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March 1 - March 22, 2020
God is love because God is a Trinity.
it is only when you grasp what it means for God to be a Trinity that you really sense the beauty, the overflowing kindness, the heart-grabbing loveliness of God.
Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God.
Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving.
the Trinity is seen not as a solution and a delight, but as an oddity and a problem.
I am never going to fall down in awe or find my heart drawn to a God so ridiculous.
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.
because the triune God has revealed himself, we can understand the Trinity.
To know the Trinity is to know God, an eternal and personal God of infinite beauty, interest and fascination. The Trinity is a God we can know, and forever grow to know better.
the Trinity is not a problem.
the Trinity is a scriptural truth—and
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.
because the Christian God is triune, the Trinity is the governing center of all Christian belief,
the triune God simply does not fit well into the mold of any other God. Trying to get along with some unspecified “God,” we will quickly find ourselves with another God.
it is not so much the seemingly bad math of the Trinity that puts us off as the sheer imposition of an unexpected sort of God.
the world is already filled with innumerable, often wildly different candidates for “God.”
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.
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.
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
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.
Before he ever created, before he ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a Father loving his Son.
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
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.”
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.
it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence.
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.
This God, he says, is love in such a profound and potent way that you simply cannot know him without yourself becoming loving.
Before anything else, for all eternity, this God was loving, giving life to and delighting in his Son.
just as a fountain, to be a fountain, must pour forth water, so the Father, to be Father, must give out life. That is who he is. That is his most fundamental identity.
He could not not love. If he did not love, he would not be Father.
If there were once a time when the Son didn’t exist, then there was once a time when the Father was not yet a Father. And if that is the case, then once upon a time God was not loving since all by himself he would have had nobody to love.
the Father is never without the Son; for it is impossible that glory should be without radiance,
Overall, the Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved.
The Father’s love is primary. The Father is the loving head. That then means that in his love he will send and direct the Son, whereas the Son never sends or directs the Father.
In other words, the shape of the Father-Son relationship (the headship) begins a gracious cascade, like a waterfall of love: as the Father is the lover and the head of the Son, so the Son goes out to be the lover and the head of the church.
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
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.
The Father speaks, and on his Breath his Word is heard.
Spirit), one has as much reason to think that the Father and the Son are impersonal as to think that the Spirit is.
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.
The Trinity, then, is not the product of abstract speculation: when you proclaim Jesus, the Spirit-anointed Son of the Father, you proclaim the triune God.
if Allah needs his creation to be who he is in himself (“loving”), then Allah is dependent on his own creation, and one of the cardinal beliefs of Islam is that Allah is dependent on nothing.
Thus Jesus Christ, God the Son, is the Logic, the blueprint for creation. He is the one eternally loved by the Father; creation is about the extension of that love outward so that it might be enjoyed by others. The fountain of love brimmed over. The Father so delighted in his Son that his love for him overflowed, so that the Son might be the firstborn among many sons.
The God who loves to have an outgoing Image of himself in his Son loves to have many images of his love
