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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I think there’s normally, dear saints, three spots that we trip up in the Athanasian Creed and need to explain. At least three questions that I always get after we confess it.
The first is, hey, pastor, are we now saying that we’re saved by our works? Because after all, we confess that the Lord will… When all are raised in their bodies, they have to give an account of their own deeds, and those who have done good will enter into eternal life, those who have done evil into eternal fire. This is, though, the simple confession of the Holy Scriptures, especially 2 Corinthians 5:10. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one can receive the things done in the body, whether good or bad.
Most especially, I think, the words of our Lord Jesus in John 5:29… where Jesus says those who have done good will go into the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil will go into the resurrection of judgment. Now, does this match? This is the question. Does this match with our teaching that we’re saved by grace through faith? And I want to suggest to you that, in fact, it does beautifully. Because, and if you could let me give you a little verse to be the key to sort this out.
In Hebrews chapter 2, Paul, or whoever gives us the book of Hebrews, says that without faith it is impossible to please God. This means that if we do not have faith in Christ, then everything that we do, no matter how good or how evil it is in the eyes of the world or in the eyes of our self or in the eyes of the neighbor or whatever, no matter how good it is, it is evil in the eyes of the Lord. Because apart from faith, it’s impossible to do good.
But here’s the corollary to that, not logical but theological, that with faith it’s impossible not to please God. That those who are repentant, that means recognize the depth of their sin and trust in Christ, that from the repentant heart will flow the gift of good works, and that even though those good works are stained and corrupted by our own sinful flesh, by faith the Lord comes along and purifies those works and forgives everything bad that we add to it.
So that the works of the Christian, this is an amazing promise and truth for us, that the works of the Christian actually appear before the throne of God as perfect and holy, as true sacrifices. Not in order that we would be saved, but in fact, works that the Lord Jesus himself works through to overcome the kingdom of the devil and the world and even our own sinful flesh.
So here’s how I think it is now. Just a little bit of my own speculation in here. Although I don’t think it’s so far off, but just so you know. I think that there might be something like this: if on the last day the Lord Jesus raises all the dead and he says, okay, I want everyone who believes in me to come over here to my right and everyone who doesn’t believe to go over there to the left, well, everyone who doesn’t believe says, well, hold on, wait a minute, that’s not fair. I didn’t know that’s what I was trying to do. I didn’t think I was trying to get to heaven by believing. I was trying to get to heaven by doing all sorts of good in my life. I was trying to get to heaven by being a good person.
And the Lord Jesus says, okay, fine, let’s do it your way. Everyone who’s good on my right and everyone who’s bad on the left. And it’s the same. It’s the same exactly because you cannot do good apart from faith. And by faith, you cannot do evil. So that while the judgment on the last day is a judgment of works, it is only possible because works follow faith. And there is no other way to understand it.
So I think that’s the first confusion. The second confusion has to do with this word that comes in the beginning and the end. It says, whoever desires to be saved must above all hold to the Catholic faith. And people say, hey, wait a minute, I thought we were Lutheran. How come we’re talking about the Catholics? It’s good to remember that the word Catholic is just a Greek word that means universal, or according to the whole. It means everywhere, all times and all places. So this is the Christian faith. That’s what we mean when we say Catholic.
In every place, it’s not a unique sectarian thing. This is not the Austin faith or the Texas faith or the 2025 faith. It’s a Catholic faith, all times and all places. Now, you’ll notice that it’s a lowercase c. The Roman Catholic Church has claimed to be the Catholic Church. They’ve made it an uppercase C, and we have a small dispute with them about that. But we still confess the Catholic faith, the faith that is confessed by all Christians of all times and in all places.
