[We will consider the Trinity before long in our sermon series on paradoxes in Scripture. Michael Reeves’ 2012 volume, Delighting in the Trinity, is an engaging, insightful, and enjoyable meditation on the importance of this key teaching. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite. Page numbers are in parentheses – Coty]

Neither a problem nor a technicality, the triune being of God is the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy. (18)

Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God ‘does’ being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old ‘God’. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation. The French Reformer, John Calvin, appreciating this deeply, once wrote:

we ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us . . . To conclude once for all, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time bear in mind that . . . we are indeed his children, whom he has received into his faithful protection to nourish and educate . . . So, invited by the great sweetness of his beneficence and goodness, let us study to love and serve him with all our heart.

It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence. We might acknowledge that the rule of some heavenly policeman was just, but we could never take delight in his regime as we can delight in the tender care of a father.”  (23)

Knowing God to be the triune God of love, [Augustine] held that we were not created simply to live under his moral code, hoping for some paradise where he will never be. We were made to find our rest and satisfaction in his all-satisfying fellowship. Moreover, our problem is not so much that we have behaved wrongly, but that we have been drawn to love wrongly. Made in the image of the God of love, Augustine argued that we are always motivated by love—and that is why Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They sinned because they loved something else more than him. That also means that merely altering our behavior, as Pelagius suggested, will do no good. Something much more profound is needed: our hearts must be turned back. A little over a thousand years later, Martin Luther picked up Augustine’s line of thought to define the sinner as “the person curved in on himself,” no longer outgoingly loving like God, no longer looking to God, but inward-looking, self-obsessed, devilish. Such a person might well behave morally or religiously, but all they did would simply express their fundamental love for themselves. (67)

Everything we have seen means that life with this God is as different from life with any other God as oranges are from orang-utans. If, for example, God wasn’t about having us know and love him, but simply about having us live under his rule, then our behavior and performance would be all that mattered. The deeper, internal questions of what we want, what we love and enjoy would never be asked. As it is, because the Christian life is one of being brought to share the delight the Father, Son and Spirit have for each other, desires matter. … The Spirit is not about bringing us to a mere external performance for Christ, but bringing us actually to love him and find our joy in him. And any performance ‘for him’ that is not the expression of such love brings him no pleasure at all. [Jonathan] Edwards compares such loveless Christianity to a cold marriage, asking:

if a wife should [behave] very well to her husband, and not at all from any love to him, but from other considerations plainly seen, and certainly known by the husband, would he at all delight in her outward respect any more than if a wooden image were contrived to make respectful motions in his presence? (99)

What is your Christian life like? What is the shape of your gospel, your faith? In the end, it will all depend on what you think God is like. Who God is drives everything. So what is the human problem? Is it merely that we have strayed from a moral code? Or is it something worse: that we have strayed from him? What is salvation? Is it merely that we are brought back as law-abiding citizens? Or is it something better: that we are brought back as beloved children? What is the Christian life about? Mere behaviour? Or something deeper: enjoying God? And then there’s what our churches are like, our marriages, our relationships, our mission: all are molded in the deepest way by what we think of God. In the early fourth century, Arius went for a pre-cooked God, ready-baked in his mind. Ignoring the way, the truth and life, he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father; thus alone, he is not truly love. Thus he can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know him. Arius was left with a very thin gruel: a life of self-dependent effort under the all-seeing eye of his distant and loveless God. The tragedy is that we all think like Arius every day. We think of God without the Son. We think of ‘God’, and not the Father of the Son. But from there it really doesn’t take long before you find that you are just a whole lot more interesting than this ‘God’. And could you but see yourself, you would notice that you are fast becoming like this ‘God’: all inward-looking and fruitless. (99)

(Quoting Miroslav Volf) I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.  (119)

With the God who is eternally love, his anger must rise from that love. Thus his anger is holy, set apart from our temper-tantrums; it is how he in his love reacts to evil. (119)