The Eternality of The Heavenly Trio
Greetings brethren, I would like to say that I will be quoting non-adventist and Adventist authors for this document just to bring to your attention what they and we believe on eternality of the Heavenly Trio and divinity. In the article we shall look at the eternality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. May God bless you as you read. Things could be said and written in a better language and where possible, your critique is welcomed.
Of The Divinity/Deity
First we have to get some things straight before we venture on this road. By eternity:
- An infinite duration which never had a beginning and will never have an end. But there are several texts in scripture wherein the words eternal and everlasting are to be understood in a more limited signification. For
- (Clarke’s Sermons, Volume I.) sometimes they signify no more than things of a long continuance or duration. This indeed is the lowest sense of the words, and in this sense it is that the hills and the mountains are called
- Hab 3:6 everlasting, merely because they are strong, and as permanent as the frame and constitution of the earth. Sometimes they denote a duration continuing as long as the subject exists, and then putting it into a state out of which it shall never be restored, even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them are set for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire, i.e. of such a fire as irrecoverably destroyed these wicked cities, and ended in their final or eternal overthrow. At other times they signify, in an higher sense, a duration not figuratively, but properly and literally everlasting, without end though not without beginning; for thus angels and the saints are eternal and will be immortal, and the happiness they enjoy in heaven is everlasting life, and endless and eternal weight of glory. But the last and highest, and most absolutely perfect sense of the words is when they signify:
- A duration of inexhaustible and never-failing permanency, both without beginning or and without end; and not only so, but including likewise necessary and independent existence must always unalterably be the same; since, having no other cause of its existence but the absolute necessity of its own nature, it must of necessity have existed from everlasting without beginning, and must of necessity exist to everlasting without end.
- (Clarke, ibid.) Since God then is a being that never depended on any, what should make him cease to be what he has been to all eternity, or put any stop to his own perfections? He cannot desire his own destruction; that is against the universal nature of all things to cease from being if they can exist. He cannot desert his own being, because he cannot but love himself as the best and chiefest good. There is nothing in his nature that can introduce any decay, because he is infinitely simple without any mixture. There is nothing without that can control or circumvent him, because of his infinite power and wisdom; and as he has no original of his existence, but his very being is inseparable from his nature, so he ever was and ever must be.
- (Charnock on the Being and Attributes of God.) To be, we must allow, is some degree of perfection, and therefore it is evident that, when we conceive of God as the most perfect being, we must conceive him to be infinite in this perfection also, as well as in others; and that as his power is not bounded by any opposite strength, nor his immensity terminated by any bounds of place, so neither is his duration limited by any periods of time, but that he exists, and lives, and governs all things from everlasting to everlasting.
- (Edwards, ibid.) The ancient Egyptians represented God by a circle, which is without beginning and end: the ancient Romans built round temples to their gods to signify the same thing; and, to remind his disciples of the like doctrine, it was an injunction of Pythagoras, that in their worship of God they should always move in a circular motion. Though therefore their poets might talk of the birth and genealogy of their gods,
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