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.

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.

Particularly, they were trying to articulate Scripture’s message in the face of those who were distorting it in one way or another—and for each new distortion a new language of response was needed.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 was a profound observation, for 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.

the Father is called Father because he is a Father. And a father is a person who gives life, who begets children. Now that insight is like a stick of dynamite in all our thoughts about God. 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.

To be the Father, then, means to love, to give out life, to beget the 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.

That is why it is important to note that the Son is the eternal Son. There was never a time when he didn’t exist. If there were, then God is a completely different sort of being. 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.

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]

while the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, there is a very definite shape to their relationship. Overall, the Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved. 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. 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.

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.

the Spirit stirs up the delight of the Father in the Son and the delight of the Son in the Father, inflaming their love and so binding them together in “the fellowship of the Holy 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. There at creation, the Spirit also hovered, dovelike, over waters. And just as the Spirit, after Jesus’ baptism, would send him out into the lifeless wilderness, so in Genesis 1 the Spirit appears as the power by which God’s Word goes out into the lifeless void. In the very beginning, God creates by his Word (the Word that would later become flesh), and he does so by sending out his Word in the power of his Spirit or Breath.

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. Hence Jesus is known as “the Anointed One” (“the Messiah” in Hebrew, “the Christ” in Greek), for he is the one supremely anointed with 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.

Moodalists think that God is one person who has three different moods (or modes, if you must).

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.

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.

Eve is a person quite distinct from Adam, and yet she has all her life and being from Adam. She comes from his side, is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, and is one with him in the flesh (Gen 2:21-24). Far better than leaves, eggs and liquids, that reflects a personal God, a Son who is distinct from his Father, and yet who is of the very being of the Father, and who is eternally one with him in the Spirit.

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.

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

The Father loved him before the creation of the world, and the reason the Father sends him is so that the Father’s love for him might be in others also. That is why the Son goes out from the Father, in both creation and salvation: that the love of the Father for the Son might be shared.

And so, just as the Father decided to include us in his love for the Son, to share it with us, so the Son chose to include us in his love for the Father. He delights to echo his Father’s love back to him, and that is what it is to be beside God, to image him, to be his child. We have been created that, knowing his love, we might love the Lord our God.

We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.

What we have been seeing is that the Father, Son and Spirit have their hypostasis in ekstasis.

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. He gives life and being as a free gift, for his very life, being and goodness is yeasty, spreading out that there might be more that is truly good.

In other words, knowing God’s love, he became loving; and his understanding of who God is transformed him into a man, a preacher and a writer of magnetic geniality.

the Son is not only the motivating origin of creation: he is its goal. The Son is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of creation. Now here we come to something astounding: because the Father’s love for the Son has burst out to be shared with us, the Son’s inheritance is also (extraordinarily!) shared with us. “Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17). It is a physical expression of the marvelous truth that the Father shares his love of the Son with us: the meek shall inherit the earth!

Belief in the Trinity works precisely against chauvinism and for delight in harmonious relationships.

Christianity decried those life-threatening ancient abortion procedures; it refused to ignore the infidelity of husbands as paganism did; in Christianity, widows would be and were supported by the church; they were even welcomed as “fellow-workers” in the gospel (Rom 16:3). In Christianity, women were valued.

the single-person God: this God did not create out of overflowing love, he created merely to rule and be served. In which case, “right” means nothing more than right behavior. Assuming this God, what then went wrong? Quite simply, Adam and Eve did what God had told them not to do. They failed to obey. Now at one level, that is exactly what we see in Genesis 3: the Lord God commanded Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but Adam and Eve did just that.

sin is something that goes deeper than our behavior. Indeed, we can do what is “right” and be no better than whitewashed tombs, clean on the outside but rotten on the inside.

Therein lies the trouble with the story of the single-person God: if sin is simply about acting and behaving aright, then the devil here is not sinning.

Made in the image of this God, we are created to delight in harmonious relationship, to love God, to love each other. Thus Jesus taught that the first and greatest commandment in the law is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:36-39). That is what we are created for.

Lovers we remain, but twisted, our love misdirected and perverted. Created to love God, we turn to love ourselves and anything but God.

Her act of sin was merely the manifestation of the turn in her heart: she now desired the fruit more than she desired God.

It did not seem to have occurred to Pelagius that we were created to know and love God, and thus for him the aim of the Christian life was not to enjoy God but to use him as the one who sells us heaven for the price of being moral.

The Father so loves that he desires to catch us up into that loving fellowship he enjoys with the Son. And that means I can know God as he truly is: as Father. In fact, I can know the Father as my Father.

And so, as the Son brings me before his Father, with their Spirit in me I can boldly cry, “Abba,” for their fellowship I now freely share: the Most High my Father, the Son my great brother, the Spirit

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.”

When someone comes to faith, Christians often smile and say (with an allusion to Luke 15:10) that the angels will be rejoicing in heaven. But what Luke 15:10 actually says is that there is joy in heaven before the angels of God over one sinner who repents. Who is before the angels of God in heaven? God. It is God, first and foremost, who rejoices to lavish his love on those who have rejected him.