(Grace
Notes August/September 2004)
What follows is a further adapted extract from Bishop Lewis
Bayly’s book ‘The Practice of Piety’, a best seller in the Puritan
era. It was published many times and in various languages, including French,
Welsh, and Hungarian. Lewis Bayly was born in Camarthen and was a minister
of the gospel in Evesham and London before being made Bishop of Bangor. He
died in 1631.
Although no creature can define what God is because he is
incomprehensible and dwells in inaccessible light, yet it has pleased him to
reveal himself in his Word to us, so far as our weak capacity can best
conceive him. So we can say that God is that one spiritual and infinitely
perfect essence, whose being is of himself eternally.
In the divine essence there are three divine persons, the Father, the Son
and the Holy Spirit. In the unity of the Godhead there is a plurality which
is not accidental, nor essential, but personal. The divine essence in itself
is neither divided nor distinguished, but the three persons in the divine
essence are distinguished among themselves in three ways: by their names, by
their order, and by their actions
1. By their names
- The first Person is named the Father; first, in respect of his ‘natural’
son, Christ; secondly, in respect of the elect, his adopted sons, that is
those who, being not his sons by nature, are made his sons by grace.
- The second Person is named the Son, because he is begotten of his
Father's substance and he is called the Word: firstly, because the
conception of a word in man's mind is the nearest thing that, in some
sort, can shadow to us how he is eternally begotten of his Father's
substance; secondly, because by him the Father has from the beginning
declared his will for our salvation; and thirdly, because he is the
chief argument of all the Word of God.
- The third Person is named the Holy Spirit firstly because he is
spiritual without a body; secondly, because he is as it were breathed
from both the Father and the Son, that is, he proceeds from them both;
and he is called Holy, both because he is holy in his own nature, and
also the immediate sanctifier of all God's elect people.
2. By their order
The Father is the first Person in the glorious Trinity, having neither
his being nor his beginning of any other but of himself; begetting his Son,
and together with his Son sending forth the Holy Spirit from everlasting.
The Son is the second Person of the glorious Trinity, and the only begotten
Son of his Father, not by grace, but by nature; having the whole being of
his Father by an eternal and incomprehensible generation; and with the
Father he sends forth the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the third Person
of the blessed Trinity, proceeding and sent forth equally from both the
Father and the Son. This order between the three persons appears in that the
Father begetting must in order be before the Son begotten; and the Father
and Son before the Holy Spirit who proceeds from both.
This divine order or economy excepted, there is neither first nor last,
neither superiority nor inferiority, among the three persons. In nature they
are co-essential, in dignity co-equal, in time co-eternal. The whole divine
essence is in every one of the three persons; but it was incarnated only in
the second person of the Word, and not in the person of the Father, or of
the Holy Spirit. This is for three reasons:
- Firstly, that God the Father might set forth the greatness of his love
to mankind, in giving his first and only-begotten Son to be incarnated,
and to suffer death for man's salvation.
- Secondly, that he who was in his divinity the Son of God, should be in
his humanity the Son of man: lest the name of Son should pass to
another, who by his eternal nativity was not the Son.
- Thirdly, because it was most fitting that that person, who is the
substantial image of his eternal Father, should restore in us the
spiritual image of God, which we had lost. In the incarnation, the
Godhead was not turned into the manhood, nor the manhood into the
Godhead; but the Godhead, as it is the second person or Word, assumed
unto it the manhood, that is, the whole nature of man, body and soul;
and all the natural properties and infirmities thereof, except sin.
The second person took not upon him the person of man, but the nature of
man. So the human nature has no personal subsistence of its own (for then
there should be two persons in Christ), but it subsists in the Word, the
second person. The two natures of the Godhead and manhood are so really
united by a personal union that they can never be separated, but remain
still distinguished by their several and essential properties which they had
before they were united. For example, the infiniteness of the divine is not
communicated to the human nature, nor the finiteness of the human to the
divine nature.
3. By their actions
The creation of the world peculiarly belongs to God the Father, the
redemption of the church to God the Son and the sanctification of the elect
to God the Holy Spirit.
He who is the Father in the Trinity is not the Son; he who is the Son in
the Trinity is not the Father; he who is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity is
neither the Son nor the Father, but the Spirit proceeding from both; though
there is but one and the same essence common to all three. As therefore we
believe that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God,
so we likewise believe that God is the Father, God is the Son, and God is
the Holy Spirit. But by reason of this real distinction, the person of the
one is not, nor ever can be, the person of the other.
Hence it is that the Scriptures use the name of God in two ways: either
essentially, when it signifies the three persons conjointly; or personally,
when by a synecdoche it signifies but one of the three persons in the
Godhead; as the Father (1 Timothy 2. 5), or the Son (Acts 20:28;1 Timothy
3:16), or the Holy Spirit (Acts 5. 4; 2 Corinthians 6:16).
And because the divine essence (common to all the three persons) is but
one, we call the same Unity. But because there are three distinct persons in
this one indivisible essence, we call the same Trinity. So that this unity
in trinity, and trinity in unity, is a holy mystery, rather to be
religiously adored by faith, than curiously searched by reason, further than
God has revealed in his Word.
