Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (IVP Signature Collection)

by Michael Reeves

Yet Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God.

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. Thus the Trinity is not some piece of inexplicable apparent nonsense, like a square circle

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.

but the very fact that certain Christian beliefs can be shared by other belief systems shows that they cannot be the foundation on which the Christian gospel rests,

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. I could believe in the

Trying to get along with some unspecified “God,” we will quickly find ourselves with another God.

The irony could not be thicker: what we assume would be a dull or peculiar irrelevance turns out to be the source of all that is good in Christianity.

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.

He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation.

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. 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.

To be the Father, then, means to love, to give out life, to beget the Son. Before anything else, for all eternity, this God was loving, giving life to and delighting in his Son.

the Lord calls himself “the spring of living water” in Jeremiah 2:13, and the image crops up again and again in Scripture). And just as a fountain, to be a fountain, must pour forth water, so the Father, to be Father, must give out life. That is who he is. That is his most fundamental identity. 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.

for it is impossible that glory should be without radiance, as it is impossible that the lamp should be without brightness.

Overall, the Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved.

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).

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.

the husband so loves his wife that he excites her to love him back.

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.

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. It all begins to look, dare I say, rather silly. A Gaggle of Gods?

The Father is who he is by virtue of his relationship with the Son.

saying that there had not always been a Son meant that God had not always been a Father. Thus God is not fundamentally a Father, not essentially loving and life-giving, but something else.

There is something about the relationship and difference between the man and the woman, Adam and Eve, that images the being of God—something

John Calvin once wrote that if we try to think about God without thinking about the Father, Son and Spirit, then “only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.”

It is one of the profoundest questions to ask: If there is a God, why is there anything else?

Aristotle’s god is hardly kind or loving. He does not freely choose to create a world that he might bless; it is more that the universe just oozes out of him.

Thus Jesus Christ, God the Son, is the Logic, the blueprint for creation. He is the one eternally loved by the Father; creation is about the extension of that love outward so that it might be enjoyed by others. The fountain of love brimmed over. The Father so delighted in his Son that his love for him overflowed, so that the Son might be the firstborn among many sons. As Paul puts it in Romans 8:29, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (see also Eph 1:3-5). This God does not begrudge having someone else beside him: he enjoys it. 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.

Because it is the Father’s love for the Son that is the motive behind creation, the Nicene Creed ascribes creation especially to the Father: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of

God is simply bursting with warm and life-imparting nourishment, far more willing to give than we are to receive.

the Son is not only the motivating origin of creation: he is its goal.

Studies have shown that in that world it was quite extraordinarily rare for even large families ever to have more than one daughter. How is that possible across countries and centuries? Quite simply because abortion and female infanticide were widely practiced so as to relieve families of the burden of a gender considered largely superf luous.

Father rejoices to have another beside him, and he finds his very self in pouring out his love.

As it is, there is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through its blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.

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.

Bach, for instance, was deeply committed to the idea that the human musician could echo and sound out the cosmic harmony of the divine musician; the orderliness, the minor and the major keys, the shadows and the lights in the music all resonating the structure of the great symphony that is creation. In writing such music, Bach quite deliberately sought to provide fuel for both mind and heart, challenging the intellect and stirring the affections, for the ultimate reality that stands behind music is not only fascinating, but unutterably beautiful. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Bach’s young contemporary, Jonathan Edwards, was an ardent lover of music.

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.

Made in the image of this God, we are created to delight in harmonious relationship, to love God, to love each other.

Lovers we remain, but twisted, our love misdirected and perverted. Created to love God, we turn to love ourselves and anything but God. And this is just what we see in the original sin of Adam and Eve.

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.

Moreover, our problem is not so much that we have behaved wrongly, but that we have been drawn to love wrongly.

Such a person might well behave morally or religiously, but all they did would simply express their fundamental love for themselves.

The nature of the triune God makes all the difference in the world to understanding what went wrong when Adam and Eve fell. It means something happened deeper than rule-breaking and misbehavior: we perverted love and rejected him, the one who made us to love and be loved by him.

Astonishingly, it was this very rejection of God that then drew forth the extreme depths of his love. In his response to sin we see deeper than ever into the very being of God.

In other words, far from hoarding his glory, the Father gives it, freely and fully, to his Son. It is simply that he will give it to no other than his Son.

Thus the high priest would be in the presence of the Lord with the people of God, as it were, on his heart.

Other gods might offer forgiveness, but this God welcomes and embraces us as his children, never to send us away.

If the Son himself had never been close to the Father, how could he bring us close?

He comes that we might grow to know the Father as he knows the Father.