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.

The Most Beautiful Truth
Jesus was God incarnate. Yet he continually referred to, and prayed to, God the Father as someone who was distinct from himself. He also continually referred to, and claimed to be empowered by, God the Holy Spirit as someone distinct from himself. And yet Jesus, along with all Jews of his time, believed there is only one God.
Put all of this together and you arrive at the revelation that the one true God somehow exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is, in some profound sense, eternal loving community. This is what is traditionally referred to as the Trinity, and while this term is never used in the New Testament, one finds evidence of the communal nature of God throughout the New Testament.
To me, this is the most beautiful and profound truth revealed in the NT. In fact, I’d argue it’s the most beautiful and powerful concept in all of history! For the doctrine of the Trinity magnificently expresses the truth that God is love (1Jn 4:8,16). Love isn’t merely an attribute God has. Nor is love merely an activity God does. Love is what God eternally is.
Love can only exist between persons, which is why only a God who eternally exists as a community of persons can be said to be love in and of himself. A God who existed as a single consciousness in the midst of absolute nothingness before creating the world could not be said to be love. Love could not be the essence of this solitary God. This solitary God would need to create other persons in order to begin to love. But this is not the case for the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ.
The Trinity is the only view of God that can claim that God never started loving and that God will never stop loving, for this is the only view of God in which God is intrinsically and eternally loving—whether he decides to create a world outside of himself or not.
The revelation that God is triune is the revelation that love is not merely a verb that God does; it’s the noun that God is. God always does the verb because God always is the noun. God is and always has been love. And therefore God is and always has been loving.
Category: General
Tags: God, God is Love, Jesus, Love, The Holy Spirit, Trinity
Topics: Trinity
Related Reading

The “Christus Victor” View of the Atonement
God accomplished many things by having his Son become incarnate and die on Calvary. Through Christ God revealed the definitive truth about himself (Rom 5:8, cf. Jn 14:7-10); reconciled all things, including humans, to himself (2 Cor 5:18-19; Col 1:20-22), forgave us our sins (Ac 13:38; Eph 1:7); healed us from our sin-diseased nature (1…

Sermon Clip: Through Samaria
In this final installment of the Women on the Outside series, we explore the story of the woman at the well Jesus encountered while traveling through Samaria and how he dives right in to the gender and racial tensions of the first century Jewish culture. You can listen/watch the full sermon here: http://whchurch.org/sermons-media/sermon/through-samaria

Jesus Refuted Old Testament Laws
Although it’s clear that Jesus regarded the Old Testament as the inspired word of God, he also directly challenged aspects of the Old Testament law. To illustrate, Jesus was repudiating Sabbath law when he defended his disciples’ harvesting of food on the Sabbath (Mt 12:1-14; cf. Ex. 34:21). Some scholars argue that the disciples were…

Tribalism
Sandra Unger spoke for Greg while he was on vacation the week after the 4th. In this clip, Sandra explains whats tribes are and how that creates unintended separation between people. In the full sermon, she speaks about what it means to be part of the Jesus Tribe. She discusses the reasons people are prone to…

How Details in the Gospels Support Their Historicity
*This essay is adapted from G. Boyd & P. Eddy, Lord or Legend? (Baker, 2007). For a fuller discussion, see P. Eddy & G. Boyd, The Jesus Legend (Baker, 2007). There are a number of questions historians ask when they are trying to assess the historical value of an ancient document that claims to report…

God’s Aikido Way of Defeating Evil
Greg continues his thoughts on the atonement with this installment highlighting the way God uses the evil intentions and actions of his enemies to bring about good. And because this strategy is based in love, the demons who encountered Christ could not possibly imagine what he was up to. They ended up participating in their…