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Yet Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God.
the Trinity is seen not as a solution and a delight, but as an oddity and a problem.
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.
“Then what about Deuteronomy 6:4?” I hear my many Muslim readers cry. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” 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
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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.
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.”
That different starting point and basic understanding of God would mean that the gospel Athanasius preached simply felt and tasted very different from the one preached by Arius. Arius would have to pray to “Unoriginate.” But would “Unoriginate” listen? Athanasius could pray “Our Father.” With “The Unoriginate” we are left scrambling for a dictionary in a philosophy lecture; with a Father things are familial. 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.
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.
WHEN “FATHER” IS A BAD THING Not everyone instinctively warms to the idea that God is a Father. There are many for whom their own experiences of overbearing, indifferent or abusive fathers make their very guts squirm when they hear God spoken of as a Father. The twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault had very much that sort of issue. The bulk of his life’s work was about the evils of authority, and it seems to have all started with the first figure of authority in his life: his father. Fearful of having some namby-pamby for a son, Foucault Senior—who was a surgeon—did what he
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The God who is love is the Father who sends his Son. To be the Father, then, means to love, to give out life, to beget the Son.
That dynamic is also to be replicated in marriages, husbands being the heads of their wives, loving them as Christ the Head loves his bride, the church. He is the lover, she is the beloved.
Like the church, then, wives are not left to earn the love of their husbands; they can enjoy it as something lavished on them freely, unconditionally and maximally.
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 ...
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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 GOD WHO SHARES Sometime in the 1150s, a young Scot named Richard entered the Abbey of St. Victor, just outside the walls of Paris on the bank of the Seine. There he dedicated himself to contemplating God and was soon known as one of the most influential authors of his day. 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
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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 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.
This God simply will not fit into the mold of any other. For the Trinity is not some inessential add-on to God, some optional software that can be plugged into him. 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.” Having such a God happily changes everything.
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
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the exuberant nature of this God means that his pleasure “is rather a pleasure in diffusing and communicating to the creature, than in receiving from the creature.”[5]
We become like what we worship.a And Sibbes clearly saw the triune God as winning, kind and lovely: he spoke of the living God as a life-giving, warming sun who “delights to spread his beams and his influence in inferior things, to make all things fruitful. Such a goodness is in God as is in a fountain, or in the breast that loves to ease itself of milk.”a That is, God is simply bursting with warm and life-imparting nourishment, far more willing to give than we are to receive. And that, he explained, is precisely why he created the world:
It was the knowledge that God is so sunny, so radiant with goodness and love, that made Sibbes such an attractive model of Godlikeness. For, he said, “those that are led with the Spirit of God, that are like him; they have a communicative, diffusive goodness that loves to spread itself.”c
He delights to make his creation—and his creatures—fruitful.
Because Allah really “loves nothing other than Himself,” he does not really turn outward to express his love to others. Thus there can be no reason why anything else should exist.
The triune God, however, is the sort of God who will make room for another to have real existence.
The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other, is by music. When I would form in my mind an idea of a society in the highest degree happy, I think of them as expressing their love, their joy, and the inward concord and harmony and spiritual beauty of their souls by sweetly singing to each other.[11]
“The triunity of God is the secret of His beauty.”
“The triunity of God is the source of all beauty.”
But God’s power tells us only how he was able to bring everything into being. It does not tell us why.
So next time you look up at the sun, moon and stars and wonder, remember: they are there because God loves, because the Father’s love for the Son burst out that it might be enjoyed by many.
John Owen wrote that the Father’s love for the Son is “the fountain and prototype of all love. . . . And all love in the creation was introduced from this fountain, to give a shadow and resemblance of it.”
in the triune God is the love behind all love, the life behind all life, the music behind all music, the beauty behind all beauty and the joy behind all joy.
in the triune God is a God we can heartily enjoy—and enjoy in and ...
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in the Bible, 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.
Made in the image of this God, we are created to delight in harmonious relationship, to love God, to love each other.
What, then, went wrong? It was not that Adam and Eve stopped loving. They were created as lovers in the image of God, and they could not undo that. Instead, their love turned.
In other words, just as Eve’s desires turned in on herself, so the cherub’s gaze turned in on himself. That is what went wrong in Eden, the garden of God: those who were made to enjoy the beauty of the Lord turned away to enjoy their own.
Everyone likes preachers who give challenging sermons, and none have ever been more challenging than Pelagius. Somewhere around the turn of the fifth century, he arrived in Rome, lambasting immorality and issuing a clarion call for Christians to live in purity. All stirring stuff. However, when Augustine, the planet-brained bishop of Hippo, looked into what Pelagius was teaching, he realized that, for all his Christian language, Pelagius had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of God and the gospel. Pelagius was teaching that we had done wrong things—that was the problem—but that if ever we
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Augustine argued that we are always motivated by love—and that is why Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They sinned because they loved something else more than him.
Martin Luther picked up Augustine’s line of thought to define the sinner as “the person curved in on himself,” no longer outgoingly loving like God, no longer looking to God, but inward-looking, self-obsessed, devilish.
It comes, not from any necessity, but entirely out of who he is, the glory of his Father. Through the cross we see a God who delights to give himself.
How different from me. God, please change my heart to be like your nature.
In short, if God had no word to say to us, we simply would not know him or dream of his deep benevolence. Of course, if God is a single person, and has always been alone, why should he speak? In the loneliness of eternity before creation, who would he have spoken to? And why would he start now? The habit of keeping himself to himself would run deep. Such a God would be far more likely to remain unknown.
Clearly, Jesus believed that it is quite possible to study the Scriptures diligently and entirely miss their point, which is to proclaim him so that readers might come to him for life.
That idea is actually one main reason so many feel discouraged in their Bible-reading. Hoping to find quick lessons for how they should spend today, people find instead a genealogy, or a list of various sacrifices. And how could page after page of histories, descriptions of the temple, instructions to priests, affect how I rest, work and pray today? But when you see that Christ is the subject of all the Scriptures, that he is the Word, the Lord, the Son who reveals his Father, the promised Hope, the true Temple, the true Sacrifice, the great High Priest, the ultimate King, then you can read,
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Charles Spurgeon, the twinkle-eyed master-preacher of the nineteenth century, put it like this: “The motto of all true servants of God must be, ‘We preach Christ, and him crucified.’ A sermon without Christ in it is like a loaf of bread without any flour in it. No Christ in your sermon, sir? Then go home, and never preach again until you have something worth preaching.”[7]
“by my own reason or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel.”
