Fr. Theodore Paraskevopoulos
Who is God?
Who is Jesus Christ?
What is the Gospel?
Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Spirit.
How can there be one God and yet be three personalities?
God is love. God is the ultimate expression of love. Well,
if we think logically, He has to be a community. He has to be three persons. Why?
Because you cannot have love on your own. You cannot be all by yourself and
love yourself: that is ego, that is evil. True love is selfless love; you have
to express it. You have to have at least one other person to show that love, to
sacrifice for that person. How can God be love if He is only one? He is one God in essence, but He is three Persons;
He is a community to show us how to love in a community. So this is one of the
reasons why there is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This is how my professor explained it:
He lit a candle for me and he placed it in front of me.
“Do
you see this flame?”
I said, “yes.”
Well, if you look at the flame, you can think of God the
Father as the actual fire; He is the source of all things. But there is not
just the flame there is also the light that comes from the fire, the light
which hits our eye and allows us to perceive the fire, the flame. This is God
the Son, Jesus Christ, because He comes into the world. The only reason why we
see God is because Christ comes into the world so the son comes in and becomes
visible to us and He reveals to us who God the Father is, who the Holy Spirit
is. As we read the Gospel of John, you’ll see that Christ always says, He who
has seen Me has seen the Father. And so
you have the flame which is God the Father, the light which comes from it,
which is Christ coming into the world and you also have the heat, and the heat
is felt but not seen. And the heat could be likened to the Holy Spirit because the
Holy Spirit we do not see it come and go as Christ says in the Gospel of John, The
Spirit comes as the wind, you do not see it but you feel it. And the Holy
Spirit is what gives us the ability to believe. It gives us the spark of faith.
It allows us to feel the presence of God. And so all these three things are all
one fire, one flame, you cannot separate the three; you cannot separate the
light and put it on its own and the flame on its own and the heat… all of them
exist, they are all part of one fire. But at the same time they are also the
three different, distinct elements. In the same way we can think of the Holy
Spirit that there is one God, one essence, one will, one plan for mankind, and
yet there are different expressions of that there are different personalities
that are revealed to mankind so that we may know God in His entirety to have a
deeper relationship to Him so that we can grow because in the Old Testament God
was very far off, He was very distant, He was someone you never saw but He only
spoke to you. But in the New Testament, We have God in human form. He becomes
one with us and this is the great mystery of Christianity and this is the great
beauty of Christianity. And so it begins with knowing exactly who is this God
that we worship. Why do we say that He is a Trinity? What has been revealed to
us by Him Himself and this is what we hold true.
thanks to Ancient Faith Radio
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