You’re sitting in Sunday school, and someone asks how to explain the Trinity. Within seconds, someone mentions ice, water, and steam. Another person brings up an egg—shell, white, and yolk. A third suggests shamrock leaves. We nod along, thinking we’ve captured something profound about God’s nature. But what if these well-meaning illustrations actually lead us away from the truth rather than toward it?

The Trinity stands as Christianity’s most beautiful and bewildering doctrine. Scripture declares with unwavering clarity that “the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). Yet this same Scripture reveals the Father as God, the Son as God, and the Holy Spirit as God (Matt 28:19; John 1:1–3; Acts 5:3–4). God exists as one divine essence shared completely by three distinct persons. Not three gods. Not one person wearing three masks. One God, three persons—forever.

When Analogies Break Down

Our human minds naturally reach for comparisons to make sense of this mystery. The water analogy seems helpful at first glance. Water exists as ice, liquid, and vapor—three forms, same substance. However, this illustration introduces a dangerous error. Water cannot be ice, liquid, and vapor simultaneously in the same place. One form exists at a time, suggesting that God shifts between being Father, Son, and Spirit rather than existing eternally as all three together.

The egg analogy stumbles differently but just as badly. Shell, white, and yolk form parts of a whole, implying each person of the Trinity represents one-third of God. This directly contradicts Jesus’ words: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Christ doesn’t reveal one-third of God—he reveals God completely. Paul confirms that “in him all the fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9).

Even organic analogies fail. Think of a watermelon with its rind, flesh, and seeds, or a banana with its peel and fruit. These require different substances joining together to create unity. God’s unity works the opposite way. The three persons don’t need to be assembled or combined—they share the same undivided being from all eternity.

The Simplicity That Defeats Comparison

Here lies the heart of the problem: God is simple. Not simple as in easy to understand, but simple as in not composed of parts. When Moses declared the Shema—”Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6:4). The text signals not merely numerical unity but absolute, indivisible oneness. This isn’t the oneness of counting (one apple among many) but the oneness of being itself.

The construction in Deut 6:4 emphasizes this radical unity. Yahweh ‘elohenu Yahweh ‘echad—literally “Yahweh our God, Yahweh one.” The repetition of the divine name brackets the confession, declaring that the God who reveals himself as Yahweh is one to the maximum degree possible. There are no parts within God that could be divided, no components that could be separated, no aspects that exist independently of his being.

This biblical witness to divine simplicity runs deeper than we might initially grasp. When Scripture declares God’s attributes—his love, justice, mercy, holiness—it doesn’t describe separate qualities that God possesses like tools in a toolbox. Rather, God is what he has. God doesn’t have love as a characteristic alongside other characteristics. God is love (1 John 4:8). He doesn’t possess justice as one attribute among many. He is justice itself. His mercy isn’t a sentiment he experiences. He is mercy.

James reinforces this truth when he declares that with the “Father of lights” there is “no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas 1:17). The Greek phrase parallage (variation) and trope aposkiasma (shadow of turning) both point to the kind of shifting among the starts that occurs when separate parts move in relation to each other. James denies any such compositional change in God. There are no internal movements, no rearrangements of parts, no development from potency to actuality—because there are no parts to move or develop. God is more stable than the stars. He doesn’t move. Creation revolves around him and when we speak of “change” with God, it is because our relationship with God has changed or a new part of God’s eternal plan has begun.

This simplicity explains why God can be fully present in each person of the Trinity without division. The Father doesn’t possess part of the divine essence while the Son possesses another part. Each person is the fullness of God—not three parts forming a whole, but three persons sharing completely in the one indivisible divine nature. When Jesus declares, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), he speaks of this essential unity that cannot be divided or distributed. Jesus states, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me” in John 14:11. He also references this concept in Jn 14:10, saying, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?” These verses highlight the unity and interconnectedness or perichoresis between the Son and the Father. 

This simplicity means any comparison drawn from creation will inevitably mislead. Created things are composed, divided, changeable. We are what we are by possessing various parts and attributes that could theoretically exist separately. Remove our rationality, and something remains. Remove our emotions, and we continue existing. But God is not an assemblage of distinct elements. Remove any so-called “attribute” from God, and God ceases to be God—because God is his attributes rather than having them.

