Teaching the Trinity to Students
This article is an excerpt from Lead Them to Jesus: A Handbook for Youth Workers (New Growth Press, 2021).
The youth group was painting Alice’s house as a service project. She was an older woman with a spitfire personality. She immediately clicked with a number of our students—and with me. Over the course of the following year, we had many conversations about faith and theology, but we regularly seemed to return to her questions and hesitations about the Trinity. She simply could not accept that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one. Finally, I told her, “Alice, if you do not believe that God is the Trinity, then you are not a Christian.”
This might seem like an overstatement, but it’s not. How can anyone consider herself a Christian if she doesn’t know who God is? That was the last conversation about the Trinity we had for quite a few months. One Sunday after the benediction, she approached me with a smile across her face and declared, “I get it. Karl helped me understand. Thank you for helping me see how important it is to believe God is the Trinity, three in one.”
Few areas of Christian theology are more mysterious, or more important, than the Trinity. The most important differences between the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—can be traced back to the Trinity, for it is God the Son who came to save sinners and the Holy Spirit who adopts and unites the Christian with God. If someone understands the Trinity, they have a basic understanding of the most important Christian teachings. It reveals to us who God is (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), what he is like (holy, eternal, sovereign), how he deals with humanity (as Creator, Savior, Advocate, Judge), and what he expects of us (to love and honor one another the way each person of the Trinity loves and honors the others). If a student claims to be a Christian but does not believe in the Trinity, they don’t believe in the Jesus of the Bible whom Christians have worshiped for two millennia.
Statements like these can be difficult, especially for youth workers who are ministering to teenagers. Mature adults have a difficult time understanding the Trinity, and it doesn’t seem fair to expect teenagers to tackle this most complex of doctrines. Patiently teaching good theology to students, however, makes a significant impact because it shapes their view of God. Don’t underestimate what teenagers (yes, even middle school boys) are able to comprehend. The nature of the Trinity is mysterious and beyond our full understanding. This is actually a good thing, because a god whose nature easily makes sense to the human brain must be a pretty small god. God’s holiness means that he is “separate” and different from us. But because he is not hiding himself from us, God has revealed enough of his nature to us through the Holy Scriptures for us to understand the following explanation of the Trinity.
The doctrine of the Trinity states that God exists as one God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. Each person of the Trinity is equally and fully God, distinct from the others, and yet they remain just one God. The Bible teaches the Trinity beginning with the days of creation. It tells how God spoke, how his Word was the agent of creation, and how the Spirit hovered over the waters (also consider how John 1:1–18 interprets Genesis 1). Then it tells how God spoke in plural, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26), at the creation of humanity. Later, Jesus commands his disciples to baptize new believers “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Although the word Trinity never appears, the teaching that God is one in three is consistent throughout Scripture, and the New Testament is particularly clear about the divine nature of the three persons.
Three Core Elements of the Trinity
Equal. The Father is not greater than the Son and the Spirit, nor is any person lesser than any other. God the Son’s label of Son does not mean he is inferior to the Father, but portrays his role in salvation as the one who is sent by the Father as a Son who represents his family. Similarly, the Holy Spirit is not simply an errand-runner for the Father and Son, but is equal in glory and is worthy of worship. None of the persons were ever created but are equal in honor and eternality. This perfect equality and unity is why Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
Distinct. Some distinct roles of the Trinity are on display in Ephesians 1:3–14. God the Father “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (v. 4). The Christian is “in Christ,” and God the Son is the one who did the work to accomplish our salvation (vv. 5, 9). And God the Holy Spirit is the one who secures our salvation like a seal that marks a document as something authoritative and legitimate (vv. 13–14). Each person of the Trinity has a particular role, and yet they work in perfect cooperation because they are one.
United. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God. The persons of the Trinity do not act in isolation from the others, as if they “go rogue.” Instead, they are united as the perfect community from whom we understand what it means to love and honor one another. In John 17:20–26, Jesus’s prayer for Christian unity directly flows from his own understanding of the Trinity’s communion.
Breaking Down the Bad Analogies
There is no perfect analogy to help explain the Trinity. The following analogies are common ways people attempt to teach the Trinity to children. Accordingly, it is important for youth workers to know how to correct the ways these misrepresent our triune God.
Egg. This analogy equates the Trinity with the shell, the yolk, and the egg whites all composing one egg. A variation of this uses an apple (the skin, the meat, and the seeds). But this is not like the Trinity, because each component of the egg or apple cannot be said to be an egg. Besides, one usually cracks an egg and discards the shell as useless. And the components of an egg can be separated and are not equal in value.
Water. This analogy compares the Trinity to steam, ice, and water. The Trinity, however, is simultaneously three in one, while a molecule of H2O must be either water, steam, or ice. Other variations of this emphasize a person’s relationships—a man might be a son, a husband, and a father—to express three different types of relationships flowing from the same person. This analogy reflects one of the oldest heresies: that God the Father turned into God the Son who later turned into the Holy Spirit. God is a unity of three persons, not one person with three expressions.
Shamrock. Saint Patrick is the famous originator of this analogy. He used the three leaves of the shamrock to point to the three persons of the Trinity, but this also falls short for the same reason as the egg and apple: each leaf is a component of a shamrock, not fully a shamrock.
The following diagram, dating from the Middle Ages, is a simple (and easy to draw) way to explain the Trinity to students. It highlights that the three persons of the Trinity are equal and united within the Godhead, yet remain distinct from one another.
Excerpted from Lead Them to Jesus © 2021 by Mike McGarry. Used by permission of New Growth Press. May not be reproduced without prior written permission. To purchase this and other helpful resources, please visit newgrowthpress.com.
