Lordship and Trinitarian Foundations (Foundations Series 4 of 6)
Lordship Foundation
Our study of God in theology must be not only biblical and missional but also centered on the supremacy of God as Lord. The essence of God’s revelation of himself in Scripture is that he is Lord.
Throughout the Bible, one of the most significant ways God reveals his nature is by his many names. Theologians suggest many groupings and distinctions between them.
But almost all agree that God’s name Yahweh (YHWH in Hebrew, or LORD in English–often capitalized) is the most significant name of God in the Old Testament.
This English name for God, LORD, the Hebrew name Lord (Adon), and the Greek name Lord (Kurios), occur over 7000 times in the Bible. All throughout history recorded in Scripture, we learn that God works in the lives of his people so they will know he is LORD (e.g. Exod 6:7).
Therefore, the essence of theology is the study of God in Scripture to know who he is and what he does as Lord. And this fundamental confession of God’s Lordship summarizes the main message of the Bible.
When God appears to Moses in the burning bush, Moses asks God what his name is to understand who he is and what he is like. God answers Moses, saying:
“I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you. Say this to the people of Israel: ‘YHWH (LORD), the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’” (Exod 3:14-15).
In obedience to God’s command, Moses wrote this historic confession of faith: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5).
God's revelation as LORD in the Old Testament continues in the New Testament when God translates his personal name YHWH as Lord (Greek kurios) and applies the name to Jesus.
When the Jewish religious leaders ask Jesus, “Who do you make yourself out to be?” he answers, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM. So they picked up stones to throw at him (John 8:53, 58-59a).” This violent response to Jesus’ “I AM” statement shows that the religious leaders understood Jesus to be saying he was equal to God, who gave himself the name “I AM” in Exodus 3.
This same confession of God’s people in the Old Testament, that “God is LORD,” continues in the New Testament and today as “Jesus is Lord!” (Rom 10:9).
The Scriptures teach that God created the world to be an eternal, utopian, cosmic display of God’s glory as he rules over everything as Lord. God created us to reflect his glory as we find our joy in him and the mission he began at creation. His mission is to fill the earth and rule over it as Lord so that the paradise of his perfect rule will extend on earth for eternity.
However, evil entered the story through a real villain, Satan, who enticed humanity to sin. We lost paradise. As a result, God allowed Satan to set up his kingdom in this fallen world and to rule over it. The Apostle John writes, “The whole world is under the control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). This means that Satan now declares himself to be Lord and cries “Mine!” over all of God’s creation to rule over it for his evil purposes.
But the good news is that God, as Lord in Christ, is not only the Creator of all things but also the Redeemer and Restorer of all things lost in creation because of the Fall.
As our Redeemer Lord, Jesus lived the life we should have lived and died the death we deserve to die for our sin. Through his death, Paul writes, “He disarmed all rulers and authorities putting them to open shame, by triumphing over them” (Col. 2:15). Then God raised Him from the dead, proclaiming his ultimate victory over evil and inaugurating his new rule on earth as Lord.
After ascending to the right hand of God the Father, Jesus continues God’s mission on earth by redeeming and restoring all things lost in the Fall as “far as the curse is found.”[1] In Philippians 2:9-11, the Apostle Paul describes why God exalted Jesus:
“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
When Jesus returns, he will reveal God’s Lordship by crushing Satan under his feet (Rom 16:20). Paul writes: “Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Cor 15:24-25).
At the return of Christ, he will reveal the full extent of God's rule and overcome all enemies of God’s Lordship and honor. This promise of God’s future rule as Lord gives us a biblical vision of Jesus’ present rule as our ascended Lord, as he is now putting all his and our enemies under his feet. So, when we battle with the enemies of God’s Lordship in our lives, we are not fighting alone.
Dutch statesman-theologian Abraham Kuyper (1880) presents this biblical vision of God's Lordship: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
Although the study of God in Scripture should help us apply God’s Word to our lives so we can grow in our maturity in Christ, however, the end goal of theology is vertical, not horizontal.
Sound theology is about God’s Lordship over all things. It starts with God and finds its goal in God. The higher purpose of our study of God in Scripture is to know, love, serve, and honor God as Lord in all of life.
Trinitarian Foundation
Sound theology must be more than biblical, missional, and centered on the supremacy of God as Lord. It must also be Trinitarian because God has revealed himself in Scripture as the Triune Lord. Therefore, to know God as Lord means to know who God is (his attributes) and what God does (his acts) as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
So all Christian theology includes the Trinity as one of its many topics. And theologians usually teach it as a sub-category under the more major category of the doctrine of God. However, the Trinity is both a doctrine and a perspective for all other doctrines.
In the study of theology, we need a method to help us identify the topics we study and determine how to organize them into a coherent whole. In this series, instead of studying the doctrine of the Trinity only under the doctrine of God, we are learning about all the other Christian doctrines in light of the Trinity.
This is because the Bible presents all these individual, doctrinal topics as vital parts of the bigger story, the unfolding mission of the Triune Lord as Creator, Redeemer, and Restorer:
God the Father establishes his will by creating all things
God the Son accomplishes his will by redeeming all things lost in the Fall
God the Spirit applies his will by restoring all things lost in the Fall
This approach connects us back to an ancient, historic method that uses the Trinity as an organizing structure for studying theology. For example, this is the model of the most famous creed of Christianity, the Apostles’ Creed (120-250 AD).
FATHER
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth.
SON
I believe in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended into hell
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
HOLY SPIRIT
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
Likewise, we find this Trinitarian method of studying Christian theology in other ancient creeds, like the Nicene Creed (325 AD) and in the writings of the church fathers of the past. Early on, the precedent for constructing theology in alignment with the Triune God’s work in redemptive history became well established.
Prominent theologians who follow this approach include Augustine (5th century), John of Damascus (8th century), Peter Lombard (12th century), Thomas Aquinas (13th century), Martin Luther (16th century), and John Calvin (16th century).
Therefore, when Calvin wrote his well-known Institutes of the Christian Religion (1564), considered by many to be one of the most significant and influential Protestant Systematic Theologies, he followed the Trinitarian approach to theology in the Apostles’ Creed and titled his first three books:
Book One. The Knowledge of God the Creator (Father)
Book Two. The Knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ
Book Three. The Way in Which We Receive the Grace of Christ (Holy Spirit)
Following this biblical and historical precedent, we will study theology in this series with an intentional focus on the person and work of the Triune Lord in history.