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
Image by GlasgowAmateur via Flickr
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 Kingdom of God (Part 2)
The Church is called to be nothing less than “the body of Christ,” a sort of corporate extension of Jesus’ incarnate body. We are called to replicate who Jesus was by manifesting who Jesus is. And this is how we expand the dome in which God is king—the Kingdom of God. By definition, therefore, the…
On Mental Illness and Jumping from a Burning Building
seyed mostafa zamani via Compfight Ann Voskamp wrote this piece in the wake of the suicide of Rick Warren’s son. It’s disheartening to hear so many thoughtless and cruel comments by other Christians when tragedies like this strike. But here is a voice of knowing and compassion. Here is love. From Ann’s blog post: I…
The Extremity of God’s Love
In response to questions he has received about whether Jesus was actually separated from the Father on the cross, Greg fleshes out his perspective on this. The love that unites the Trinity is the very same love that resulted in the separation of the Father from the Son. This separation actually expresses the great love…
God in Our Image
zen Sutherland via Compfight We came across this piece written by Jonathan Storment earlier this month and we had to share it here. The title of the piece is Everyday Idolatry: My God. He does a great job of outlining the ways that we twist God into whatever we need him to be to prop up…
Featured Sermon Series: Scandalous Love
The Scandalous Love series is often considered one of Greg’s and Woodland Hill’s most foundational series. In fact, it was so important that it subsequently led to the Can’t Stop the Love series. Defining the true character of God is at the heart of what ReKnew is all about, so we wanted to host…
Sermon: Diaper Power
In this short clip from Greg Boyd’s Sermon Diaper Power, he introduces the theme of the sermon where talks about how the poverty of the manger exemplified the power of God. In this sermon, Greg shows that God really is like the baby swaddled in clothes in the manger. The kind of power that God…