripture, what they gave to us concerning their belief about the Trinity. But during this time between 50 and 100 A.D., the Didache, which was a non-inspired composite of the teaching of the apostles, asserted the Trinity in its formula of baptism. This is what it said. But concerning baptism, thus you shall baptize, having first recited all these things, baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit in running water. So, following the command that Jesus gave in Matthew 28, 19 and 20, the church formulated a statement and they took it very seriously. The first thing that a person had to believe before they would baptize was they had to believe in the Trinity. And they had to have a basic understanding of the Trinity. The apologist Justin Martyr in the early to middle of the 2nd century, about 100 years, 150 years later, said, "'For in the name of God the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, they receive washing with water.'" He's talking about the new converts. And of course, they were catechized in the doctrine of the Trinity. in a simple confession of faith, Irenaeus of the mid-2nd century, around the same time, said that the church believes in one God, the Father Almighty, and in one Christ, Jesus, the Son of God, and in the Holy Spirit. So, basically, we've got a very clear but simple assertion of the Trinity and its importance in the early church for those who came to Christ and what they needed to, what their basic confession had to be before they were considered true believers. He went on to say, this is Irenaeus, this then is the order and rule of our faith. God the Father, not made, not material, invisible, one God, the Creator of all things. This is the first point of our faith. The second point is this, the Word of God, Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, through whom all things were made. And the third point is this, the Holy Spirit through whom the prophets prophesied. So they had a very clear understanding of the Trinity Although it was simple, it wasn't systematized, they had a very clear understanding of the Trinity, not only of the persons in the Trinity, but also their functions. Which is amazing, just in the first 100 or 150 years of the church. In A.D. 250, Cyprian of Carthage arranged this statement for converts, converts to Christianity at their baptism. I believe in God the Father, in His Son Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. So, we're starting to see more than statements here. Now we're seeing confessions. And about this time, you're going to notice that these statements develop into confessions, and these confessions become more sophisticated, and eventually these confessions turn into creeds. It's very interesting to follow this. We see in one of these confessions, written by Novation of Rome, and he was about the middle of the second century. He said, the rule of truth demands that first of all, we believe in God the Father and Almighty Lord, that is, the most perfect Maker of all things. The same rule of truth teaches us to believe after the Father, also in the Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord. Moreover, the order of reason and the order of faith in due consideration of the words and scripture of the Lord admonishes us after this to believe also in the Holy Spirit, promised of old to the church, but granted in the appointed and fitting time." A bit later, in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries, Tertullian wrote this. Thus the connection of the Father in the Son and of the Son in the Spirit produces three coherent persons who are yet distinct one from the other. These three are one essence, not one person. As it is said, I and my Father are one in respect of unity of substance, not singularity of number. Here a very clear understanding of the difference between the one substance and the three subsistences or three persons. And again, this would be late second, early third centuries. So, a hundred years after the apostles, we've got this pretty much hammered out as far as an essential doctrine in the church. And so you can see that as the decades and centuries went by, the confessions became a bit more sophisticated than those first simple statements that I read to you. And they were actually the precursors of the creeds that the church would produce in the 4th and 5th centuries and then even later than that. But in the latter part of the 3rd century, Gregory actually put the church's belief in an informal creed. And this was the first informal creed that I could find. Again, this is late third century. So the late third century. And here you can see some of the church's first sophisticated and formulated thoughts. concerning the Trinity. There is one God, the Father of the living Word, there is one Lord, one of one, Jesus Christ, God of God, and there is one Holy Spirit. Neither, indeed, is there anything created or subservient in the Trinity. not introduced, as though not there before, but coming in afterwards. Nor indeed has the Son ever been without the Father, nor the Spirit without the Son. But the Trinity is ever the same, unvarying and unchangeable." So here in this informal creed, we see for the first time that the father and the son relationship is based on essence and substance, not on Christ becoming a man. There's always been confusion in the church that Jesus is called the Son of God because He was born of Mary by the inception of the Holy Spirit. That is not true. That's not why He's the Son. As if He was the second person of the Trinity until Mary got pregnant, and then all of a sudden He became a Son. But before that, He wasn't a Son. Well, that doesn't make any sense because the father is the eternal father. And to be a father, you have to have a son, which means if the father is eternal, the son has to be eternal. And of course, that was declared a heresy. Anyone who believed that Jesus became