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August 12, 2021
Yet Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God. To know and grow to enjoy him is what we are saved for
Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving. Sensing the desirability of God alters our preferences and inclinations, the things that drive our behavior: we begin to want God more than anything else.
God is a mystery in that who he is and what he is like are secrets, things we would never have worked out by ourselves. But this triune God has revealed himself to us.
The bedrock of our faith is nothing less than God himself, and every aspect of the gospel—creation, revelation, salvation—is only Christian insofar as it is the creation, revelation and salvation of this God, the triune God.
That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.
Before he ever created, before he ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a Father loving his Son.
The most foundational thing in God is not some abstract quality, but the fact that he is Father.
For if, before all things, God was eternally a Father, then this God is an inherently outgoing, life-giving God. He did not give life for the first time when he decided to create; from eternity he has been life-giving.
Like the church, then, wives are not left to earn the love of their husbands; they can enjoy it as something lavished on them freely, unconditionally and maximally. For eternity, the Father so loves the Son that he excites the Son’s eternal love in response; Christ so loves the church that he excites our love in response; the husband so loves his wife that he excites her to love him back.
And so we see that the Father, Son and Spirit, while distinct persons, are absolutely inseparable from each other. Not confused, but undividable. They are who they are together. They always are together, and thus they always work together.
That is why the Son goes out from the Father, in both creation and salvation: that the love of the Father for the Son might be shared.
Knowing God to be the triune God of love, he held that we were not created simply to live under his moral code, hoping for some paradise where he will never be. We were made to find our rest and satisfaction in his all-satisfying fellowship. Moreover, our problem is not so much that we have behaved wrongly, but that we have been drawn to love wrongly. Made in the image of the God of love, Augustine argued that we are always motivated by love—and that is why Adam and Eve disobeyed God.
Knowing God as our Father not only wonderfully gladdens our view of him; it gives the deepest comfort and joy. The honor of it is stupefying. To be the child of some rich king would be nice; but to be the beloved of the emperor of the universe is beyond words.
Since our problem is with our hearts, the Spirit gives us new birth into a new life precisely by giving us new hearts (Ezek 36:26; Jn 3:3-8). The tool he uses is Scripture (1 Pet 1:23; Jas 1:18), but through Scripture he opens our blinded eyes to see who the Lord truly and beautifully is and so he wins our hearts back to him. And that is life—to know him (Jn 17:3).
The Spirit of the Father and the Son would never be interested in merely empowering us to “do good.” His desire (which is the desire of the Father and the Son) is to bring us to such a hearty enjoyment of God through Christ that we delight to know him, that we delight in all his ways, and that therefore we want to do as he wants and we hate the thought of ever grieving him.
But the triune, living God of the Bible is Beauty. Here is a God we can really want, and whose sovereignty we can wholeheartedly rejoice in.
The holiness of the triune God is the perfection, beauty and absolute purity of the love there is between the Father and the Son. There is nothing grubby or abusive about the love of this God—and thus he is holy.
For what we think God is like must shape our godliness, and what we think godliness is reveals what we think of God.
God’s purpose is unfathomably kind: he will at the last so spread his life, being and goodness that he will be all in all; he will at the last fill the universe with the light of his wonderful glory. He is all light—but that is terrible for those who love the darkness.
On the cross we see the glorification of the glory of God, the deepest revelation of the very heart of God—and it is all about laying down his own life to give life, to bear fruit.
