Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

by Michael Reeves

Yet Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God.

And so it is with the divine policeman: if salvation simply means him letting me off and counting me as a law-abiding citizen, then gratitude (not love) is all I have. In other words, I can never really love the God who is essentially just The Ruler. And that, ironically, means I can never keep the greatest command: to love the Lord my God.

Here we are not left to guesswork: the Qur’an is a perfect example of a solitary God’s word. Allah is a single-person God who has an eternal word beside him in heaven, the Qur’an. At a glance, that seems to make Allah look less eternally lonely. But what is so significant is the fact that Allah’s word is a book, not a true companion for him. And it is a book that is only about him. Thus when Allah gives us his Qur’an, he gives us some thing, a deposit of information about himself and how he likes things. 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. The Word was with God and the Word was God. It is all, well, very revealing. This God does not give us some thing that is other than himself, or merely tell us about himself; he actually gives us himself. If he just dropped a book from heaven, he could keep us at the sort of distance we would expect. But he doesn’t. The very Word of God

who is God comes to us and dwells with us.

John Calvin said that the sinful human mind is like “a perpetual factory of idols,”[4] meaning that we are all constantly distorting the nature of God in our minds, making the Father of lights out to be less than he is, and devilish. In fact, this tendency is the very source of all spiritual coldness, for when we suspect that God is really a Stalin-in-the-sky, of course we run from him. We have a

What is holiness, then? The words used for holiness in the Bible have the basic meaning of being “set apart.” But there our troubles begin, because naturally I think I’m lovely. So if God is “set apart” from me, I assume the problem is with him (and I can do all this in the subtlest, most subconscious way). His holiness looks like a prissy rejection of my happy, healthy loveliness.