a son when he was born, that was considered heresy. So, God is a father by nature. not by having a son born to him in time. And the son, of course, is a son by nature. If Jesus was never born, there would still be a father and a son. At the beginning of the 4th century, Lucian of Antioch wrote this. And this is more of a lengthy, informal creed. We believe in accordance with the evangelical and apostolic tradition, in one God the Father Almighty, the Maker and Provider of all things, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, His Son, the only begotten God, through whom all things were made, who was begotten of the Father before all ages, God of God, and in the Holy Spirit, these names being assigned not vaguely nor idly, but indicating accurately the special personality, order, and glory of those named, so that in personality they are three, but in harmony, one." So in this particular precursor to the creeds, we see for the first time the mention of the Son being the only begotten of the Father. He goes on to say this, "...having then this faith before God in Christ, we anathematize all heretical false doctrine. And if anyone contrary to the right faith of the Scriptures teaches and says that there has been a season or time or age before the Son of God was begotten, let him be accursed. And if anyone says that the Son is a creature, as one of the created creatures, or generated, as one of the things generated, or made, as one of the things made, and not as the divine Scriptures have handed down each of the four named statements, or if a man teaches or preaches anything else contrary to what we have received, let him be accursed. For we truly and clearly both believe and follow all things from the Holy Scriptures that have been transmitted to us by the prophets and apostles." So, not only does it say that Jesus is the only begotten of the Father, it also denies that He was begotten at any point, either in time or eternity. And this is very important, and this is ultimately what the controversy finally was decided on. So from the time of the apostles, the early church understood and stated their belief in the Trinity, even though they didn't formally adopt those statements or confessions into creeds until about 100, 150 years later in the 4th and 5th centuries. But as we turn our attention now to the controversy, I wanna get specifically into the controversy of the Trinity. It had been brewing ever since the days of the apostles. I mean, we have heresy in the apostolic church, which we know from the New Testament. So this controversy had been percolating for 300 years. And this is important to understand. The creeds we have today, If you get anything, I want you to get this. The creeds that we have today from the early church are not theological discourses formulated in a vacuum. They are theological responses and defenses to heresy concerning the Trinity. Satan was in all-out war against the church to try and destroy the church's understanding of God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. So the creeds that we have are simply responses to the heresy that was infiltrating the church. The doctrine of the Trinity was the first that the church formally dealt with and formulated creeds to defend. And it was a long, brutal war. And to the men who fought this war, it was, as I said before, a matter of eternal life or eternal death. This is why I'm really shocked about how lightly the church today treats its history. You can talk to most people in the evangelical church who don't have a clue of where the church came from and where the doctrines that we have came from. I mean, it's almost irrelevant. There's an ongoing debate today as to whether doctrine is necessary at all in the church. There are some churches that brag, we don't teach doctrine, which is extremely sad and dangerous. People don't even know what to believe. There are many in the church today who argue for a doctrine-less church. If you don't believe me, go on, just pick a half a dozen evangelical churches right here in Colorado Springs and go to their websites and go to their statements of faith. Most statements of faith are less than six lines long. That covers entirely what they believe. I mean, I read to you one precursor to a creed that is longer than most doctrinal statements in the evangelical church and that just deals with one thing, the Trinity. For most churches, just a simple confession such as, I believe in Jesus, is enough to mark you out as a Christian. That's it. You believe in Jesus? Yes. You're in. What do you believe about him? I don't know. I think he died on a cross and rose from the dead. You know who he is? Wasn't he born sometime about 2,000 years ago? I mean, it's just crazy. The early church knew better. The argument goes something like this. If God is love, and there are many churches that from the beginning of the service to the end of the service, that's all you hear about is God's love. That's it, nothing else. The songs talk about it, the prayers are all about God's love, the message is all about God's love. Every week, week after week after week. If God is love, and this is the most important thing we should know about Him, then why do we need all this doctrine, since it's doctrine that really divides people? Aren't we supposed to pull people together? Since it divides, it goes against what Jesus commanded, that we love one another, instead of arguing with one another about what's right and what's wrong. But if we're constantly divided on what we believe and there's no way to be unified in our beliefs, why don't we just set our doctrinal beliefs aside and just love one another as Jesus told us to? This is a creed of many, many, many evangelical churches. But as we all know from personal experience, love can be harsh. I don't know if you've raised any kids or not, but if your kid runs in the street when they're two years old and