-Looking at the Nicene Creed in celebration of it’s 1,701^st birthday. But each week, we’re also looking at a different creed to see why we need to have creeds. I’m guessing you’ve seen this one before, there’s a house in my neighborhood that has it up:

Let’s think about what this is saying:

-Black lives matters. I agree! As the nursery rhyme that I still sing to my kids says: Jesus loves the little children of the world, red and yellow, black and white. But, we have to differentiate between this statement the organization Black Lives Matter. BLM as an organization has some major disagreements with Christian faith, but we as Christians can affirm that black lives do indeed matter! 

-Science is real: science is merely observation, this is as helpful as saying “science says…” science doesn’t “say” anything, scienTISTS can say things as they interpret data and observations.

-Love is love: we talked about that one last week.

-Kindness is everything: have you looked at gas prices? I can’t use kindness to fill up my tank! It’s a ridiculous platitude that’s meant to give warm fuzzies but doesn’t mean anything!

-And Christians can be guilty of doing the same thing: I’m “pan” millennial, we’ll see how it all “pans” out, I’m as Calvinist as the Bible says and as Arminian as the Bible says. Study these issues! Those are an excuse to be lazy, and God doesn’t call people to laziness! Friends, this is why we need creeds in our lives to help protect us from laziness or theological drift. A friend sent me this yard sign that if anyone wants to buy for me I will gladly stick in my front yard:

-I’m going to ask you to stand for the reading of God’s Word, but we’re going to do something a little bit different, I’m just going to read them to you and ask you to listen and not follow along in your Bibles quite yet because I want to read the primary texts that get to what we’re studying today.

–Gen. 1:1-2; Luke 1:26-35, 4:1, 14-15, John 14:15-26, 16:12-15

1. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed

-Technically, the creed we’ve been studying is referred to this way instead of just the Nicene Creed, because there are 2 editions of this. I shared at the beginning of this series that we’re celebrating 1700 years since this was written, but that’s only partially true. The conversation continued over the next decades, so in 381 they landed on the finalized version of the Nicene Creed that continues to be used through today.

-Now before we look at the biggest difference, I want to remind us where we’re starting and the reason this Creed even exists. God is the creator of everything, but there’s a hard line between God and creation, you’ve seen this each week. Arius worked hard to emphasize the one-ness of God and thus argued that Jesus has to go below the line. He argued that since Jesus was “begotten” then there had to have been a time when He was not. But the council, tracing what the Bible said, disagreed with that argument and said that Jesus Himself claimed to be one with the Father, therefore Jesus is above the line.

-The next question they had to work through gets us back to the beginning of last week’s section, where it said that Jesus’s work was “for us and for our salvation.” How do we bridge this divide? History traces humanity’s attempts at building a ladder to try to get up there, most specifically seen at Babel where humans did their best to reach the realm of the gods (in the heavens above), but despite humanity’s attempts, there is nothing that can bridge this gap. God exists completely outside of His creation, we can’t do anything to get up to Him, which means He has to come down to us, which just so happens to be the story we see in the Bible! Out of the overflow of God’s inner love comes the physical created world that is created to love God and love each other. But how can we be brought into that Trinitarian love? That’s where we need the Holy Spirit living in us, which the 325 edition of this creed didn’t articulate very much, here’s the comparison:

-The first edition made a basic statement that didn’t give much clarity, which meant guess which debate came next? Yeah, people trying to argue that the Holy Spirit was less than God. There was a group that called themselves the Pneumatomachi (side note, but if you’re going to create a heretical cult, this is a great name to use) which is Greek for “Spirit-fighters.” Just as Arius denied that Jesus was fully God, this group denied that the Holy Spirit was fully God, proposed by a guy name Macedonius. So how did the church respond? They convened another council to re-articulate and defend what the Bible says by fleshing out what they meant when they said “and in the Holy Spirit” previously.

-This takes place all the time, like you know how policies and laws always get created in response to something happening? That’s exactly what’s taking place here. At a previous church I was at, there was a policy in the wedding manual (but nowhere else) that banned Dungeons and Dragons, which means it could be played anytime EXCEPT when a wedding is going on! I would have LOVED to have known what happened that led to the banning of a board game because you know it was in response to some funny story!

-1 other big difference between these 2 editions is what is included after the section on the Holy Spirit: 

-This was removed in the 381 version because they wanted to use it as devotional and liturgical statement to be used in the church and by Christians.

