LIFE IN THE TRINITY

As we turn to thinking about God, where do we begin?  We start with Jesus.  Through him, the one true God makes himself known.  But throughout history, there have been many great thinkers who have created great systems of thought.  Can we simply ignore what has been said so profoundly? 

Can we not, at least, begin with these great systems of thought and fit Jesus in to make them even better?  

We must take  Jesus seriously as THE TRUTH.  We cannot simply adjust the systems of thought we already have and try to fit him in. No! We have to start from scratch and build everything around Jesus.  Whenever we try to contain Jesus within one of our systems of thought we end up with a fake Jesus.

We are always going to be faced with systems of thought that seem true and are difficult to question. Yet, when we try to fit the LORD Jesus into any system of thought we will lose Jesus. We will be left with a shadow.  But don’t we do this, even as Christ-followers?   Don’t we try to fit Jesus into what we already believe about God and the world?  Do we make Jesus the starting point and test everything else by Him?  What is the test of truth in our minds? How do we know what is true?  Is Jesus our standard of truth or do we make him submit to other standards of truth? We must take Jesus seriously as the truth by seeing as him the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all we believe.

When people begin to think about God they may assume that it is possible to begin with our own concepts of  God which we can build up into a fuller knowledge of God. However, when we think about God we only have human ideas about God that we accept as true but are actually false. And we use human words to express these ideas. The “God” that we have in our human minds is an illusion. When Jesus encounters us by the Spirit he reveals the Living God to us.  In doing so, he shows that all our human ideas about God are wrong. 

In Jesus, the living God is both revealed and concealed at one and the same time. He is revealed because when Jesus encounters us he reveals the Living God just as He is – in all His Trinitarian wonder and glory.  He takes our inadequate human ideas and words to make them servants of his own unveiling.   However, we must say God is also concealed because our human ideas and words have not in themselves the slightest capacity to comprehend God. Even the most godly among us cannot grasp all that He is!  Our knowledge of God through Jesus is true but not exhaustive. 

Because God is at one and the same time knowable and unknowable to us we never become his masters.  However, it is also true that in both cases he becomes truly recognisable by us.  We know him, not because of our own thinking and speaking, but simply because he makes himself known to us through Jesus by his Spirit.

God wants us to know him personally even though we don’t want to know him. He makes himself known to us through Jesus and he makes himself known in us by His Spirit. Jesus is The Truth and the Spirit is the Spirit of Truth who will guide us into all the truth in Jesus. He will glorify Jesus within us and among us by making the things of Jesus known to us.  He will glorify Jesus in this way so that we see, in Jesus, the glory of God himself. So we don’t decide what the glory of God is.  No!  God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. The Spirit lights up the face of Jesus in personal encounters.  And in that beautiful face, we see the glory of God.

 We only know God because God first acted towards us through his Son and also within us by his Spirit to make himself known.  And God makes himself known more and more as the living Jesus encounters us again and again in the Spirit.  We don’t begin with our own ideas of God nor do we continue with our own ideas of God.  We are always radically dependent on God making himself known to us through Jesus in the Spirit. That means God is not at our disposal.  We don’t “possess” the knowledge of God by ourselves to make use of it for ourselves. God moves out of his own fullness to make himself known.  Only then do we gaze on the glory of God lost in wonder love and praise.

John looked at the love of God expressed freely in Jesus and said, “God IS Love”. So we cannot describe the Being of God in any other way than simply the one who loves freely. This is the true God and no other.

When I say that God loves freely I simply mean that His love moves entirely from himself as love. He is the loving God who is what he is in the free expression of his love moving from himself alone. God IS the one who loves freely. That’s what we see in Jesus, the one who makes God known.

But is this where we usually begin when considering who God is? I think too many of us begin with philosophical ideas about the divine being. God is infinite, eternal, unchanging and so on. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. He is the perfect “Omni-being”. This is the actual “stuff” of divinity. So when we talk about God this is where we begin. And where some may actually stay. We have in our heads this general idea of the most perfect being.

But is this the way God has made himself known? Has God opened up his own Being to us in these abstract philosophical ways? John tells us he has made himself known in the one who is close to the Father’s heart ( John 1:18 NRSV). He has made himself known as the one who loves freely seeking fellowship with us. This is God as He is in Himself.

Are we able to grasp who God is by ourselves?  Can we ever explain him?  Some of the most brilliant human minds have thought their way to one god, many gods or even no gods at all.  We think that it is down to us to find God and we are smart enough to do it.

Has God really left us to find him by our own efforts?  No! He came to us as Jesus making himself known to us.  Jesus is the very unveiling of God himself in our world.  To know what God is like we don’t begin with what we think he is like. We rather fix our eyes on Jesus as God living, moving and relating in the world.   For Jesus did not simply act for God in the world as many others have done.  Jesus is unique, he acted as God in the world.  Who God is within himself is made known in its deepest depths in this man Jesus.  He is the very revelation of God among us. So, we do not simply look at Jesus as God; we also look at God as Jesus.  That changes everything!  We now see God as he really is – full of lowly self-giving love as one of us.

And now this majestic and humble God comes to us encountering us personally through Jesus and by the Spirit.  He opens himself to us as the living God who always surpasses our knowing.  We don’t decide who God is or what God is like.  That means we cannot own God.  We cannot make knowledge of him our own possession.  

