What are some popular illustrations of the Trinity?

from the old testament

• The Old Testament teaches that God is a Triune God (Genesis 1:26; 18:1-2; Isaiah 48:16). That is, that He is one in nature but three in Persons.
• In Exodus 20:4, the Israelites were warned against making images of God. While illustrations are not images, per se, they have the same problem. The invisible Triune God simply cannot be represented by anything in creation because He is transcendent, completely unlike anything in creation. Every attempt in history to come up with an illustration has been heretical, even if unintentionally.

from the new testament

• Saint Patrick is famous for using a three-leaf clover to teach the Trinity. He explained that just as the clover is one plant with three leaves, so also God is one God with three persons. However, God is not a combination of three parts; the Father, Jesus, and Spirit are each fully divine (1 Corinthians 8:6; John 1:1; Acts 5:3-4). This is different from the clover which is three leaves added together to make one clover. This illustration leads to a heresy known as Partialism, which says that God is made up of three individual parts. This same heresy is present in another illustration of God’s triune nature being like a musical chord composed of three notes.
• Other variations of these illustrations include apples (three parts of outer peel, inner flesh, and centralized seeds), eggs (three parts of shell, white, and yolk), and the sun (three rays of light, heat, and radiation), and light (Father as source, Son as the beam, and Spirit as the power). In these instances, the three parts are not the same (in the way that three parts of a clover are all still parts of a clover or three notes are three parts of the same chord). Therefore, though similar to the previous errors, they lead to a different heresy, known as Tritheism. Tritheism argues for there being three gods, as opposed to the Biblical view of Monotheism (Mark 12:29), in which there is only one God with three Persons.
• Yet another attempt to avoid the previous errors is the illustration of the three states of H2O. As solid, H2O is ice; in liquid, it’s water; and as a gas, H2O becomes steam. Regardless of the form, the chemical makeup remains the same. However, this illustration falls short because ice, water, and steam do not coexist in the same space and time. Instead, the H20 changes, being found in different forms at different times. However, the Father never becomes the Son, nor does the Son turn into the Spirit. This illustration represents the heresy known as Modalism. Modalism argues that God is one both in essence and in person. Therefore, the Father, Jesus, and Spirit is simply the one god changing his form to sometimes be the Father, sometimes Jesus and sometimes the Spirit. This is in contrast to Scripture where not only is each Person distinct, they share the same space at the same time (Matthew 3:16-17).

implications for today

Analogies like the egg (shell, yolk, white), H2O (liquid, solid, vapor), or the sun (star, light, heat) all fall short of rightly representing God. Each one subtly introduces error. Modalism, for instance, falsely teaches that God is one person appearing in different forms or “modes,” like water changing states. Tritheism, on the other hand, wrongly implies three separate gods, such as light or eggs are three separate entities combined. These distorted illustrations may simplify the doctrine for explanation, but they also misrepresent the glory and mystery of God’s triune nature.

Scripture does not offer an illustration for a reason: God cannot be encapsulated by one. Rather than trying to fully comprehend or explain the Trinity with created comparisons, we should let God’s Word speak for itself. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father—yet all are fully and eternally God. This is not a contradiction but a mystery we simply cannot understand. However, it is true because it is how God, who cannot lie (Titus 1:2), has revealed Himself to us. Let us not reduce the Trinity to something manageable but worship the one true unmanageable God as He has made Himself known.