We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Participating in the Divine Nature (Love)
Image by *Leanda via Flickr
When God created the world, it obviously wasn’t to finally have someone to love, for God already had this, within himself. Rather God created the world to express the love he is and invite others in on this love.
This purpose is most beautifully expressed in Jesus’ prayer in John 17. Jesus prays to his Father that all of his disciples would “be one … just as you are in me and I am in you” (vs 21). Jesus wants his followers to live in some sense inside one another—just as he and the Father live inside each other.
He then says that he’s given his disciples the same “glory” the Father gave him. He did this “so that they may be one as we are one” (vs 22). What God is aiming at, clearly, is a community of people who reflect and participate in his “glory,” which is nothing other than the radiance of his own perfect, eternal, loving, communal, oneness.
As if this wasn’t beautiful enough, Jesus continues by saying that just as the Father is in him, so he prays he’ll be in his disciples “so that they may be brought to complete unity.” This is how “the world” is to become convinced that Jesus was sent by the Father (vs. 21-23). Then Jesus ends his magnificent prayer by proclaiming that he will continue to make the Father’s name (or character) known “in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them” (vs 26).
Stop and read that last sentence again.
The very same love the Father has for the Son—a love, Jesus says, that goes back before creation (vs 24)—is to dwell in Jesus’ disciples, for Jesus himself dwells in his disciples! This blows me away! God’s love for us isn’t a secondary, derivative, watered down kind of love. It’s the very same eternal love the Father has for the Son. It’s the very same love that God’s eternally is.
What I wrote in the post yesterday about God now applies to us. God’s love for us isn’t merely a verb God does: It’s the noun he is. When God loves us, he’s simply being himself toward us. With God there’s no distinction between the love he gives and the love he is.
If we catch even the slightest glimmer of this magnificent truth, we can’t help but be overwhelmed by its beauty.
So, humans were created out of God’s perfect love—in his “image” and “likeness”—for the purpose of participating in and expressing God’s perfect love (Gen 1:26-27). We were created to dance with and in the triune God. We were created for a relationship with God and each other that is nothing less than a participation in, and reflection of, the triune relationship that God eternally is. This is how we “participate in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
Category: General
Tags: God, God is Love, Jesus, Love, Love Your Neighbor, The Holy Spirit, Trinity
Topics: Following Jesus, Trinity
Related Reading
Not the God You Were Expecting
Thomas Hawk via Compfight Micah J. Murray posted a reflection today titled The God Who Bleeds. In contrast to Mark Driscoll’s “Pride Fighter,” this God allowed himself to get beat up and killed while all his closest friends ran and hid and denied they even knew him. What kind of a God does this? The kind…
The Politics of Jesus
Many are so conditioned by the mindset of the world that they can’t even envision an alternative way of affecting society and politics other than by playing the political game as it is done by the established governmental system. Some thus conclude that, since Jesus didn’t try to overhaul the political systems of his day…
The Starting Point for “Knowing God”
While it makes sense that Hellenistic philosophers embraced knowledge of God as the simple, necessary and immutable One in an attempt to explain the ever-changing, composite, contingent world (see post here for what this means), it is misguided for Christian theology to do so. By defining knowledge of God’s essence over-and-against creation, we are defining God’s essence…
Overemphasizing Christ?
In response to my work, some have argued that I tend to overemphasize Christ. In light of the claim that in Jesus we have the one and only definitive Word of God and that no previous revelation should ever be placed alongside him or allowed to qualify what he reveals about God, some allege that…
The Cruciform Beauty of Horrific Divine Portraits
“Only a person who is aware of the crucified Christ can properly understand Scripture.” Luther (Table Talks) In the last three posts I’ve been wrestling with how insights from Matthew Bate’s book, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation might help us interpret violent portraits of God in the OT in a way that discloses how…
On Renunciation
Jonathan Kos-Read via Compfight We are bombarded daily with messages that urge us to satisfy every desire we might have. That’s what consumers do. And that’s exactly what the world has reduced us to: consumers. But what about Jesus’ words in Luke 9:23: Then Jesus said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must…