Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind.

We want to look at this question of Trinity because it is one of the most difficult, mysterious, puzzling, and controversial doctrines of the entire Christian faith.

Mysterious, puzzling, and controversial, but foundational to the Christian faith.

And yet do we understand where the idea of a triune God comes from?

Despite the fact that the word Trinity doesn't show up anywhere in Scripture, the Bible from stark to finish reveals to us that there is one God who is three persons.

Here's our cease-broll.

When we look at the cultures of antiquity, one of the things that jumps out at us in terms of the vast majority of ancient civilizations is the commitment that we find in their culture to a highly developed system of polytheism.

We think, for example, of the Greeks who had their pantheon of deities and of the Romans who had their corresponding gods and goddesses, a God for this and a God for that covering every sphere of human concern and human endeavor.

And yet in the midst of that Mediterranean world of antiquity, there is a culture that stands out for its unique, developed, commitment to monotheism.

Now, I realize that there are critical scholars who argue that the Jewish religion as reflected in the Old Testament was not really monotheistic,

but was a subtle blending of forms of polytheism and that the Scriptures, as we receive it today, were worked over by later editors and a more modern view of monotheism was written back into the earlier patriarchal periods of the biblical record.

But those critical theories, notwithstanding one of the things that jumps out at us, is that from the very first page of sacred scripture, there is an unambiguous declaration that the Lord God is not simply a deity whose reign and authority is restricted to the boundaries or borders of Israel, but he is the most high God.

He is the God of heaven and earth, he is the God who creates and rules all things.

Now, the actual working out of the development of the religious community of Israel and the Old Testament put great stress and great emphasis on this point that God is singular, that there is only one God and none beside Him.

And we think, for example, in the Pentateuch in the book of Deuteronomy of the Shema, which was something that was so deeply rooted in the consciousness of the people, and this was an idea that was recited in their liturgy, and we find it in Deuteronomy chapter 6, beginning at verse 4.

I'm sure you're all familiar with this, as you've heard this on many occasions, it goes like this,

here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength.

Now, we're familiar with those words as they contain for us the content of the great commandment.

Well, in the context of the Shema here, where the call to assembly is given, and the announcement is made hero Israel, the Lord our God is one.

And then what immediately follows the great commandment here are these words, and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart,

and you shall teach them diligently to your children, shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up,

you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes, and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates.

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