LIFE IN THE TRINITY

Before any humans were created God was already loving.  The Father loved the Son in the Spirit and the Son loved the Father in the Spirit. I think we can say that God is a circle of joyful love. 

Because God is a circle of love he is content. He is not needy.  He is not lacking anything.  And yet, the love of the lovers cannot be contained.  They must expand the circle. The three persons had such joy in the circle of love they wanted to extend it to others.  So they created us to share in the love and to become loved and loving with them in the circle of love.   The God who is love created us in love, through love and for love within the circle of love. 

We did not want all this.  We wanted to live our own way.  We wanted to live in self-love.  So we rejected the circle of love.  But God didn’t give up on his purpose.  We did not love the God who is love, but in love, he loved us and came after us.  Through Jesus and the Spirit, he brings us back within the circle of love to be loved and loving within the circle of love that God is. 

As Father Son and Spirit move together in the world, we see that the divine persons are so tightly bound up together that we cannot think of one person apart from the others.  Indeed, their relationships with one another make them who they are as persons. 

It follows from this that human persons are also defined similarly by their relationships with one another. God created us to be relational to the point that being relational makes us persons.  However, our relationships with others are now seriously depersonalised. But through Jesus and the Spirit, God’s relations with us and our relations with God are deeply personalised.  And so, T. F Torrance speaks of Jesus as the personalising person, who restores us as persons in relation to other persons. 

As God personalises us in Jesus and the Spirit we come to know something of God as the communion of Father, Son and Spirit within their inner life.  We cannot begin to understand this by merely studying the doctrine of the Trinity.  Only as personalised persons sharing in the communion of love can we begin to see who the Triune God is.  

When Eugene Peterson began to see the Trinity as an emphatic statement that God is relational he moved into a new life of praying as relational and serving as relational.  I suppose that was because he was in the process of being personalised. He was personalised by the Person of the Son who lives as a dearly loved Son in a relationship with his Father in the communion of the Spirit.  And who also lives in us as a personalising person restoring all our relationships in the Spirit.

God is three-person relational.  But what do we mean by person?  To answer this question, we focus on the three-person relational God. God the Father is who he is in relation to his Son.  He is not who he is as Father without the Son.  God the Son is who he is in relation to his Father.  He is not who he is as Son without the Father.  Each Divine Person is other than and distinct from the other two.  And yet, they are so interrelated that they always intertwine with one another.

Likewise, each human person is only who he or she is as a person in relation to other persons.  We were created to be persons in relation to the personal God.  And also in relation to one another.  But we humans turn into ourselves to find who we are within ourselves.  So now we even define a person in terms of who we think we are as individuals. This is a departure from God’s intention for us.

The whole purpose of God through Jesus is to restore us to relationship.  Having reconciled us to God, Jesus sends the Spirit from the presence of the Father to restore our relation with the communal God.  That’s why TF Torrance speaks of Jesus as the “Personalising Person” and ourselves as “Personalised Persons.”  He restores our personal relationship with the personal God, and in doing so, he restores our personal relationship with one another.  We become God’s community in space and time restored in relationship with God and one another.  And so, we share in God’s communal life in union with the Son in the love of Spirit.  

During my early years as a Jesus follower, I received teaching about the Trinity fairly close to metaphysical philosophy. It was all about abstract formulations and precise definitions. It was also about heresy hunting. This was a big turnoff.  

However, I later received teaching about God as three-person relational.  He is three-person relational in the the drama of redemption, as all the action moves from the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit. This shows that God has always been three-person relational within his own communal life. He is essentially relational and calls us into relationship with him.  

This opened up to me a life of prayer as relational.  I saw for the first time that praying is sharing in Jesus’ relationship with his Father in the Spirit.  A conversation is already going on between Jesus and his Father in the Spirit and we get to share in that relational conversation in union with Jesus.

We easily slip into prayer as mere request.  We ask God to meet our own needs and the needs of our friends and family.  It is easily reduced to list-making and requests.  We must see that prayer is primarily a relationship. The request element is simply part of the relationship. We need to develop a new relational way of praying that arises from discovering who God is as a three-person relational being.  In the Spirit, the relational God draws near to us through Jesus for relationship; and in the Spirit, we draw near to the relational God through Jesus for relationship.  We share in the Son’s relationship with his Father as we cry abba Father in the Spirit of his Son.

The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you” (John Owen). We can add, that the greatest hurt and harm we can do to ourselves is not to believe that God loves us. We were created out of love, through love, and for love to live within God’s joyful communion of love.  But, tragically, too many miss that by failing to simply believe that he really does love them to the core.  

God has wonderfully demonstrated his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Christ gave himself for us, not while we were godly or righteous or worthy in some other way, but while we were God rejecting sinners.  God as human died for his enemies with no guarantees that we would ever turn to him.  Furthermore, God pours his love into our hearts by the Spirit that he has freely given us in Christ.  And by that same Spirit, we grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.  By the Spirit, we come to know this love that surpasses knowledge. 

God has revealed through Jesus a limitless ocean of love between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, an ocean that overflows towards humanity even when that humanity has turned against him.  And God takes us ever deeper into the revelation of himself as Love in his Spirit. Truly God loves us and wants us to know his love.