there's traffic out there, there's gonna be some pretty stern discipline so the kid understands you can't do that anymore. When a doctor warns his patients of an unqualified or unfit doctor across town, he's not being mean-spirited, he's trying to protect his patients. from going to a quack and possibly getting harmed or even experiencing death because of unqualified medical help. Error has to be called out. Sometimes if it's not called out, people die. It's the same way in the church. If you don't call error out, people can die. Not necessarily physically, but eternally. and it's happening every day in the church. And it's no different defending the critical doctrines. The Orthodox Christians of the early church were not mean-spirited when they responded to heresy. That's not what they were about. They were concerned, deeply concerned, that people were going to hell because of what they believed They called out the heretics and they warned people to stay clear of their poisonous teachings. And the first one they called out was error concerning the Trinity. You can't even begin to think about being a Christian until you understand the Trinity. At least have a basic understanding. Not as involved as I'm getting, but you have to understand that there's one God and three persons and they're not three different substances. They're not three different, you know, like Peter, James, and John are three different substances. That's not the Trinity. Contrary to much of the church today, the early church understood this. They could identify error and cared enough to do something about it. I'm telling you today, most could care less. If you got Jesus somewhere in your vocabulary, you're in Any true loving Christian always strives for peace and unity in the church. We all want peace and unity. Who doesn't? But there comes a point when one has to sacrifice peace and unity now for peace and unity in eternity. And sometimes you can't have it both ways. This is the kind of concern that motivated the early church. If you couldn't have peace and unity in the church for all, for everybody, through unity of doctrine, then the battles had to take place to ensure that some had peace and unity in heaven. By the time we get to the fourth century, two groups emerged. It's more complicated than that, but I'm going to try and keep it simple. The Orthodox. or the true segment of the church. That was one group. And the heterodox, or the heretical segment of the church. That was the other group. Those who believed in the Trinity and those who didn't. Those who didn't believe in the Trinity basically went off into two directions. Some of the heterodox believe that God was one God and one person. who just revealed himself in three different ways. In other words, one God and sometimes he's coming as the Father, sometimes he's coming as the Son, sometimes he's coming as the Holy Spirit. He just changed masks or puts on different hats. It's the same person, just reveals himself in three different ways. It's heresy. That's not Trinitarianism. Others of the heterodox party, and they argued this from scripture, although it was erroneous, they believed that God the Father was the true, eternal God, but the Son was His first and greatest creation. And the Spirit was another, lesser creation below the Son. They had the Father, the Son, and then the Holy Spirit. The Father was the only one who was truly God. the other two created by God. Now, I'm going to focus on the second one because that's where the Trinitarian controversy focused. What I just described to you is God being the Eternal Father and then the Son being created from the Father, so the Father was eternal, the Son is not, and then the Son being created by the Father less than the Son, we call that, theologians call that ontological subordination. Ontological simply means being, okay? Substance, nature. Within the Trinity then, we have a substance, substantive subordination. In other words, the Father is more important than the Son, and the Son is more important than the Spirit because of their nature. The first one is 100% God, the second one's not God at all, and the third one's not God at all, and not even as important as the second. So it's ontological subordination. The Son was subordinate to the Father, and the spirit was subordinate to the father and the son because of nature or essence. This violated the orthodox view of co-equality of essence, substance, and nature and attributes among the three persons. Clear violation. Just in the precursory creeds that I read to you, The church understood this before the apostles died. We have extra-biblical confessions or statements before John died in 90 some AD, AD 90. So the Orthodox party vehemently denied this ontological subordination and correctly argued from Scripture that if there was any subordination within the Trinity, it was a functional subordination. not an ontological one. You say, what do you mean by that? Well, when the Eternal Son became a man, when Jesus was born and He grew up, He was subordinate to His Father in His role or His function as the Messiah. But his incarnation, him becoming a man, never affected his ontological relationship with his father, which is co-equality, right? He was still God when he became a man. 100% God. Had all of the attributes the father had. So ontologically they were completely equal as what the Trinitarian doctrine states, but functionally he was subordinate, which is what the scriptures teach. So from an ontological standpoint, or from an essence and nature standpoint, the Orthodox Church defended the biblical claim that there was no ontological subordination in the Trinity. Now this is really not hard to understand. For example, in the concepts of subordination, the two concepts of ontological and functional, we believe that the scriptures teach men and women are ontologically equal as human beings. Women are not subordinate