When we try to explain the infinite through the finite, we end up shrinking God down to something manageable rather than lifting our minds up to something magnificent. The God who is one in the absolute sense cannot be captured by analogies drawn from the composed, divided world of creatures.

Remembering Ancient Wisdom

This warning against analogies isn’t new. The church’s greatest teachers have consistently urged caution. Thomas Aquinas recognized that while analogies might protect certain truths, they inevitably fail because God’s being is wholly unlike created being. Since God’s essence is simple and uncreated, all comparisons drawn from creatures must acknowledge God as the original and creation as the pale copy.

John Calvin spoke even more forcefully, rebuking speculative illustrations and urging believers to “think more of what God is than of what he is like.” Calvin insisted that biblical revelation, not philosophical analogy, must measure all teaching about the Trinity. Herman Bavinck called many common analogies “dangerous” because they tend to “either divide the essence or confuse the persons.” Since God’s being is simple, infinite, and personal, only God’s concrete revelation in Christ and the Spirit leads to right understanding.

The Better Path

Does this mean we should never use illustrations when teaching about the Trinity? Not necessarily. But we must use them with extraordinary care, always emphasizing their limitations and returning quickly to Scripture’s own language.

The safer path involves confessing what Scripture reveals rather than explaining what Scripture doesn’t attempt to explain. We proclaim with the apostles that there is “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:6), while also baptizing “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19).

This approach requires intellectual humility. We resist the urge to make God comprehensible and instead allow God to remain incomprehensible—not because he is unknowable, but because he is infinitely greater than our finite minds can grasp. We know him truly through his self-revelation, but we never know him exhaustively.

Worship Over Understanding

The Trinity calls us not primarily to understanding but to worship. When we encounter this mystery, our proper response isn’t to solve it but to confess it, not to explain it but to adore it. The God who saves us is the God who exists in perfect community within himself—Father loving Son, Son glorifying Father, Spirit proceeding from both in eternal harmony.

This God doesn’t need us, yet chooses us. This God lacks nothing, yet gives everything. This God is complete in himself, yet includes us in his divine life through union with Christ. The mystery of the Trinity isn’t a puzzle to be solved but a reality to be received, not a problem to be fixed but a Person to be loved.

The church’s task remains beautifully simple: speak where Scripture speaks, confess what Christ reveals, and trust that the mystery we proclaim is the God we worship. For “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5)—a truth too glorious for analogies, too wonderful for comparison, too precious to risk diminishing through human illustration.

The doctrine of the Trinity stands at the center of Christian faith because it reveals who God is in himself and how he has acted for our salvation. Scripture bears united witness that there is one God in essence (Deut 6:4; Isa 45:5), yet three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who are each fully and eternally God (Matt 28:19; John 1:1–3; Acts 5:3–4). These persons are not parts of God, nor three separate beings, but each is the whole God, sharing the one divine essence without division or diminution (John 10:30; Col 2:9).

The mystery of the Trinity cannot be captured by the analogies of human imagination. Created comparisons either divide the divine essence, confuse the persons, or reduce the eternal relations to mere temporal manifestations. The church fathers, medieval scholastics, Reformers, and modern theologians alike have testified that God is to be confessed as he has revealed himself, not as we might imagine him to be. The unity of God is absolute; his essence is simple, indivisible, and infinite. The distinctions among the persons are real, eternal, and without hierarchy of deity.

The church proclaims with the apostles: “To us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor 8:6), and confesses “one Spirit… one Lord… one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4–6). The baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19 is not a metaphor or a model, but the very name of God in which the church lives, prays, and hopes.

Thus, the church must guard against the temptation to explain away mystery by reducing God to the measure of the creature. Instead, we receive with faith the biblical truth: the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God; yet there are not three gods, but one God, blessed forever (Rom 9:5). We adore the Trinity in unity and the unity in Trinity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance, for “from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Rom 11:36).