-hypostasis and ousia are used as synonyms here (untranslated to be able to see what exactly is being said) and ensuring that Arius couldn’t use his preferred word and get away with it. Hypostatis refers to personhood or being, and ousia is the same thing (at this time). Eventually, hypostatis is the preferred term in referring to the persons of the Trinity, so what we looked at last week is what theologians call “the hypostatic union,” Jesus having 2 natures but 1 Being or essence. And if you’re already confused, then use that confusion to marvel at our God whose ways and thoughts are above anything we can ever imagine!

-So now let’s all recite the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed together again (and I hope some of you are taking the time to memorize it throughout the week! There are papers at the tables on your way out if you haven’t gotten one yet!)

-This last phrase I’m breaking up into 2 weeks, this week we’ll just look at the Holy Spirit, next week we’ll look at where He’s at work: in the church. 

• The Life-Giver

-I intentionally pulled this word out even though it’s not the first word used to describe him because I love this summary of the Spirit’s work, and the Greek is 1 compound word “life-giver.” Have you ever thought of the Sprit as the one who gives life? We read Gen. 1 earlier which explicitly mentions the Spirit being involved in creation. We know from other passages in the NT that the Son is also involved in creation, so we see from the beginning the Trinitarian nature of God.

-This is intentionally mean to contrast with the dead. Think of what Rom. 8:11 says: the Holy Spirit’s role in salvation is literally to bring us from death to life spiritually. 

-And we also see the role of the Spirit in the act of creation twice. First in the verses we read earlier where the Spirit is involved in bringing life to the primordial chaos, but then we see His work implied when the text focuses on the creation of humans in Gen. 2: notice that it’s not until the man is giving breath that he becomes a living being, so the Spirit’s role is to give life.

-We read these verses earlier, too, but that theme comes up again in the new creation of Jesus inside Mary’s womb. Look at how both Luke and Matthew describe what happened.

-Back to the creed: the Lord, the same as Jesus, pointing to unity between Son & Spirit

-The ordering is both biblical & logical. We started with the Father, then talked about the Son, and now we’re getting to the Holy Spirit, and that’s the reason we refer to them as the first, second, and third persons of the Godhead. It’s not significance, it’s the way God reveals Himself to us. 

-What is “proceeds”? Another word theologians will use in reference to the Spirit is the word “spiration” which just means breath.

-They’re trying to answer the question: how do we talk about the distinctions within the godhead? How do we determine the difference between the Son & the Spirit? Last week we looked at the word “begotten” in relation to Son seen from John 3:16, proceeds is the word chosen to refer to the Spirit’s relation because of John 15:26 (remember, they’re working to define how the Bible reveals God to us) so we see that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, while the Son is begotten from the Father.

-we’ll talk about the part in brackets as the third point, so hold onto that

-The theme in this next section is the Greek word syn being used repeatedly in this section, it means “with” or “together.”

-a literal way of trying to translate this idea would make zero sense in English in most cases, but it appears 3 times: “with”, “co-worshipped” and “co-glorified” attempting to signify that we worship God as Father, Son, and Spirit.

-Something I’ve been mulling over for a few years that comes out of this: do we pray to the Spirit? And I at times struggle to land on some of this discussion because there’s so many excesses of conversation that we need to avoid, but that doesn’t mean we should stop thinking, studying, or learning about the HS, but if the HS is God, then shouldn’t we also pray to Him? 

-I also think emphasis matters, because the primary focus throughout Scripture is on the Father (think of the Lord’s Prayer, how does it begin?), the second emphasis is on the Son, and the third emphasis is on the Spirit, which means if we’re following the Bible our addressing of God should follow a similar pattern where we direct our prayers to our Father, addressing him through the Son, and we do so in the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit. And even the work of the HS is meant to focus our minds in a specific direction: towards Jesus.

-I love what Charles Spurgeon said about this idea in one of his devotionals: Friends, part of the reason we struggle with sin is because we’re too busy looking at our sin or at ourselves instead of looking to Christ! Ask the Holy Spirit to focus your eyes on Jesus instead of yourself! 
-As always, because we’re in the realm of God, there’s more that could be said, but we don’t have time to dig into it today! I have plenty of books for you if you want to borrow them!

-The last phrase on the Holy Spirit gets to the realm of speaking. Have you ever considered the reality that our God speaks? And not just that God speaks, but sometimes God speaks through people! Where it says the prophets here, just replace it with “the Bible.” Anytime we see the Spirit speaking it’s going to drive us back to the Bible, and we see examples of that throughout Scripture:

-Look at what David says in 2 Sam. 23:2. Who is that spoke through David? The Spirit!