to men in any way as human beings. They're not less because they're women, which is what Christianity gets accused of all the time. They are 100% equal to men in essence, substance, and nature. But in function, in roles, the Bible is very clear that women are to be subordinate to their husbands, right? That's in a role, not in nature. You say, well, that's not fair. That's chauvinism. Well, that's what the Bible teaches. I can't apologize for that. That's the way God made us. He didn't make women first. He made the man first. We've got several examples of this in the Bible and that could be another message or another series, but let me just give you one. Go to 1 Timothy 2. And by the way, in this functional subordination between women and men, there is a lot of balance here. If I have a second, I might share that with you. But here, Paul is talking about functional subordination here in 1 Timothy 2 in verse 11. He's talking about in the worship service in verses 9 and 10. actually verse 8 through 15. But here in verse 11, he says, let a woman learn in silence with all submission. Submission to her husband. Talking about in the worship service. That's all it's talking about here. And I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man, but to be in silence. He's talking about in the worship service. God wants a certain order in the worship service. We all know that 90% of evangelicalism violates what God says here. I can't help it. That's what God says. You have the same thing in your Bible that I have in my Bible. Now he gives the reasons why the woman is to be subordinate in the worship service to her husband. If you want to jot down 1 Corinthians 14, the latter part of the chapter, Paul explains what the woman is supposed to do in the worship service when she doesn't understand something and Paul gives directions there. But, here's the first reason. Two reasons why women are not to teach men or have authority over men in a worship service. Number one, because in the male-female order, before the fall, this is before Adam and Eve fell, God created the man first, then the woman. Look at verse 13, for Adam was formed first, then Eve. That's his first reason. This is why women don't teach in a worship service. It's a functional subordination. It has nothing to do with value, equality, as human beings or anything. This is just in role, okay? So women are subordinate to men because of the created order. That's the way God says. If you have a problem with that, you need to take it up with him. That's the way God made us. But secondly, and this is interesting, He gives one reason from before the fall and then he gives another reason after the fall. Secondly, in the fall the woman was deceived whereas the man was not. If you go back to Genesis 3, Eve was completely deceived by the serpent. Adam wasn't. And when Eve offered Adam the fruit to eat, he knew exactly what he was doing. He made a choice between his wife and God. A conscious choice. When the woman fell, she was completely discombobulated. She was completely taken off guard. And that's what Paul's explaining here. That's the second reason why women are not to teach or have authority over men in the worship service. One because of the created order and the second reason because of the fall. So he covers both ends. So if man never fell, this is the way it would be anyway. There would still be a created order. Women would still be subordinate to men in function. But lest you think dysfunctional subordination makes women inferior to men, I don't have time to go through all of it, the Bible makes it clear that women are to be elevated by men. I'll tell you what, I'd be, I don't want to get into the transgender issue, but if God made me a woman from my mother's womb, and I understood this, I don't think I'd complain. Because men are supposed to treat their wives like queens. Men are the ones who have to answer for their wives and themselves. Women don't have to answer for their husbands. The men have way more responsibility than women. And this is demonstrated all throughout the Bible. And unless you understand this, unless you understand that men are supposed to treat women very highly, and there to provide for the women and those kinds of things where it's not reversed in the created order, that's the balance that God has placed within this functional subordination. And when you read some of the laws in the Old Testament where the women couldn't do this and the women couldn't do that, but the men had to do it, the reason for that was because God had more responsibility for the men, and the men were supposed to protect the women. And that's just the way God made us. And of course, our culture is turning all of this, and has been for years, on its head. But nevertheless, God's Word doesn't change. So, the reason I'm bringing this up is it's the same way in the Trinity. The Son is subordinate to the Father in a functional way, in role. The Spirit is subordinate to the Father and the Son in role. I don't see anywhere in the scripture where Jesus gets upset because He's functionally subordinate to His Father or the Spirit gets upset because He's functionally subordinate to the Father and the Son. That's the way God made it. Ontologically they're completely equal but functionally they're subordinate. One verse actually ties both of these things together. Functional and ontological subordination in the Trinity and in the husband-wife relationship. Go to 1 Corinthians, I'll show you, and you can kind of look at it later in 1 Corinthians 11. Verse 2, now this is talking about functional subordination, purely roles, okay. