LIFE IN THE TRINITY

The Almighty God became human to live and move in human frailty. The Creator himself became a creature without ceasing to be the Creator.  The high and holy one stooping to become little and low without ceasing to be who is in majesty. This does not mean a reduction of his power.  It Rather means the expression of his power within human weakness.  In Jesus, the God-Human, God reveals himself as the one who has the inconceivable power of becoming little and low while remaining what he is eternally as majestic and all-powerful Lord. 

This God who became one of us also tasted death.  In doing so he destroyed its power for his death was the death of death. In weakness, he shows his lordship over death.  He demonstrated God’s distinctive power in weakness and suffering on the cross.  This power is so unique that we cannot describe it by comparing it to any other kind of power. 

In Jesus, the God-Human we see God in the highest acting from the lowest, becoming what we are in our lost and hopeless condition to reconcile us to God in himself. In him, we see the triumph of divine Love and Light over all darkness and evil.  

We do not learn what omnipotence is by abstract speculation magnifying human power to the nth degree.  We rather see God’s power as we gaze on his power in weakness demonstrated in the God-Man on the cross. There we encounter the revelation of God’s distinctive kind of power that is, the very opposite of what we would think or could ever imagine.

In the beginning, there was nothing at all. Nothing, that is, except God—Father, Son, and Spirit as a circle of joyful love. However, this God chose to create all things. Our cosmos is no mere accident, but the loving and purposive work of the one true God. Creation expresses the Father’s love for his Son in the Spirit. For the Father made all things through the Son and FOR the Son. (Colossians 1: 16).  His long-range plan is that everything would be brought together and summed up in Jesus, his Son. However, in creating all things for the Son, God also created all things for us in the Son

Some may ask why creation exists at all.  Why is it what it is and not something else? There is no reason why there is something and not nothing apart from the eternal movement of Love within the life of God. The movement of love which overflows from the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit. This is the almighty love of the triune God who does not will to exist for himself alone but for others also. The ungrudging and unrestrained overflow of Love that delights to give life and freedom to his creatures. He loves the world, upholds it and blesses it. He acts in the power of his love to bring us into his own life and freedom.

As we survey the universe with wonder before its immensity and complexity along with its beauty we are in awe of the almighty God of love who made it all from love, through love and for love.  In all its diversity we see it as a great masterpiece of love.

God did not need to create the world in order to have someone to love. God IS love as three persons within a communion of love. The Father loves the Son in the Spirit. The Son loves the Father in the Spirit.  And both Father and Son love the Spirit.  Each of the persons ever pouring himself out to the others in an eternal act of self-giving love. So, God is the one who loves and is also the one who is loved. That means God loves even if there is no creation for God to love. 

Creation expresses the Father’s love for the Son in the Spirit. For The Father made all things through the Son and FOR the Son. (Colossians 1: 16 ) In love, the Father hands over the whole of creation to the Son so that the Son may rule over all as supreme King.  Truly, it is all for him and one day all will be united in him and for his pleasure. In every way, he is the goal of creation.  

Creation is joyfully received by the Son as a loving gift from his Father. And then the Son perfects creation in himself and presents it back to his Father. Paul says, “Then the end will come when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power 

(1 Corinthians 15:24).  He does so, that God may be all in all. So creation is also the Son’s gift of love to the Father.

Truly, Creation emerges from love, it exists in love. it is upheld by love and is drawn towards its destination by love.

Within the church at Colossae, there was a desire for “fullness”. So, to gain fullness, they placed alongside Jesus dietary rules, religious festivals, the worship of angels, false humility, philosophy etc.   With that in mind, Paul wants the Colossians to know for sure that all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Jesus and that we have been given fullness in him. And making that point, Paul gave the Colossians and us a magnificent vision of the Supremacy of Jesus: 

“We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body. He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so expansive, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.”  (Colossians 1:15 -20  The Message).

Here Paul shows us that there is nothing bigger or beyond  Jesus.  So we never seek fullness in Jesus plus something else. If we treat Jesus as merely a part of the picture, we become disconnected from him and then we no longer enjoy the fullness that is in him and only in him. 

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.