-Look how the author of Hebrews refers to the OT in 3:7. He’s quoting Psalm 95 there, but who does it say was speaking in Psalm 95? The HS!

-But it’s not just the OT the whole Bible is inspired by the same Spirit! 2 Tim. 3:16-17 tells us that ALL Scripture is “inspired by God” is trying to translate another compound Greek word made up of God + breath/Spirit, some translations have “God-breathed”, again inspired by the Spirit, and notice the goal of this inspiration: for us to be complete and ready for every good work (which comes about through the Spirit working in us)

-The last example of the Spirit speaking through Scripture: 2 Peter 1:21. I love the picture Peter paints here! “carried along” God working in them, but not leaving them off the hook, all this comes because the third person of the Trinity lives within us in some mysterious way through faith.

-Not let’s get into the most debated phrase of this whole thing: 

• Filioque

-If you don’t know Latin, this word is Latin for “and the Son.”

-Let’s go back to the verse for the wording of this creed “proceeds” in John 15:26

-It sure looks like the Son is somehow involved in this process, right? And there’s other passages like John 14:16, once again Jesus is involved in the sending of the Spirit, even if the Spirit doesn’t “proceed” from the Son.

-The biggest debate about this whole creed is whether or not to include “and the Son” of for the procession of the HS. This is pointed to as the reason for the split of the church between the east and the west. The phrase wasn’t added to the creed until 589 (200 years later), at a Western council in Toledo, Spain

-And this wasn’t a trivial matter! One of the eastern bishops named Photius wrote in 866 (pardon the French): do you see how strongly he’s condemning the phrase?

-And he has a point! Notice the word ecumenical, we tend to view that word with at least skepticism today, if not outright dismissal as someone who pursues just the lowest common denominator in theology instead of taking a stance, in this case view it positively as something the whole church together affirms.

-We’re Western Christians, we’re products of affirming that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, but is that the best way to describe their relationship?

-Some terms theologians use to help us understand are in Latin: one refers to the mysterious inner workings of the Trinity that we can’t fully understand, the other refers to the external workings of the Trinity (and if you go digging into this further you’ll find that theologians will also refer to this distinction as the economic or the immanent Trinity, economic as the external workings, immanent as the internal)

-And if you just got more confused: we need a way of distinguishing between the work of God Himself versus the way we experience him in the history of salvation. For example, we can say that God lives in us from the moment we’re saved, but we can’t say the Son lives in us. Similarly we can say that Mary is the mother of God (another early church debate!), but we can’t say that Mary is the mother of the Father. Or one more example, we can say that God died, but we can’t say that the Father died.

-The phrase “and the Son” wasn’t in the original, so it shouldn’t be considered a marker of orthodoxy, but we do have to acknowledge some kind of relationship between the Son and the Spirit. Maximus the Confessor (another great name) said it should be proceeds from the Father through the Son.

-Words matter, definitions of words matter, and God’s revelation matters above all of them! And one of the joys of being a Protestant (that’s another church history issue for another time) is we can look at some of these debates as outside observers who continually go back to the Bible and try to defend what the Bible says. So a couple passages that I think help us get some more glimpses into the Trinity:

–John 16 shows the Spirit obeying Jesus, and says that everything the Father has is also Jesus’s, which you could argue that if the Spirit proceeds from the Father, then He must also proceed from the Son.

-In contrast to that, Mark 1 tells the account of Jesus’s baptism where all 3 persons of the Trinity are glimpsed together, Jesus in the water, the Spirit like a dove, and the Father affirming His Son. But then what happens to Jesus? He obeys the Spirit. And once again, we’re left with a mystery as to how the Godhead works “ad intra” or internally. We experience the Trinity “ad extra” and the Spirit (through the Son) brings us into this loving relationship within the Trinity, but we will never completely understand how this relationship works. And each time we bring up this mystery, we need to fall on our face in worship of this God. 

-I want to end our study on the HS today in John 20. Because of what God has done for us through His Son and in the Spirit living in us, we have peace with God. But the Spirit living in us is also the reason we’re still here in the world. The Spirit living in us is the reason Jesus sends us out into the world to both show the world the love God has for them, and to live holy lives in the world as a picture of what it means to follow Jesus.

-There’s also a note in here about sins, which leads us into the Lord’s Table. The church is the place where we gather each week to remember what’s truly true: that we have been adopted into this family of God that comes from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. This family allows you to have your sins forgiven and together works towards ensuring the purity of Christ’s bride.