Now, the third question I usually get about the Athanasian Creed, it’s also there in that first line, and it shows up in a couple of other verses where it basically says that if you do not have this faith, then you do not have salvation. Verse 2, for example, whoever does not keep it, the Catholic faith, whole and undefiled, will without doubt perish eternally. This comes up again down the road a little bit where we say in verse 26, Therefore whoever desires to be saved must think thus about the Trinity. And then in verse 27, but it’s also necessary for everlasting salvation that one faithfully believe the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now, I want us to note, first of all, and we’ll spend some time thinking about this, but I want us to note, first of all, that it does not say that we, to be saved, that we have to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. If this was the case, then none would be saved. It says that we confess the doctrine of the Trinity, that we believe the doctrine of the Trinity, that we hold to the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The reason why this is so important, why error here is so important, important to reject and to clarify, is that the God who is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the God who saves and the only God who saves. If we fall off of this orthodox confession of who God is, then whatever God we’re confessing and whatever God we’re worshiping and whatever God we’re believing in is a false God and a God who cannot save. So we want to think about that.
Now, the Athanasian Creed can really be divided into two parts. The first part is the doctrine of the Trinity, and the second part is the doctrine of the incarnation. And really, our texts today are incarnation texts, or at least close by. The texts that we read from Proverbs, from Acts chapter 2, from John chapter 8 are really presenting to us the biblical doctrine that Jesus is Lord, Jesus is God.
In Proverbs chapter 8, it’s beautiful. Wisdom is there before the foundation of the world, and you think it’s maybe just talking about wisdom in an abstract way, but then wisdom starts to talk and talk about how he was there with God in the beginning creating the world, and we realize, wait a minute, this wisdom is Jesus. And there we’re confessing that he is co-eternal with the Father, that he is co-creator with the Father. It’s a beautiful, oh, it’s a beautiful text, Proverbs 8.
And then in Acts chapter 2, Peter, he’s preaching on Pentecost. It’s further on from the sermon we had begun last week, and he quotes Psalm 16, you will not let your Holy One see corruption. He quotes Psalm 110, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand. He’s quoting all this David stuff.
And then Peter makes this point. He says, now David, you guys, remember how you all like David? Remember that David is over there in the tomb still. He was preaching in Jerusalem and the tomb of David was like down the street and around the corner. Remember, David’s still in the tomb, but Jesus is not. And God has made, look at how he culminates that beautiful sermon, that God has made this Jesus both Christ and Lord, so that Jesus is the only one who’s ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father so that Jesus is God.
And also in the John chapter 8 text, which is pretty intense. Can you, I just, John chapter 8 always says, If you start in the middle of the text, it’s like that time that you walk in. Like, if you imagine there’s some people talking and you just go and walk up to join the conversation, hey, what are you guys talking about? And then you realize that they’re in a fight. And you’re like, ooh, and you try to slowly. You walk up and you hear, and there’s Jesus and the Jews, and they’re talking to each other.
And the Sanhedrin there, they say, aren’t we right in saying that you’re a Sadducee? Or sorry, that you’re a Samaritan? Right. That you’re demon-possessed. Whoa. And Jesus says, no, I’m not demon-possessed. That’s you. In fact, Jesus said it already. You’re of your father, the devil. But I honor God. Who says he’s your God?
And then Jesus says this. You say you’re sons of Abraham. Abraham, if you were sons of Abraham, you’d believe in me. Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad. And they say, whoa. Now we know you’re demon possessed because look, you’re not even 50 years old, and you’re saying that you met Abraham? And then Jesus says to them, before Abraham was, did you get it? Before Abraham was, I am.
That’s what Jesus said to Moses from the burning bush. Who should I say sent me? Tell them, I am who I am sent you. And that’s where we get the divine name, a derivative of this. So that when Jesus says before Abraham was, I am, he is saying, you remember the God that you worship? That’s me. and God. These are all beautiful texts of the incarnation confessing that Jesus is God and Jesus is Lord.
But I really want to think about the first part of the Athanasian Creed because there’s really two things that are going on there, and we don’t normally think about it, so we can’t miss it. We cannot, it’s Trinity Sunday, so we have to say, all right, we’ve got to buckle down our minds and imaginations and focus it on the stuff that we don’t normally focus about, so make sure that we’re confessing it right.
And here’s the first thing, talking about the doctrine of the Trinity. The Athanasian Creed says if you could imagine you have a piece of paper and you draw a line down the paper, you make two columns. And one column is created, and the other column is not created. This column is made and this column is not made. In fact, this not made, not created column is almighty and eternal and infinite and everlasting and God and Lord. And on this side is everything else. Right?
