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May 1 - May 8, 2023
God is love because God is a Trinity.
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—and
getting to know God better does actually make for far more profound and practical change as well. Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving.
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 word is also used, for example, in Genesis 2:24, where Adam and Eve—two persons—are said to be one.
For what makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God. Which God we worship: that is the article of faith that stands before all others. 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.
Trying to get along with some unspecified “God,” we will quickly find ourselves with another God.
Idolatry, making God in our own image
That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.
Jesus tells us explicitly in John 17:24. “Father,” he says, “you loved me before the creation of the world.” And that is the God revealed by Jesus Christ. Before he ever created, before he ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a Father loving his Son.
That is to say, the right way to think about God is to start with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, not some abstract definition we have made up like “Uncaused” or “Unoriginate.” In fact, we should not even set out in our understanding of God by thinking of God primarily as Creator (naming him “from His works only”)—that, as we have seen, would make him dependent on his creation.
He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation.
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.
The God who is love is the Father who sends his Son. To be the Father, then, means to love, to give out life, to beget the Son. Before anything else, for all eternity, this God was loving, giving life to and delighting in his Son.
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.
For the way the Father makes known his love is precisely through giving his Spirit.
The Spirit is the one through whom the Father loves, blesses and empowers his Son. The Son goes out from the Father by the Spirit.
God is a sharing God, a God who loves to include. Indeed, that is why God will go on to create. His love is not for keeping but for spreading.
And so it is with the Spirit: as a person he speaks and sends (Acts 13:2, 4); he chooses (Acts 20:28), teaches (Jn 14:26), gives (Is 63:14); he can be lied to and tested (Acts 5:3, 9); he can be resisted (Acts 7:51), grieved (Is 63:10; Eph 4:30) and blasphemed (Mt 12:31).
he is the Father, loving and giving life to his Son in the fellowship of the Spirit.
What he means is that, since God the Father has eternally loved his Son, it is entirely characteristic of him to turn and create others that he might also love them.
God’s love is creative. Love comes first.
was his overflowing love for the Son that motivated the Father to create, and creation is his gift to his Son.
It is that, like a mothering dove settling on her eggs, the Spirit vivifies, bringing what has been created to life.
Made in the image of this God, we are created to delight in harmonious relationship, to love God, to love each other.
their love turned.
Lovers we remain, but twisted, our love misdirected and perverted. Created to love God, we turn to love ourselves and anything but God.
The problem is deeper than her actions, deeper than outward disobedience. Her act of sin was merely the manifestation of the turn in her heart: she now desired the fruit more than she desired God.
As God the Father has always looked outward to the Son and vice versa, so Eve was created to look outward, to look like God and to enjoy God as the source of all goodness and life. But Eve was turning inward to love only herself. And thus she was turning from the image of God into the image of the devil.
That is, the Father sent his Son to make himself known—meaning not that he wanted simply to download some information about himself, but that the love the Father eternally had for the Son might be in those who believe in him, and that we might enjoy the Son as the Father always has.
the Father so delights in his eternal love for the Son that he desires to share it with all who will believe.
However, when the triune God gives us his Word, he gives us his very self, for the Son is the Word of God, the perfect revelation of his Father.
Knowing that the Bible is about him and not me means that, instead of reading the Bible obsessing about me, I can gaze on him.
But the word grace is really just a shorthand way of speaking about the personal and loving kindness out of which, ultimately, God gives himself.
Realizing this, said Charles Spurgeon, is the secret to Christian happiness: It is ever the Holy Spirit’s work to turn our eyes away from self to Jesus; but Satan’s work is just the opposite of this, for he is constantly trying to make us regard ourselves instead of Christ. . . . We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul. If we would at once overcome Satan and have peace with God, it must be by “looking unto Jesus.”[7]
It is by the Spirit that the Father has eternally loved his Son. And so, by sharing their Spirit with us, the Father and the Son share with us their own life, love and fellowship. By the Spirit uniting me to Christ, the Father knows and loves me as his son; by the Spirit I begin to know and love him as my Father. By the Spirit I begin to love aright—unbending me from my self-love, he wins me to share the Father’s pleasure in the Son and the Son’s in the Father. By the Spirit I (slowly!) begin to love as God loves, with his own generous, overflowing, self-giving love for others.
That means that when we go out and share the knowledge of God’s great love we reflect something very profound about who God is. For when Jesus sends us, he is allowing us to share the missional, generous, outgoing shape of God’s own life.
The Spirit shares the triune life of God by bringing God’s children into the mutual delight of the Father and the Son—and there we become like our God: fruitful and life-giving.
the antitheist’s problem is not so much with the existence of God as with the character of God.
Now the holiness of a single-person God would be something quite different. His holiness would be about being set apart away from others. In other words, his holiness would be all about aloof distance. But the holiness of the Father, Son and Spirit is all about love.
Love for the Lord, love for neighbor—that is the heart of holiness and how the triune God’s people get to be like him.
No, for all eternity the Father was loving his Son, but never once was he angry. Why? Because there was nothing to be angry with until Adam sinned in Genesis 3. So God’s anger at evil from Genesis 3 onward is a new thing: it is how the God who is love responds to evil.
God is angry at evil because he loves. Isaiah speaks of the pouring out of God’s wrath as his “strange work,” his “alien task” (Is 28:21), because it is not that God is naturally angry, but that evil provokes him: in his pure love, God cannot tolerate evil.
that God’s glory—his nature and character—is like a pure and dazzling light radiating outward and shining forth.
Ignoring the way, the truth and life, he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father; thus alone, he is not truly love. Thus he can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know him.
We think of God without the Son. We think of “God,” and not the Father of the Son.
