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You know getting back to some things we don’t always understand from the Scripture, it’s
just kind of you have to walk by faith no matter what. I am well reminded of the story
– and I believe it was of the church father Augustine – who was writing about the Trinity.
He knew that tension of not going too far and creating this false doctrine or going
too far and getting involved in that false teaching. And so he was really struggling
with writing about the doctrine, the teaching of the Trinity. That is that there is one
God, one God, and yet three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
So he decided to take a walk.
And so as he’s walking he goes down by the ocean, he’s walking on the shore and he
is just contemplating, he’s kind of lost in all of these thoughts. And he wakes up
to what is taking place before him. And there is a little boy that has a wooden pail, and
he’s dug a hole in the sand. He’s made a rather large pit in the sand. And he wakes
up to the little boy taking his wooden pail and running to the ocean, filling the pail
up and coming and dumping it into his hole. Back and forth. Takes the pail, fills it up,
dumps it in the hole. Back and forth and back and forth and finally he [Augustine] says,
“what are you doing, little boy? What’s going on here?”
And the little boy says, “Well, mister. I’m emptying the ocean into my hole.”
Well, he kind of laughed and went on as he walking, he stops and then he writes later…
“That’s what I knew was happening with me. I was trying to take the immensity of
God – everything about God that the scriptures share with us – and put it into my finite
mind in a way in which I could just write about it. God is too big for that.”
And later on he even makes an additional comment: “If, in fact, we understood everything about
God – He wouldn’t be God.”
Everything that we need to know about God for our salvation, and I probably think even
more than that, has been revealed in the Scriptures. There are certain things there, you know,
that we just can’t give a reasonable, plausible, rational explanation. But the Scriptures are
very clear about those truths. One of them being the Trinity: three individual persons
– One God. There will be a time when we will understand. That will be in Heaven. There
will we know perfectly even as we have been perfectly known, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians
13.
Just a thought.