Now, the question about Jesus is maybe the first one that we have to deal with because we say, well, what side of the ledger does Jesus belong? On what side of the column does Jesus go? This is all of the Christological arguments in the early church. Where do we put the Lord Jesus? And the church said Jesus has to go on the creator side of things, not on the created. He’s on the not-made side of the ledger, not on the made side of the ledger.
Remember, it was the chief heretic Arius, and really every heresy does this about Christ. They say, no, no, Jesus should be on the created side. I mean, very close to the line of creator. But on the created side of that line, he was the first creation of God, and then through him, God made everything else. But that just, it simply won’t cut it. To put Jesus on the made side of that line, he has to be on the not made. And that’s the whole import of the first part of the Athanasian Creed.
Did you hear how they do it? They say, the Father is uncreated, and the Son and the Spirit. And the Father is infinite, and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Infinite, infinite, infinite. The Father’s eternal, the Son’s eternal, the Holy Spirit’s eternal. So that on this side of the ledger, on the not-made, not-created side, is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But then we have this question, well, then how many beings are on this side of the ledger? And you might be tempted to say, well, there’s three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But the answer is no, one. There is only one being on this side of the uncreated and unmade list. Just God. There’s not three infinites. There’s one infinite. There’s not three eternals. There’s one eternal. There’s not three almightys. There’s one almighty, which means Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three persons, not three beings. There is only one God.
In fact, this is our confession of God. That there is only one God, that the Father is God, that the Son is God, that the Holy Spirit is God, and that the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. And this is so important for confessing this truth.
Now, so on this ledger, God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and on this side everything else. But then the second question is, well, if there’s only one God, and there’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, how do we distinguish between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? This is the second big chunk of the Athanasian Creed. And again, it’s not something that we normally think about. It’s good for us right now to think about it.
In fact, if you want to put your eyes on the text, I’m on page 320 in your hymnals. Because we have to say, now what is the difference between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? Now, the old theologians used to use a Latin phrase that I think is helpful. They would speak of the opera ad extra and opera ad intra. Opera means work. Ad means towards or to. And intra is inside, and extra is outside.
So what are the works of God to the outside? Those are the opera ad extra. And there was a helpful phrase, the opera ad extra indivisive suit, the works of God to the outside are undivided. But the opera ad intra, the works of God towards the inside, are to be distinguished. So that when we’re considering the doctrine of the Trinity, we consider this, that the Father acts or works or is different toward the Son and the Spirit than the Son is to the Father, and the Spirit is to the Father.
Look at how we confess it here. I’m looking at verse 20 of the Athanasian Creed. Now, in fact, let’s compare 20, we’re looking at 20, 21, 22. It says the Father is not made or created. Okay? So over here, you remember, made and created, that’s on this side. The Father’s not there. He’s on this side. But look at verse 21. The Son is neither made nor created. So the Son’s not over there either. The Son’s on this side as well.
Then the Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son, neither made nor created nor begotten. So the Holy Spirit’s not over there. Okay, so neither Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are on that side. They’re both on this side. But here’s the differences. Okay? The Father is not made or created nor begotten. The Father is not begotten. Verse 21, the Son is neither made nor created but begotten of the Father alone.
And the Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son, neither made nor created nor begotten, but proceeding. So what is the difference between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? The answer is that the Father fathers the Son. And what’s the difference between the Father and the Son? That the Son is fathered, or he is sonned by the Father. And that the Spirit spirits from the Father and the Son.
It turns out that those names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are less names but actual titles, but more profound. It’s Father’s Day, so it’s good for us to think about this. That nobody, I mean, we’ll talk about earthly fathers and how it doesn’t count, actually, because nobody, no man on earth is born a father. You become a father when you conceive your first child.
There was a time when I was just plain old Brian, and then I became dad. Some 70 something years ago, I don’t know exactly, but it seems like a while. But this is the point, is that you are not a father, and then you become a father when your first child is begotten. Same for mothers. Same for marriage. You are not born married, but you become a spouse, a husband or a wife.
This is not the way it is with God. We’re tempted to think that if God is Father, that he must have become the Father. But no, he always is eternally Father, so that Jesus has begotten of the Father before all worlds. He is always the one who has begotten the Son. We wouldn’t know if that’s the right way to say it; it’s in eternity. It’s this eternal reality. And the Son is always of the Father, and the same with the Spirit.
In fact, those titles then, Father, we could say, the begetter, and Son, the begotten, and the Spirit is the spirited. So that their titles are speaking of the different works, ad intra, in the work of the Holy Spirit.
Now we say, okay, Pastor, so what? Now, there’s a couple of things that we want to think about. I mean, the first so what is that this is simply how the Lord has taught us to confess who he is. So we don’t get to make up our own ideas about God. Surely no one would have made this up. You can’t get there on your own with your own imagination. I mean, it has to be revealed to us.
And so we have to stick to what the Lord has said to us, how he’s revealed himself to us, and confess what he’s given us to confess. So that’s the first thing. In fact, that’s our worship, is that we can strain our words and our hearts and our imagination to speak of God the way that He teaches us to speak of us.
But not only is this confession of the Holy Trinity true, it’s also wonderful. And not just wonderful like, hey, that’s really fantastic, but wonderful in the sense that it is our salvation. The errors when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity probably fall in two directions. And I want us to consider this because we can see what’s lost.
If you think of it that our confession is that we have one God and three persons, so we have the unity of essence and the plurality of persons, that there’s really two ways that that confession kind of rolls down the hill. One is that you deny the plurality of persons, that you say God is one and supremely and absolutely one, and there is no plurality of persons.
Who does that? The synagogue, Judaism does that? Islam does that. All the kind of enlightenment religions, the kind of deist stuff, they do this. Maybe universalism does this. They say that there’s a, what do they call it, strict monotheism, which is basically denying the plurality of persons.
And when that happens, and you roll down the hill this way, and you have the doctrine that there is one God, but that there are not three persons, then what you’ve lost is the capacity for God to love. Love, remember… Love requires an object. And if there is no object within the eternal nature of God, then God cannot be love. Maybe he can love once creation shows up, but it cannot be who he is.
So when John teaches us to confess that God is love, he’s teaching us that even within the unity of the Godhead, there’s this plurality of persons so that there’s this conversation of love that was there even before creation. And this is what it means when we say that God is love.
Now, let’s say you roll off the hill on the other side. We’ve got the unity of persons and the plurality of, sorry, the unity of essence and the plurality of persons. Let’s say that you deny the unity of essence and you just have the plurality of persons and you roll down the mountain on this side. This is when you get paganism, the idea that there’s tons and tons of gods. This is Hinduism. This is all variations of Eastern religion. This is the old Greek religions, where there were all sorts of gods fighting with each other and Olympus and everything else like this.
And what’s lost there is the idea that God is holy, that he is set apart, that he is pure. I remember learning this in Athens. I was with my pastor Graff, and we were looking at this temple of Hepfestus, and I was asking, if we were wandering around the ancient world and we came across this temple in Athens, and then we went and looked at the temple in Jerusalem, what would the difference be? And he said, the God in Jerusalem is holy. Yes.
So that we must confess the unity of God so that we can confess His holiness, and we must confess the plurality of persons so that we can confess His love. And when you put those two things together, that God is holy and God is loving, then you have the God of the Bible who comes to save us.
If there was no holiness in God, then there would be no justice in His condemning us to suffer eternally. There would be no cause for God to stand on, to claim us guilty. In fact, there would be no hope for any better place. But God is holy and requires holiness of us. But because God is love, he can send the Son to take upon himself our own human nature and the wrath that we deserve from his holiness so that he can save us from our own sins and bring us to eternal life.
This is because God loved the world; he gave his only begotten Son so that we confess the Trinity in unity and the unity in Trinity, that is, we confess God is holy and God is loving, and he is all of these things for us to save us, to deliver us, and to bring us into eternal life.
So dear saints, we stand with the church Catholic, the church of all times and all places, and confess that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that He is all of these things, not only in truth, but in beauty and in the particular beauty of saving us and bringing us out of our corruption and sin and death and into His promise of eternal life.
May God grant us the wisdom of his spirit that we would confess this our lives until at last we see the beauty of the Lord in the splendor of his holiness. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.