Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

by Michael Reeves

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.

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you,” the Son says (Jn 15:9). And therein lies the very goodness of the gospel: as the Father is the lover and the Son the beloved, so Christ becomes the lover and the church the beloved. That means that Christ loves the church first and foremost: his love is not a response, given only when the church loves him; his love comes first, and we only love him because he first loved us (1 Jn 4:19).

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. Such is the spreading goodness that rolls out of the very being of this God.

And what Arius demonstrated was the reverse: when you don’t start with Jesus the Son, you end up with a different God who is not the Father. For the Son is the one Way to know God truly: only he reveals the Father.

if we try to think about God without thinking about the Father, Son and Spirit, then “only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.”[5] He was quite right. For there is a vast world of difference between the triune God revealed by Jesus and all other gods.

Having such a God happily changes everything.