We do not discover what God is like by drawing on our ideas.  Nor do we gain this knowledge from a teacher. No! We come to know God because he became present to us through the activity of his Spirit. This Spirit, who searches the “depths of God,” revealed Jesus to us so that we came to know God through Jesus. 

We may speak about our journey towards God. However, we must first turn this around to emphasise God’s journey toward us.  In the person of Jesus, God came to us as one of us. And now he comes to us personally through this Spirit, gathering us into his family. In this journey, God finds us where we are and discloses what he is like through Jesus and in his Spirit.  So a Trinity of divine persons is working together to draw us into the life of God.

The only way we grasp the truth about God is for God to grasp us telling us again and again what he is like. Why? Because God is The Truth and is in charge of the truth.  Furthermore, as broken and fractured beings, we have no capacity in and of ourselves to find the truth about God. God alone shares himself with us.

The Living God is still speaking.  He is not simply the God of the past, but the God who is present here and now by his Spirit. And only by this Spirit, who searches the depths of God, do we come to know God. Therefore, with Paul, we keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better (Ephesians 1: 17). 

When the risen Jesus encountered Saul on the road to Damascus, Saul asked, “Who are you, Lord?  The answer was, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”  Following that encounter, Saul knew that Jesus is indeed The Lord God of Israel.  So later he could write, “…there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live” (1 Corinthians 8: 6). 

By the Spirit, we confess Jesus as Lord.  So, we affirm Jesus as the Lord God of Israel.  However, turning that around and affirming God AS Jesus is more than a little helpful.  The word God has many different meanings as people put their own ideas into it.  But when we affirm God as Jesus, we see God as he is unveiled to us through this man.  It isn’t simply God in this human, but God as this human. We really need to let this sink in.

In light of this, we now understand that there is simply no God hiding behind Jesus waiting to be found.  No divine being is more real or true than Jesus. When we see Jesus we see God. So, as the Nicene Creed emphasises, the Son is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. From now on, the answer to every question about God is Jesus. Jesus is God and he reveals who God is and what he is like.  If you want to see what God is like you look at Jesus. 

Saul of Tarsus was a zealous Jew who seemed to think that God called him to severely punish those who were hindering God’s righteous purposes.  That meant he was ardently opposed to Jesus and his followers. However, a very different God met him on the road to Damascus. This God came to Saul declaring love for those Saul once hated. Indeed, in this encounter, God also showed that he loved Saul even as he was filled with hate and murder.  

This encounter transformed Saul.  He now loved what he once hated. The one Saul hated most was Jesus but now this hated Jesus meets Saul embracing him with love. In this encounter, Jesus also called Saul to share his love with the Gentiles.  How could Saul do this?  Naturally, Saul hated the Gentiles and only wanted to tell them how God hated their ways and was bent only on punishing them severely. Nevertheless, he is now called to tell the Gentiles how much God loved them and wanted them. This revelation of love was unexpected and involved a massive reorientation. He was moving wholeheartedly in one way, and then suddenly he was heading in a radically different direction. This shift happened because God intervened dramatically in a revelation of the risen Jesus changing everything.  

The unveiling of Jesus to Saul on the road to Damascus made everything new.  He now had a new understanding of who God really is through the unveiling of Jesus by the Spirit.  He entered into a new way of living: sharing in Jesus’ communion with the Father by his Spirit.  And also, a new vocation: sharing in the mission of Jesus in the Spirit on behalf of the world and the whole cosmos.

When I first came to faith, I knew very little about God. However. in my journey, I soon became serious about knowing who God is and what he is like.  I realised that I needed to think hard about who God is. So, I read books on knowing God. However, I did not see that I needed to think first about how we know God.  I failed to see that the way we know God determines the kind of knowledge we have of him. So what is the right way of knowing God?  Where do we find out what God is really like? We continue using our minds to discover who God is and what he is like. Nevertheless, we must humbly accept that we are not in charge of knowing God. Knowledge of God begins with God’s desire to make himself known and it happens as God unveils himself through Jesus and by his Spirit. We come to know God in living encounters as those now known by God.  

Knowledge of God is relational and given relationally as he encounters us through Jesus and by his Spirit. And our knowing grows ever deeper from inside the circle of our life within the Triune Communion and not from without?  Within that communion, we pray with Paul that we may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,  and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Are we able to discover who God is by our own reasoning?If you ask people about God, they may say, I think God is… In their own minds, they decide what God is like or even if he exists.  That isn’t where we should begin.  God has shown us what he is like by unveiling himself through Jesus and his Spirit.  That means we always begin by saying, God is like Jesus.  

Through Jesus, God unveils himself showing who he is as Love. In love, the Father’s Son came to us as a human person.  He participated freely and fully in our human plight, going down to the very lowest place on the cross. He faithfully walked towards the cross in self-giving love for us.  In this dark event, God unveils himself showing who he is as Love. 

How do we come to know this truth of God as Love? Jesus tells us that he is the way and the TRUTH and the life. He is the truth about God because he is the true God.  He is the truth about us because he is the True Human.  We come to know him as the truth as he encounters us personally by the Spirit of Truth.  And so, this truth is personal.  The risen Jesus comes to us in personal encounters as the presence of God with us and for us as one of us. We do not know the truth in this dynamic way constantly and perfectly.. Far from it! The point is that Jesus is the truth coming to us personally by the Spirit of truth