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
Repent! … From the Sin of Religion
People often think that being Christian is about “being religious,” but loving others in the way that Christ instructs us is about as far removed from religion as anything could be. Religion, as I use the term, is a system of beliefs and behaviors one embraces as a means of getting life—whether this be feeling…
Was Jesus Fully God and Fully Human?
In the previous post I argued for the logical possibility of the Incarnation, so today I’d like to establish its biblical foundation. This will be review for some readers, but it’s important review because this doctrine is the absolute bedrock of the Christian faith. For example, this doctrine alone is what allows us to claim…
Doing the Kingdom, Not Voting It In
Our central job is not to solve the world’s problems. Our job is to draw our entire life from Christ and manifest that life to others. Nothing could be simpler—and nothing could be more challenging. Perhaps this partly explains why we have allowed ourselves to be so thoroughly co-opted by the world. It’s hard to…
Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 2
This is the second of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? If you missed it, you can catch the first installment here.
Overview of Crucifixion of the Warrior God
Greg reviewed the content of his new book, Crucifixion of the Warrior God, as a part of the Woodland Hills Church Covenant Partner gathering on March 5, 2017. If you want a fairly succinct synopsis of the thesis of his book, look no further. Ten years ago, Greg set out to write a book justifying the…
What To Do With the Violent God of the Old Testament
For eight years Greg has been researching for and writing the book entitled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. In it he confronts the commonly held idea that the Old Testament depictions of God behaving violently should be held alongside of and equal to the God revealed through Jesus dying on the cross. But if the Old Testament…