Many people assume they know at least some things about God. They have many ideas about God and some strong opinions on the subject. They assume that God must fit in with the best human logic and the highest human ideas about what is good. John tells us, “No one has ever seen God… (John 1:18). That means all human talk about God is just making it up.

Knowing God is vital for us, so we must deal with the real God, not the one we would like or imagine. The real God might not be what we want him to be! He might be many things we don’t want Him to be.  So where do we find knowledge of the real God? John says, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” (John 1:18).

The only Son is close to the Father’s heart simply because he has always been with God as the Father’s unique Son. And this one who was always with God became human showing us what God is really like.  We might say that we see God in Jesus and through Jesus, but we can say more. For we actually see God as Jesus. The only God I know is the man Christ Jesus.  He is God.  So, we do not try to see God apart from Jesus.  Nor do we begin with Jesus and then move on to see the real depths of God beyond Jesus.  For we only learn the deepest truths about God himself as we look at Jesus. He is the only God we know.

Arius (256 – 336) was a church leader whose starting point for thinking about God was Greek philosophy rather than Jesus. This way of imagining God was stronger to Arius than anything he could see in Jesus.  Arius always thought that Jesus was not “the real thing”, but only a lesser version of the real “stuff” of divinity  It seems to me, that too many of us may fall into this way of thinking.  We may not go along fully with Arius, but, like Arius, we might think we already know what God is like before we ever think about Jesus.  And so, we may always look above and beyond Jesus.

Jesus does not fit into most of the ideas about God that human philosophy and religion have developed. He is God as human. He was utterly humble in serving the lowliest people, washing their feet and embracing the outcasts He humbled himself by going to the very lowest place by dying a shameful death as a common criminal. Jesus will always disturb and outrage human ideas about God, religion and the universe.

Nevertheless, the New Testament declares Jesus as the true Face of God. Thomas Torrance writes, “When we look into the face of Jesus Christ and see there the very face of God, we know we have not seen and cannot see God anywhere else or in another way but in him, for he is God himself become human, and there is no God except the God who has come and meets us in Jesus”.

Truly, Jesus is God with a human face.  We don’t try to get behind him so that we may move beyond him.

Over and over again we need to hear, “Fix your thoughts on Jesus” because we so easily look elsewhere. Not a few may assume that there is some bigger and deeper reality of God that is above and beyond Jesus. They think that the idea of “God” or “spirituality” cannot be confined to just one historical person. The idea is that we can go beyond Jesus to something bigger and even better. Some may say, “I’ve now moved on to a bigger and deeper view of God”.

In the Colossian church, some seemed to think they needed other things alongside of Jesus. They thought that knowledge of angels, spirituality and religion were all necessary to live in the fullness of God. Paul responded to this by writing,
“My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ,  in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2: 2-3). And also, “see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness” (Colossians 2: 8-10).

In contrast to the people he is writing to, Paul has a big view of Jesus as the very fullness of God and the one who brings us into fullness. I don’t think Paul, or even God himself, would ever say to us, “you have made Jesus too big!”

Some have referred to the Holy Spirit as the shy member of the Trinity. He is happy to remain hidden as he shines his light on the Son and the Father through the Son. He wants to remain hidden for this purpose. He is truly glad when he does what he wants to do-glorifying the Son before our eyes. Yes, the Spirit of truth simply wants to bring the radiance of God’s glory to us.

So we do not know the Holy Spirit directly in his own personal glory. We only know the Spirit indirectly as the personal presence of God bringing the glory of God to us in the face of Christ and enabling us to share in that glory as we are transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory. His light shines in us to enlighten us so that we may see the beauty of Jesus with the eyes of our hearts. And as we are transformed into his glory by the Spirit we reflect his beauty to one another.

What a great vision of church! A community gathered around Jesus contemplating his glory in the Spirit and being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory in the Spirit. And also, by the Spirit, reflecting that glory to one another and the world. All this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. Of course! How else?

The Spirit’s passion and purpose is to glorify Jesus within us and among us. The Spirit doesn’t show us the glory with the result that we are detached spectators staring at the glory. Spirit is within and among us and so he glorifies Jesus in such a way that we share in his glory. We can say this because the Spirit unites us personally to Jesus and Jesus to us so that we share in all that he is with us and for us.

During the Old Testament story, the shekinah glory filled God’s dwelling place. This is the shining forth of the personal presence of the Lord himself. God’s Spirit comes to us to make this shekinah glory shine forth even more fully to us in the Face of Jesus, the Father’s Son. The God who said let light shine out o darkness has shone into our hearts (by his Spirit) to give the light of the knowledge of the (shekinah) glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son. Through the Son and the Spirit the divine shekinah glory of God’s personal presence shines towards us and within us and among us. And as we contemplate this glory we are transformed into the same likeness with ever-increasing glory. In this way, we really do share in the glory.

This sharing in the glory is real, but only in part. However, as the Spirit enables us to see something of the glory, we live in sure expectation of the future glory in fullness.
For right now, the Lord who is the Spirit shows us that our lives are hidden with God in Christ and that when he appears we shall appear with him in glory