Why It Makes Sense That the Trinity Doesn't Make Sense

The Trinity can be defined as follows: “God eternally exists as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and each person is fully God, and there is one God” (Grudem 226). In other words, as the common person would understand it, the Trinity is simply that God is both One and Three. It is that He is One God, but that He is made up of Three persons. He is Three in One, and One in Three. All Three are One, and that One is Three. And yes, it is indeed confusing. The Trinity is a matter that the mind cannot comprehend, just as much as the heavens baffle our eyes. It is as crazy as the fact that there are a million million million galaxies consisting of a trillion trillion trillion stars. It is simply beyond us. But many dismiss the Trinity for just this reason. We don't get it. We don't understand. It doesn't make sense. Yet the difference between how the Trinity doesn't make sense and how that there be such a thing as a billion solar systems doesn't make sense, is simply the fact that we think it should. We say the Trinity should make sense even as we say it should make sense like everything should.
Oh, how arrogant are we! Does anything even make sense to us? Is not the essence of fire, of lightening, of electricity but still nonsense to us? Are they not as fantastic as anything? We don't know what they are. We have simply placed names on the unknown. Far from being called the “natural” a more accurate term would be the “magical.” For it seems no less than magic that water should evaporate into air and assimilate into clouds. It is but a wonder of the imagination that there be such a thing as rain in the first place. Or clouds, or air, or sand, or mountains, or the hummingbird, or the dragonfly, or the lightening bug, or the giraffe. Is not this whole world but a sight too wonderful for us even with the grandest of imaginations! Yet we walk about it as if we understood it all. As if we understood how a seed could grow into a 330 foot-tall tree. Or how a small egg could hatch a 20-foot long crocodile. Or why they should even! We gaze at the ocean with little mystery. We watch the ant hold twenty times its weight- hanging upside down. We don't even think twice when a host of fruit flies springs from the bananas on our kitchen table. And everyday we see birds defy gravity. Yet we dismiss it all as if it couldn't be any way else. We are like the person who after living in a cave his whole life walks outside and simply nods his head as if everything is just as he supposed.
It is not the world around us that ceases to be amazing, it is us that cease to be amazed. It is the difference between how the child sees a butterfly and how an adult sees one. It is not that the butterfly is any less wonderful, but the adult who is that much more jaded. We lose our sense of imagination because we forget that everything around us is no less wonderful than a child's bed-time story. The fact that daisies are and that sun-rises exist, that there is such a thing as a rainbow or a tornado or a volcano or porcupines or rhinoceroses or blowfish or chameleons or penguins or seahorses or ostriches or kangaroos or manatees or meerkats or (most strange enough) people! ought to make us wonder what fantasy book we're all really living in. The reality of what is around us is more dreamlike than reality. And probably more absurd than even our dreams! No one could dream up a hippopotamus... We are all fans of magic, because we love to wonder, yet it would be good for us to take a second glance about us. We live in the greatest magic trick that could ever be.
Therefore, let us not question the unfathomable Godhead. Let us not pretend that we can -or ever could- wrap our minds around the Three Persons of the Trinity as but one Unity. We can't even grasp why ice, rain, and vapor should all be the same water. It is just as it should be that we shake our heads and shrug our shoulders when we are asked to explain the Trinity. For what more can we tell of the Trinity than we can of why a fish can breathe in water? Or why our laptops can pick up wireless Internet? So let us rest in the Word of God when we speak of the Trinity, not our reason. Let us listen to the Great Magician, the One who created all things out of nothing. Let us come before Him as children filled with wonder for we are in a world sprung from His imagination. With Him all things are possible.