THE TRINITY

THE TRINITY (TRIUNE GOD): The bible teaches that God is a Triune being. 1 John 5:7 declares that "there are three that bear record in heaven, THE FATHER, THE WORD, and THE HOLY GHOST and these three are ONE." Jesus is identified on numerous occasions as The Word of God made flesh. In the Old Testament (Genesis 1:26,27) God refers to himself as creating man in "our" image and then creating man in "His own" image. The book of Hebrews declares Jesus to be the "express image" of God and Jesus himself told his disciples that if they had seen Him, then they had seen The Father.

Still this teaching remains difficult for many people to understand. Perhaps the best example is mankind. We were created in the image of God as triune beings possessing BODY, SOUL and SPIRIT. All three are the individual, but they are not the same. Your spirit is you, your soul is you and your mortal/physical body is you, but they are separate parts of the whole. On a much grander scale we find God who is a triune being and yet ONE GOD.

SACRIFICE

SACRIFICE (offering): the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim. Biblically, offerings were made unto God of various items and animals in order to cover sin and allow man to have communion with God. We learn in the book of Hebrews that these sacrifices actually had no power to remove sin, but were symbolic of the sacrifice God's only begotten Son would make when He came into the world. Jesus is called the Lamb of God, because He is God's perfect sacrifice for the sins of mankind. Faith in Jesus and His sacrifice for our sins actually cleanses sin away for all time. When Christ rules on a renewed Earth for 1,000 years, called the Kingdom Age, the sacrificial system of the Old Testament times will be restored in memorial of the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross.