Matthew 3:13–4:11 Baptism of Jesus and Temptations of Christ (Bible Study with Hank Hanegraaff)

Hank Hanegraaff, the host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast, explains that in Christ’s Baptism we have a poignant picture of the Trinity—the Triadic One. One God revealed in three co-equal and co-eternal persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and those three persons are eternally distinct. A Muslim must commit to belief in a unitarian God, but the unitarian Allah of Islam, by definition, lacks the moral perfection of love and, thus, on the basis of logic, is morally defective. This is so because for God to be a perfect being, he must of necessity also be a loving being (1 John 4: 8). This implies that there is someone to love. But there has not always been someone to love, because in accordance with modern cosmology, the universe and the persons that inhabit it came into being a finite time ago. Thus, independent of creation, the unitarian Allah would not have had an object on which to lavish love. While moral imperfections apply to the unitarian Allah, they do not likewise apply to the trinitarian God. Why? Because though the biblical God is a single being, there are subject-object distinctions within the Godhead. And the three centers of consciousness within the one true God have loved one another from all eternity. A trinitarian God exists in an eternal love relationship—the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, the Father and the Son love the Holy Spirit. Eternal love relationships. And part of the great message of salvation, indeed, the quintessence of that message is that you and I are brought into the loving fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the loving fellowship of the Son, the loving fellowship of the Father—the fellowship of the Triadic One! Hank also begins to discuss Matthew 4. After His baptism, Christ was tested by the devil in the wilderness.

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