A few days ago we had a bank holiday in England, essentially because it was the last Monday in May. However, in the calendars of many churches, the day before that was Trinity Sunday, which seems a good enough reason to have a day off. Thus begins a long series of Sundays known simply as the 1st Sunday after Trinity, the 2nd Sunday after Trinity etc, right through into October. We keep hearing and seeing the word Trinity, over and over again for months on end: Trinity, God is three, God is one, God is relationship. It is such an important concept because it's at the heart of the life of God as a life of love, but it receives relatively little attention.
God is beyond our understanding; he is incredibly complex. One of the most difficult things to understand about him is that he is one God but three persons. I posted here about that last year, as well as about making sure that we relate to the whole of the Trinity. However, today being at the start of that season again, it's worth thinking afresh about who God is as a relationship. At the end of the day, that's what the Trinity is all about: even on his own, God has to relate; even though his nature is vastly too intricate for us possibly to comprehend, he wants us to know him.
God is love. To love you have to have an object of your love, someone on whom to lavish your affection. Therefore, by virtue of his own nature, when God was on his own he had to be more than one person. The love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is perfect and the model that we have for our own love. It was a love which overflowed beyond the Godhead because it was too great to be contained. It needed other objects for its affection and so God created, to give himself other things to love. How he feels about animals we have largely to guess, although he gives indications that he clearly has a least concern for them. However, he made people to be like him, formed in his image, not gods ourselves, but reflecting the key essences of his nature. In us he has companions who understand his love in the way that he does and who are able to love him back in the same, albeit lesser, way.
No wonder our God, Yahweh, for he has told us his name, was so distraught when Adam and Eve disobeyed him and the intimately close relationship which mirrored that within the Trinity of the Godhead was lost. When he had to cry out, "Adam, where are you?" God's heart must have been not just broken, but torn asunder (Genesis chapter 3, verses 8 & 9). No wonder he had to find a way to reconcile us to himself; no wonder that he was willing to risk breaking the bond of the Trinity to achieve that.
Or perhaps it is a wonder - wonder of wonders that God, in all his glory, should choose to go through the rigours of becoming a man and dying as one in order to save us, rather than just wiping us out and starting again. The whole of the Trinity was involved in this: the Father was willing to part with the Son and have to live with Jesus somewhat at arm's length while he was on Earth; Jesus, the Son, was willing to become human and be crucified with the guilt of all our sin upon him, ultimately being abandoned by both his Father and the Holy Spirit at his lowest point physcially on the cross; the Holy Spirit also had to be willing to endure this separation from Jesus. They did it because God is love; God is relationship. Yahweh could have destroyed the human race, perhaps completely this time, not like when he saved Noah and his family at the time of the Great Flood. But the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were in a love relationship with us and lovingly, together, put together a plan which they were willing to work on as a team, to be able to restore our intimacy with them.
So let's not concern ourselves for now about how a trinity can exist, but rather revel in the fact that such an amazing, complex, almighty God with the whole of Heaven and Earth at his disposal, as well as the ability to create anything else that he wants, should choose to redeem the seriously messed up human race by sacrificing the fundamental core of his nature - the unbreakable intimate relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Godhead that is Yahweh.
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