R.C. Sproul

Or the difficult is to be interpreted in light of that which is plain and clear.

Because that's basically the difference between that which is explicit and that which is implicit.

An explicit statement is one that is made forthrightly, directly, and clearly.

It's what the scriptures actually say.

something that is implicit is not stated directly, but rather is implied.

We must use our rational powers of deduction to draw inferences from the text in order to find the implications of a given passage.

Now, I want to be careful here because I don't want to be misunderstood at this point as if I were saying that we ought never to draw implications from the scripture, God forbid.

No, it's very important and at times necessary for us

to draw inferences from the Scripture that are perfectly reasonable and indeed necessary.

Maybe you've even heard people say that the Bible doesn't teach the doctrine of the Trinity.

And then they point out that nowhere in the New Testament does the word Trinity appear.

That's true.

But that doesn't mean that the concept of the Trinity is nowhere to be found in the Bible.

The Bible teaches clearly and explicitly that God is one.

There's the unity part of Trinity, which means triunity.

But it also teaches us clearly that Jesus

is somehow God incarnate, that the Holy Spirit is divine, and that the Father is divine.

So the church had to develop a doctrine that would make sense out of these different nuances, that God is one and yet at the same time there's diversity within God.

And so the concept comes by necessary inference from the scripture that there is a trinity, but the word is nowhere to be found.

The problem comes