Kindle Notes & Highlights
Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving.
For, what makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God.
The Trinity is the cockpit of all Christian thinking.
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.
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.
That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.
fact, we should not even set out in our understanding of God by thinking of God primarily as Creator (naming him ‘from His works only’) – that, as we have seen, would make him dependent on his creation. Our definition of God must be built on the Son who reveals him.
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.
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.
just as a fountain, to be a fountain, must pour forth water, so the Father, to be Father, must give out life.
He is love, and does not need to create in order to be who he is.
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.
He makes the Father’s love known to the Son, causing him to cry ‘Abba!’ – something he will also do for us (Romans 8:15; Galatians
For in making the loving Father of lights known, the Spirit is the bringer not only of love but of joy, and is regularly associated with a joy next to which the merriness of wine is no substitute
And so it is with the Spirit: as a person he speaks and sends (Acts 13:2, 4); he chooses (Acts 20:28), teaches (John 14:26), gives (Isaiah 63:14); he can be lied to and tested (Acts 5:3, 9); he can be resisted (Acts 7:51), grieved (Isaiah 63:10; Ephesians 4:30) and blasphemed (Matthew 12:31). In every way he is presented alongside the Father and the Son as a real person.
once you puree the persons, it becomes impossible to taste their gospel.
even that most basic call to believe in the Son of God is an invitation to a Trinitarian faith. Jesus is described as the Son of God. God is his Father. And he is the Christ, the one anointed with the Spirit. When you start with the Jesus of the Bible, it is a triune God that you get.
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.
It is that the Father has always enjoyed loving another, and so the act of creation by which he creates others to love seems utterly appropriate for him.
He has always enjoyed showering his love on his Son, and in creating he rejoices to shower it on children he loves through the Son.
the divine majesty of Artemis is dependent on the service of her worshippers. In herself she sounds empty and parasitic, as if her magnificence is nothing but the glisten of the silver brought to her temple by her minions.
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.
Without belief in God the Father and the Son, one in the Spirit, why should a husband not treat his wife as a lesser being? Yet if a husband’s headship of his wife is somehow akin to the Father’s headship of the Son, then what a loving relationship must ensue! The Father’s very identity is about giving life, love and being to his Son, doing all out of love for him.
In the lively harmony of the three persons, the radiant love, the overflowing goodness of this God, there is a beauty entirely at odds with the self-serving monotony of single-person gods such as Screwtape described. And because this God has poured out his love and life, we can also say: ‘The triunity of God is the source of all beauty.’
To be coherent and meaningful, maths requires the existence of ultimate plurality in unity.
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.
Indeed, 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 other words, in the triune God is a God we can heartily enjoy – and enjoy in and through his creation.
Jonathan Edwards argued that even the demons can do what is ‘right’ in that superficial sense of good behaviour: The devil once seemed to be religious from fear of torment. Luke 8:28, ‘When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high? I beseech thee, torment me not.’ Here is external worship. The devil is religious; he prays: he prays in a humble posture; he falls down before Christ, he lies prostrate; he prays earnestly, he cries with a loud voice; he uses humble expressions – ‘I beseech thee,
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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.
Eve takes and eats the forbidden fruit because a love for herself – and gaining wisdom for herself – has overcome any love she might have had for God.
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. Love’s longings and the desires of their hearts shifted from the Lord to themselves. And thus, instead of running to him, they would now hide from him.
But Eve was turning inwards to love only herself. And thus she was turning from the image of God into the image of the devil.
our problem is not so much that we have behaved wrongly, but that we have been drawn to love wrongly.
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. Such a person might well behave morally or religiously, but all they did would simply express their fundamental love for themselves.
All that is precisely what Jesus is about in John 17: he comes before God his Father with the incense of his prayers (as a pleasing smell rising before the Lord, incense is symbolic of prayer, Psalm 141:2; Revelation 5:8). And he does so with the people of God on his heart: ‘My prayer is not for them [the apostles] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message’ (John 17:20). In other words, as Israel’s high priest would symbolically bring the people of God before the Lord by that plate over his heart, so Christ would bring us, in him, before his Father. God the Son
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The psalm is referring to the ordination of Aaron as high priest, where the sacred anointing oil would be poured out on his head (Leviticus 8:12). Just so would Christ (‘the Anointed One’) be anointed by the Spirit at his baptism. And as the oil ran down from Aaron’s head to his body, so the Spirit would run down from Christ our Head to his Body, the church. Thus we become ‘partakers of his anointing’.3 The Spirit, through whom the Father had eternally loved his Son, would now anoint believers ‘that they may be one as we are one’ (John 17:22). One with the Lord, one with each other.
the more Trinitarian the salvation, the sweeter it is.
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
But this God comes to us himself, the Father rejoicing to share his love for his Son, sending him that in him we might be brought back into the Father’s bosom, there by the Spirit to call him ‘Abba’.
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.
Allah is a single-person God who has an eternal word beside him in heaven, the Qur’an. At a glance, that seems to make Allah look less eternally lonely. But what is so significant is the fact that Allah’s word is a book, not a true companion for him. And it is a book that is only about him. Thus when Allah gives us his Qur’an, he gives us some thing, a deposit of information about himself and how he likes things.
Radical difference between the monoid Allah and the triune YHWH…
This God does not give us some thing that is other than himself, or merely tell us about himself; he actually gives us himself. If he just dropped a book from heaven, he could keep us at the sort of distance we would expect. But he doesn’t. The very Word of God who is God comes to us and dwells with us.
then you can read, not so much asking, ‘What does this mean for me, right now?’ but ‘What do I learn here of Christ?’ 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. And as through the pages you get caught up in the wonder of his story, you find your heart strangely pounding for him in a way you never would have if you had treated the Bible as a book about you.
the fear that we’ll merely study the Scriptures as interesting texts instead of hearing them as God’s very words that hold out Christ and draw us to want him.
‘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
‘grace’ is really just a shorthand way of speaking about the personal and loving kindness out of which, ultimately, God gives himself.
Having once given life, then, he does not move on; he stays to make that life blossom and grow.
‘Where the Spirit is, there it is always summer’ wrote William Tyndale, for there ‘there are always good fruits, that is to say, good works.
It is ever the Holy Spirit’s work to turn our eyes away from self to Jesus; but Satan’s work is just the opposite of this, for he is constantly trying to make us regard ourselves instead of Christ . . . We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul.
