Here is a trick question: How many colours does your television set use?
Answer: Just three: red, green and blue. And in that order, just like a rainbow (where reds are at one side, blues at the opposite side, green in the middle). This is known as “RGB”.
These are TV’s three primary colours which, when their luminescence is fired at your eyes, give all the colours of the visible spectrum. These are all ‘additive’ colours. In fact, mix these three together in different proportions, and your screen can offer you 16 million colours.
You thought the sequence was red/yellow/blue? No, that’s for painted or printed colours. A TV set positively gives out light in three different colours, whereas paint daubed on paper absorbs and removes some colours, to reflect back merely a small part of the light falling on it the colour that you see.
You’ll soon call out the repair man if your television loses one of its three colours and all the presenters look as though they came from Mars. But change the intensity of any one colour (red, green or blue) even slightly and you change the overall colour.
Switch them all off, and you are left with black. Let all three of them shine at full brightness, at the same point – and then as if by magic you have a totally different colour: WHITE!
It’s a parable which illustrates the Holy Trinity. Three completely distinct persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), just as your TV set has three quite separate colours: red, green, blue.
Take away any One member of the Trinity, and you slip into theological error; take away any one of the three colours, and you call out the TV repair engineer!
So –
It DOES matter that God is our Creator and Father – otherwise our whole life is merely a meaningless illusion.
It DOES matter that Jesus is God the Son, for otherwise His death is simply a human tragedy, with no promise of salvation or eternal life.
It DOES matter that the Holy Spirit is with us here and now, otherwise we are disconnected from God.
Yes it really does matter! Just as it is essential that a TV set can produce white by the equal intensity of all of its three colours. In fact, the more you think about it, the more it seems that the doctrine of the Trinity is far from being a complicated bit of theological nonsense, but is a sort of theological test-card, to make sure that we’ve got the right picture of God, without distortion.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay