Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

by Michael Reeves

the truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity.

God’s triune being makes all his ways beautiful.

If the Trinity were something we could shave off God, we would not be relieving him of some irksome weight; we would be shearing him of precisely what is so delightful about him. For God is triune, and it is as triune that he is so good and desirable.

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

God is a mystery, but not in the alien abductions, things-that-go-bump-in-the-night sense.

But this triune God has revealed himself to us. Thus the Trinity is not some piece of inexplicable apparent nonsense, like a square circle or an interesting theologian.

The Trinity is a God we can know, and forever grow to know better.

One, not three. But the point of Deuteronomy 6:4 is not to teach that “The LORD our God, the LORD is a mathematical singularity.” In the middle of Deuteronomy 6, that would be a bit out of the blue to say the least. Instead, Deuteronomy 6 is about God’s people having the Lord as the one object of their affections: he is the only one worthy of them, and they are to love him alone with all their heart, soul and strength (Deut 6:5). In fact, the word for “one” in Deuteronomy 6:4 really doesn’t convey “mathematical singularity” at all well. 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.

And it is not just incompatibly different numbers we are dealing with here: that difference, as we will see, is going to mean that Allah exists and functions in a completely different way from the Father, Son and Spirit.

If we content ourselves with being mere monotheists, and speak of God only in terms so vague they could apply to Allah as much as the Trinity, then we will never enjoy or share what is so fundamentally and delightfully different about Christianity.

the triune being of God is the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy.

First of all, if God’s very identity is to be The Creator, The Ruler, then he needs a creation to rule in order to be who he is. For all his cosmic power, then, this God turns out to be pitifully weak: he needs us.

Perhaps you recall how, when Hitler used to speak about God, he called Him “the Almighty”. But it is not “the Almighty” who is God; we cannot understand from the standpoint of a supreme concept of power, who God is. And the man who calls “the Almighty” God misses God in the most terrible way. For “the Almighty” is bad, as “power in itself” is bad. The “Almighty” means Chaos, Evil, the Devil. We could not better describe and define the Devil than by trying to think this idea of a self-based, free, sovereign ability.[1]

If God is The Ruler and the problem is that I have broken the rules, the only salvation he can offer is to forgive me and treat me as if I had kept the rules.

But if that is how God is, my relationship with him can be little better than my relationship with any traffic cop (meaning no offense to any readers in the police force).

That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.

“What was God doing before creation? Making hell for those cheeky enough to ask such questions!”

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.

Arius began teaching that the Son was a created being, and not truly God. He did so because he believed that God is the origin and cause of everything, but is not caused to exist by anything else. “Uncaused” or “Unoriginate,” he therefore held, was the best basic definition of what God is like. But since the Son, being a son, must have received his being from the Father, he could not, by Arius’s definition, be God.

Our definition of God must be built on the Son who reveals him. And when we do that, starting with the Son, we find that the first thing to say about God is, as it says in the creed, “We believe in one God, the Father.”

And if God is a Father, then he must be relational and life-giving, and that is the sort of God we could love.

The most foundational thing in God is not some abstract quality, but the fact that he is Father.

Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly.

Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. 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.

Father is called Father because he is a Father.

if, before all things, God was eternally a Father, then this God is an inherently outgoing, life-giving God.

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.

Thus love is not something the Father has, merely one of his many moods. Rather, he is love. He could not not love. If he did not love, he would not be Father.

Now, God could not be love if there were nobody to love. He could not be a Father without a child. And yet it is not as if God created so that he could love someone. He is love, and does not need to create in order to be who he is.

As the light from the lamp is of the nature of that which sheds the brightness, and is united with it (for as soon as the lamp appears the light that comes from it shines out simultaneously), so in this place the Apostle would have us consider both that the Son is of the Father, and that the Father is never without the Son; for it is impossible that glory should be without radiance, as it is impossible that the lamp should be without brightness.[3]

The Father loves his Son in a very particular way, something we can see if we look at the baptism of Jesus: “As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased’” (Mt 3:16-17). Here, the Father declares his love for his Son, and his pleasure in him, and he does so as the Spirit rests on Jesus.

The way the Father, Son and Spirit related at Jesus’ baptism was not a one-time-only event; the whole scene is full of echoes of Genesis 1.

Richard argued that if God were just one person, he could not be intrinsically loving, since for all eternity (before creation) he would have had nobody to love. If there were two persons, he went on, God might be loving, but in an excluding, ungenerous way. After all, when two persons love each other, they can be so infatuated with each other that they simply ignore everyone else—and a God like that would be very far from good news. But when the love between two persons is happy, healthy and secure, they rejoice to share it. Just so it is with God, said Richard. Being perfectly loving, from all eternity the Father and the Son have delighted to share their love and joy with and through the Spirit. It is not, then, that God becomes sharing; being triune, 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.

The Father is who he is by virtue of his relationship with the Son. Think again of the image of the fountain: a fountain is not a fountain if it does not pour forth water. Just so, the Father would not be the Father without his Son (whom he loves through the Spirit). And the Son would not be the Son without his Father. He has his very being from the Father. 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.

At bottom this God is different, for at bottom, he is not Creator, Ruler or even “God” in some abstract sense: he is the Father, loving and giving life to his Son in the fellowship of the Spirit. A God who is in himself love, who before all things could “never be anything but love.”

It is one of the profoundest questions to ask: If there is a God, why is there anything else? Why the universe? Why us? Why might God decide to have a creation?

There is a fascinating tension at just this point in Islam. Traditionally, Allah is said to have ninety-nine names, titles which describe him as he is in himself in eternity. One of them is “The Loving.” But how could Allah be loving in eternity? Before he created there was nothing else in existence that he could love (and the title does not refer to self-centered love but love for others).

Thus Jesus Christ, God the Son, is the Logic, the blueprint for creation.

Because in a sense the Son is the model for creation, his response to the Father also serves as the model for how creation and all creatures should themselves respond.

One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.[2]

What we have been seeing is that the Father, Son and Spirit have their hypostasis in ekstasis. That is, God’s innermost being (hypostasis) is an outgoing, loving, life-giving being. The triune God is an ecstatic God: he is not a God who hoards his life, but one who gives it away, as he would show in that supreme moment of his self-revelation on the cross.

aTheologians would come to speak of the Father, Son and Spirit each being a hypostasis. What they meant by this is vital: that there is nothing more foundational in God than the Father, Son and Spirit. There is no “God” or “God-stuff” behind them or from which they emerge.

Where Genesis speaks of a good creation and then a fall into evil, Gnosticism imagined first a fall into evil, and creation as the result.

Believing that God is not lonely, it made perfect sense to say that it is not good to have men alone. As God is not alone, so a human in his image should not be alone. They therefore upheld creation and the physical, femininity, relationship and marriage all as being intrinsically good, created reflections of a God who is not lonely.

The Father’s very identity is about giving life, love and being to his Son, doing all out of love for him.

J. I. Packer once wrote: “If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means he does not understand Christianity very well at all.”[4]

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.