Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith

by Michael Reeves

This book, then, will simply be about growing in our enjoyment of God and seeing how God’s triune being makes all his ways beautiful.

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.

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.

We might acknowledge that the rule of some heavenly policeman was just, but we could never take delight in his regime as we can delight in the tender care of a father.

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.

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.

But when the love between two persons is happy, healthy and secure, they rejoice to share it.

behind everything, instead of some abstract “God,” we see the Father, whose nature it is to give himself and beget his Son.

But that in itself raises an enormous problem: 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.

Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centered beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything else to exist. Wouldn’t the existence of a universe be an irritating distraction for the god whose greatest pleasure is looking in a mirror? Creating just looks like a deeply unnatural thing for such a god to do.

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.

And the hope such gods offer does not usually include ever getting to see, know or relate to them. They offer “paradise,” but will not really be there themselves.

The creatures of the triune God are not mere extensions of him; he gives them life and personal being. Allowing them that, though, means allowing them to turn away from himself—and that is the origin of evil. By 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.

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]

John 1:18 describes God the Son as being eternally in the bosom or lap of the Father. One would never dare imagine it, but Jesus declares that his desire is that believers might be with him there (Jn 17:24). That, indeed, is why the Father sent him, that we who have rejected him might be brought back—and brought back, not merely as creatures, but as children, to enjoy the abounding love the Son has always known.

If, for example, the Son was a creature and had not eternally been “in the bosom of the Father,” knowing him and being loved by him, what sort of relationship with the Father could he share with us? If the Son himself had never been close to the Father, how could he bring us close?

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.

For Calvin, salvation was not about getting some thing called “grace”—it was about freely receiving the Spirit, and so the Father and the Son.

In other words, through the Spirit the Father allows us to share in the enjoyment of what most delights him—his Son.

The Father’s very identity consists in his love for the Son, and so when we love the Son we reflect what is most characteristic about the Father.

At the heart of our transformation into the likeness of the Son, then, is our sharing of his deep delight in the Father. In our love and enjoyment of the Son we are like the Father; in our love and enjoyment of the Father we are like the Son.

Oneness for the triune God means unity. As the Father is absolutely one with his Son, and yet is not his Son, so Jesus prays that believers might be one, but not that they might all be the same.

In my own experience, talking with non-Christian students, again and again I find that when they describe the God they don’t believe in, he sounds more like Satan than the loving Father of Jesus Christ: greedy, selfish, trigger-happy and entirely devoid of love. And if God is not Father, Son and Spirit, aren’t they right?

No, for all eternity the Father was loving his Son, but never once was he angry. Why? Because there was nothing to be angry with until Adam sinned in Genesis 3. So God’s anger at evil from Genesis 3 onward is a new thing: it is how the God who is love responds to evil.

Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.[11]