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11.2, Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things, and keep the traditions as I have delivered them to you. But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ. That means men are subordinate to Christ in the church. The head of every woman is man, and the head of Christ is God, God the Father. So this isn't difficult to understand at all. The difficulty is in acceptance, not understanding. So in the Trinity, the Father is first, the Son is second, the Holy Spirit is third. Have you ever realized that somebody's got to be first, somebody's got to be second, and somebody's got to be third? Everybody can't be first. And in role, the father's the head of Christ, and Christ submits to his father. The Holy Spirit is directed by the father and the son. He never directs the father and the son. If you go to scripture, you'll see that. You'll never see the son direct the father. So in the Trinity, there's never an ontological subordination, only a functional one. And this was a big debate. This was the debate. Because if you believe in ontological subordination, there's no way that the Son can be God and the Holy Spirit can be God. At least not in the same sense as the Father. Which means they are not equal. And that's heresy. This was one of the most, if not the most, heated controversy in the early church. And it was tearing the church apart at the end of the third and beginning of the fourth centuries. And at the head of the Orthodox party was a man named Athanasius. He was the Bishop of Alexandria. And at the head of the Heterodox party was a man named Arius. He was a presbyter in Alexandria as well. And ironically, it was the Emperor Constantine who ordered the two parties to come together to work this out. Now, Constantine wasn't a theologian. He was a pragmatician. He just wanted the church to have peace. So he says, you guys need to get together and work this out. So he brought them together in AD 318 in a town called Nicaea, which is in Northwest Turkey today. in what we now know as the Nicene Assembly or the Nicene Council, 318. And he brought them together to resolve this raging, increasingly raging controversy in the church. It was splitting the church apart. Now, Arius, who led the heterodox party, used scripture to support his heresy. He used the Bible. He reasoned, this was his reasoning, He reasoned that if the son was subject to limitations or incompleteness, as the New Testament says, then he could not be equal to the father. I mean, to him, this was crystal clear. For example, Arius argued that since Jesus said in John 14, 28, that the father is greater than I, Jesus, or the son couldn't be substantially equal to the father. He also argued that since the son grew in wisdom and stature, as Luke 2.52 says, he couldn't be equal to his father because God can't grow in wisdom and knowledge and stature. He also said that if the son didn't know the time of his own return, as Mark 13.32 says, he couldn't be equal with the father. I mean, he had a list a mile long. Hebrews 5, 8 and 9 says that the son learned obedience while he was here on earth. Arius said he can't be equal to the father if he had to learn obedience. And if the son submitted to his father's will as he did in Matthew 26, 39, not my will but yours be done, then he can't be equal with the father. Now, if there is no understanding between ontological and functional subordination, Arius is right. But you have to make the distinction. He refused to admit the differences. And clearly in the passages that he used to say that the son was not equal to his father, the son from an Orthodox standpoint, is functionally subordinate. That's the reason Jesus didn't know the time that He was coming back. That's the reason He submitted to His Father's will in the garden. That's the reason He said, My Father is greater than I. Father is greater than I in function, not in ontological essence in nature. When Jesus wanted to say that He and His Father were equal in an ontological relationship, He says, I and the Father are one. We're one substance. We're one nature. We are one equally. So even Jesus made the distinctions. But Arius didn't stop there. He argued in John 1.1, let's go there. and you need to know this anyway if you're talking to Jehovah's Witnesses. Everything I'm telling you is absolutely crucial to know if you're talking to Jehovah's Witnesses. Because Jehovah's Witnesses today are Arians. They believe exactly what Arians believed. John 1.1, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Now if you notice there, the first God, the Word was with God, has a definite article in front of it, in the original language. We don't have definite articles, well we do, we have the, okay. A definite article to us would be the, the man. An indefinite article would be a, a man. In other words, the man is specific. A man is general. It could be any man. When I have a definite article from it, I know in front of it, I know which man we're talking about. When I have an indefinite article in front of it, I don't know who we're talking about. That's how we do it in English. The Greeks didn't do it that way. But it gives you a concept of a definite and indefinite article, okay? The first God with God has a definite article in front of it in the original language. The second one does not. So Arius concluded, that because the second God doesn't have a definite article in front of it, it means it was indefinite. That's not how the Greeks used a word without an article. Matter of fact, there is no article, there's no indefinite article in the Greek, only in English. We call it, when you leave an article out in Greek, we call it anarthros. It means it's absent Doesn't mean it's indefinite. But Arius believed that since it was not there, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was a God, not the God. That's how he interpreted it. But a careful study of the first century Greek shows that the Greeks didn't use the definite article the same way we use it today. I mean it's crystal clear if you study the language. No two languages are the same. For one, once they used the article to describe a subject, in