Is "unfold" the right word for how the Father, Son & Spirit reveal themselves to us in the Bible?
I'm pondering this question because it is a word that I've bumped into quite a few times recently in relation to the Bible.
The idea is that the revelation of the Trinity - and especially the person and work of the divine Messiah - is deposited as a tightly folded up piece of paper that cannot be read or understood. Then, what "God" is doing from Genesis to Malachi is unfolding that folded up paper so that slowly more and more of its contents can be read & understood... until finally Jesus arrives and now the paper is flattened out and turned over so it is easy to read.
The idea seems to be that the one LORD God who is the Most High, His Angel and His Spirit, is very slowly (over at least a couple of thousand years!) unveiling...
perhaps beginning with a cheeky flash of a monotheistic ankle,
and then a suggestive view of a promised messiah arm (of some undetermined nature)
and then building up to a very few provocative glimpses of multiple divine agents (gasp - pearls suitably clutched!)
At the back of this (to change the metaphor) is the assumption that the God of the Bible is presented in a flat-pack form.
The unopened box is presented at the beginning of Genesis... and then slowly the contents are unpacked, and as the generations go by the Biblical saints have more and more guesses as to what the finished form will be - is this a bedside cabinet? is it a chest of drawers? is it some kind of wardrobe?
The story then is how the Bible is about the accumulation of clues as the flat-pack revelation is unpacked... until finally Jesus arrives to assemble the pieces and then everyone is shocked to find out He assembled them in a way that nobody guessed at!
Then we are supposed to be able to look back at the unpacking process and now, retrospectively, appreciate how these pieces actually do make sense in the light of what we now know the finished furniture to be.
On this model, then, whether seen as a tightly folded up piece of paper, flat-pack furniture or even a certain kind of unveiling dance... the Trinity is being deliberately concealed from the ancient Church in order that the Trinity could only be known by much future generations.
In other words, the Father, Son and Spirit intended the ancient Church to remain ignorant of the Trinity and the Person & Work of the Divine Messiah...
because...
well....
why?
That bit is not clear.
There is nothing about the truth of the Trinity and the Person & Work of Christ that is intrinsically harder for ancient people to understand than modern people.
In fact, modern people seem to have more difficulty grasping these realities than ancient people...
The ancients were surrounded by extremely complicated religions and mythologies - and in those religions & mythologies there were ideas of mediation, sacrifice, multiple divine agency, dying and rising gods etc etc ... all of which surely made it a cultural environment MORE suited to grasping the heights and depths of the Trinity and the Divine Messiah..?!
What if the Trinity is fully revealed on page one of the Bible?
What if the Person and Work of the LORD Jesus Christ is always out in the open - displayed in dozens of ways, with no intent to conceal in any way?
What if all the problems of understanding the Trinity & the Person & Work of Christ are on us sinners and none at all are on the divine revealer?
In other words, what if the Trinity is light and in this Living God there is no darkness, no hiddenness at all... so that it should be no surprise that for those who had eyes to see and ears to hear the full glory of the Trinity & Christ was there to see from the very beginning.
John Gill, writing about the "hidden manna" in Revelation explains that to the regenerate Church in the Exodus, they had true understanding and communion with the LORD Jesus Christ with a proper grasp of the Trinity... but to the unregenerate unbelievers this reality is ALWAYS hidden, now as much as in the most ancient times.
The LORD Jesus Christ "is wholly hidden from carnal and unregenerate men, and is enjoyed only by believers; ... the true church of Christ had communion with Him in His word and ordinances in the wilderness... Philo the Jew often interprets the manna by the "Logos", the Word of God, the most ancient Word of God."
Given that the actual text of the Old Testament really does fully and clearly present the Trinity and the Person & Work of the LORD Jesus Christ (especially in the most ancient Books of the Law), aren't the metaphors of unpacking or unfolding or unveiling fundamentally.. wrong?
Or....
These metaphors are just as applicable to the New Testament.
When we read the New Testament perhaps we personally become ever-increasingly aware of the Trinity/Jesus who is fully revealed before us in the text.
Subjectively speaking we may experience an unfolding or unpacking - because we personally are increasingly grasping what is being presented to us in the New Testament.
However, objectively speaking, the Trinity/Jesus is fully revealed from the start.
If Galatians was written around 15 years after the ascension of Jesus, as the oldest book of the New Testament, yet in that book we are confronted straight away, without apology or explanation or "dance of seven veils", with
"God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ"
"God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.”"
(The Spirit in Galatians is especially prominent - ranking alongside John 14-17 in terms of sheer density of references to the Spirit).
Paul writes as if the Trinity is fully known and understood - as if there is nothing new or especially complicated being stated here... as if the reality of Father, Son and Spirit is well-understood and grasped by God's people.
"The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ."
I'm increasingly unconvinced by these unpacking and unfolding and unveiling metaphors because they seem to contain within them an alien view of revelation - AND they seem to blame unbelief on the manner of revelation rather than on the sinfulness of humanity.