More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 15 - July 29, 2017
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.
To know the Trinity is to know God, an eternal and personal God of infinite beauty, interest and fascination.
Pressing into the Trinity we are doing what in Psalm 27 David said he could do all the days of his life: we are gazing upon the beauty of the Lord. And as we do so, I hope you will begin to feel as David did, and that you could do the same.
they were not trying to add to God’s revelation of himself, as if Scripture were insufficient; they were trying to express the truth of who God is as revealed in Scripture.
For what makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God.
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.
The trouble is, 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.
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.
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.
good stuff
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.
That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.
That is to say, 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 like “Uncaused” or “Unoriginate.”
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.
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.
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.
Therein lies the problem: how can a solitary God be eternally and essentially loving when love involves loving another?
how can God be eternally and essentially good when goodness involves being good to another?
And so, as he gloriously goes, “shines” and “radiates” out from his Father, he shows us that the Father is essentially outgoing.
aRichard Sibbes, “The Successful Seeker,” in Works of Richard Sibbes
Small wonder, then, that creativity, the ability to craft, adorn and make beautiful, is a gift of the Spirit:
The Spirit makes his creation alive with beauty.
(Of course, one could simply argue that men and women are equal because they are both human, but that is an entirely loveless affirmation, and gives no grounds for seeing those things as absolute goods to be reveled in.)
Allowing them that, though, means allowing them to turn away from himself—and that is the origin of evil.
graciously giving his creatures the room to exist, the triune God allows them the freedom to turn away without himself being the author of evil.
the Lord God in Isaiah 42 is not a single-person God, desperately hugging himself and refusing to share as he whines: “I will not give my glory to another.” In Isaiah 42, the Lord is speaking of his servant, his chosen one, the one he anoints with his Spirit (Is 42:1). That is, the Father is speaking of his anointed Son, the one who will not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smoldering wick
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.”
For if the Spirit’s first work in salvation is to loose our hearts that we might have a lust or desire for the Lord, then the Christian life is about so much more than “getting heaven.” The Spirit is about drawing us into the divine life. 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.
A problem similar to Sadoleto’s happens when the Spirit is thought of as a force and not a person.
the Spirit’s personal presence in us means we are brought to enjoy the Spirit’s own intimate communion with the Father and the Son. If the Spirit were not God, he could not do that.
The life the Spirit gives is not an abstract package of blessing; it is his own life that he shares with us, the life of fellowship with the Father and the Son.
The new life the Spirit gives is a life of warmth, for it is his own life of delighting in the Father and the Son, and he rears us up precisely by warming our hearts to them.
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.
Knowing him is life, and looking to him is what enlivens. Realizing this, said Charles Spurgeon, is the secret to Christian happiness:
And so the Spirit supports us, the Son brings us and the Father—who always delights to hear the prayers of his Son—hears us with joy. With the Son, secure in him, enabled as he is by the Spirit, we pray to our Father.
What Edwards was getting at was the fact that the Spirit is not about bringing us to a mere external performance for Christ, but bringing us actually to love him and find our joy in him.
The truth is that God is already on mission: in love, the Father has sent his Son and his Spirit. It is the outworking of his very nature.
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.
the antitheist’s problem is not so much with the existence of God as with the character of God.
Is it too much of a coincidence that the advance of atheism parallels the retreat of the church on the Trinity?
The triunity of God is the secret of His beauty.
Isaiah speaks of the pouring out of God’s wrath as his “strange work,” his “alien task” (Is 28:21), because it is not that God is naturally angry, but that evil provokes him: in
I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being
...more
thought this was relevant after our wonderful message today at Fellowzhip Grenville
Instead, when we give God the glory, we simply ascribe to him what is already his, declaring him to be as he truly is.
Ezekiel 1 speaks of God’s glory in terms of both a person and a light/radiance/brightness.
What is salvation? Is it merely that we are brought back as law-abiding citizens? Or is it something better: that we are brought back as beloved children?
What is the Christian life about? Mere behavior? Or something deeper: enjoying God?
he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father; thus alone, he is not truly love. Thus he can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know him. Arius was left with a very thin gruel: a life of self-dependent effort under the all-seeing eye of his distant and loveless God.