the beginning the word was with God, with the God, because it has a definite article. Any subsequent use of God, they left the article off because they already identified Him. Until you change identification of the subject or the object, you don't need to put another the in front of it. In the Greek mind. So if you don't change subject or article, you put it on the first one and all the rest of them you leave off. Makes sense. They didn't have a lot of paper back then. They wanted to save everything they could. Leave it off. So what John is saying in John 1.1 is that in the beginning, the Word, which is the second person of the Trinity, already existed. In the beginning was the Word. In other words, in the beginning, the Word already existed, right? Before anything was created. That's what he's talking about. Arius actually agreed with that. But to us, that shows us the eternality. To Arius, it didn't. And this word was the one and only true God showing him as a separate person. And God was the word showing his same quality or essence or substance. So, as I said, because John didn't use the article in the second place doesn't mean that it's indefinite. A better way actually to interpret this is, In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and God was the Word. That's literally how it reads in the original language. God was the Word. In other words, God is the subject, the Word is the predicate. In our English, it's reversed. But because the article's left out, the God who is the Word is the same one and only one, yet a separate person. And this is what he says in verse 2. He, this Word, was in the beginning with God. So what John is doing here is he's telling us that you have one person of the Trinity who is God relating to another person in the Trinity who is God. And he clarifies it in verse 2 by saying these are two separate persons who are God. And here's the irony of Arius' interpretation. If John would have used an article in the second one like he did in the first one, it would show two different substances, two different gods of equal nature and substance. So he couldn't put the article in. Otherwise he'd be guilty, if you include the Holy Spirit, of tritheism. But he left it out. I told you before, Greeks didn't use the article indefinitely like we do. They didn't use it that way. They use it to show quality. In other words, when you left the article off, you were not identifying the person as much as you were qualifying the person. And what that means is, the word is the same quality as the God mentioned in the first place, which means same substance and nature. John couldn't have been more clear on how he wrote this. And yet Arius said, no, he meant a God. Now, just as a side note, if you didn't follow what I just said, you'll be able to follow this. Look in verse six. There was a man sent from God. Did you get that? Verse 12. As many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become the children of God. Verse 13, Who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Verse 18, No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. Do you know that in every single one of those instances I just read to you, there's no article there? no one would argue that in verse 6, 12, 13, and 18 that it is not talking about the one true eternal God. Not even Arius would argue that. And yet there's no article there. Why not? You don't need one. He's already identified it the first time. So the other five or six times that John uses it in chapter one, the article is absent. But at some point, the Arian party had to formally submit its belief in God to the council. So later in the Trinitarian controversy, one of Arius' peers, Eusebius of Caesarea, submitted a creed to the council at Nicaea. that the heterodox party thought would be accepted by the orthodox party. They were praying that it would be accepted. A creed that would hopefully be accepted but also give the Arians interpretive room to insert their heretical views. And that's where we'll pick it up next week. We don't have nearly the understanding, I would say, the cranial capacity that our forefathers did to think through this stuff. I'm telling you, some of this stuff gets so technical, you can really get lost in the weeds. I'm trying to simplify this as much as I can. But these men were intellectual, spiritual giants compared to what we have today. And it's really sad that we've lost that edge in critically thinking through the Scriptures. But if we hadn't had this in the first few centuries, at least from a human perspective, I don't even know if Christianity would still exist today. I mean, Satan was ripping the church apart over this issue because it is the issue. John 1.1 says it's the issue. John wrote his gospel evangelistically and he said the first thing you need to believe is the relationship between the Father and the Son. That's in the first two verses of the book. That may not be your forte to go through this, but I think it's still important. Try and get as much out of it as you can, and we'll pick it up next time. Thank you, Lord, for this time. Thank you for being gracious to us. And Lord, I really thank you for the fathers that have gone before us who have hammered this out, who have literally, some of them, given their lives to this all-critical doctrine of understanding the relationship between the Father and the Son and the Spirit. And it all comes down to, at least from our standpoint, salvation. Because if the Son of God is not God in full, then there's no way we can be saved because only God can save. So we thank You for these men and we thank You for Your Word and we thank You for the creeds that we have to clarify what is true and what is false. And we just look forward to looking at this again and then getting into the biblical data where we can see from Your Word exactly what it says about the Trinity. And we thank You in Jesus' name. Amen.