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April 18 - May 5, 2020
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.
That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.
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.”
The Bible is awash with talk of the Father’s love for the Son, but while the Son clearly does love the Father, hardly anything is said about it. The Father’s love is primary.
“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.
Here, the Father declares his love for his Son, and his pleasure in him, and he does so as the Spirit rests on Jesus. For the way the Father makes known his love is precisely through giving his Spirit.
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.
And they must be real persons: there could be no true love between them if they were, say, just different aspects of one single divine personality.
The moodalist is left with no assurance and a deeply confused God. Somehow the Son must be his own Father, send himself, love himself, pray to himself, seat himself at his own right hand and so on.
Grace, then, is not merely his kindness to those who have sinned; the very creation is a work of grace, flowing from God’s love.
Love is not a mere reaction with this God. In fact, it is not a reaction at all. God’s love is creative. Love comes first.
It was his overflowing love for the Son that motivated the Father to create, and creation is his gift to his Son.
the Spirit garnishes and beautifies the heavens and the earth.
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.
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. Clearly the salvation of this God is better even than forgiveness, and certainly more secure.
As the Son makes his Father known, so the Spirit-breathed Scriptures make the Son known.
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.
The Father has eternally delighted in the Son through the Spirit, and the Son in the Father; the Spirit’s work in giving us new life, then, is nothing less than bringing us to share in their mutual delight.
The life that the Spirit gives is not some abstract thing. In fact, it is not primarily some thing that he gives at all. The Spirit gives us his very self, that we might know and enjoy him and so enjoy his fellowship with the Father and the Son.
It is how the Spirit breathes out his life on us: he enlightens us to know the love of God, and that light warms us, drawing us to love him and to overflow with love to others.
How, though, does the Spirit enlighten us to know the love of God? Quite simply, by opening our eyes to see the glory of Christ.
