The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (2 Corinthians 13:14)
Trinity.
What happens in your mind and heart when you read this word? Perhaps you feel intimidated. Perhaps you feel low-grade anxiety that someone will ask you to explain it. Perhaps you imagine an awkward puzzle piece (maybe shaped like a three-leaf clover) that never quite fits, no matter how hard you try. Perhaps you feel a bit frustrated that people spend so much time on such (seemingly) impractical theology. Perhaps you feel intrigued by the mystery.
However you currently feel, I encourage you to delight yourself in the Trinity.
After all, God is most glorified in us when we deeply delight in him. And the God of the Bible is no generic deity. Ours is a God in three persons; we worship in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14). Michael Reeves explains,
Because the Christian God is triune, the Trinity is the governing center of all Christian belief, the truth that shapes and beautifies all others. The Trinity is the cockpit of all Christian thinking. (Delighting in the Trinity, 16)
If we are to take seriously how God has revealed himself in his word, then when we hear God, we should think Father, Son, and Spirit. As Tim Keller observes, even prayer cannot be divorced from God’s triune nature:
The primary theological fact about prayer is this: We address a triune God, and our prayers can be heard only through the distinct work of every person in the Godhead. (Prayer, 66)
To know the true God is to know the Trinity. To love God is to love the Trinity. To delight in God is to delight in the Trinity.
The Trinity is the heartbeat of our joy.
Mystery, Not Problem
Yet how often do we settle for a generic God?
Calvin tells us that if we fail to think of God as Trinity, “only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God” (Institutes 1.13.2). We need God, the great Iconoclast, to tear down the single-person idols we erect in his place.
Too often, we imagine the Trinity as a theological Rubik’s cube, reserved for the professional theologians who teach seminary classes. You need special credentials to access that part of the Christian library. We suppose that “one God, three persons” is a liability for our evangelism and a complication for our faith. But nothing could be further from the truth. Reeves dismantles our doubts:
The irony couldn’t be thicker: what we assume would be a dull or peculiar irrelevance turns out to be the source of all that is good in Christianity. Neither a problem nor a technicality, the triune being of God is the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy. (Delighting in the Trinity, 18)
If we shy away from the lovely triunity of our God, we suffocate our joy. And eventually, we lose everything else. Someone rightly observed, “Those who discard the doctrine of the Trinity discard, usually, every other fundamental doctrine.” Without the most important thing in place — namely, who God is — all the secondary things slip and slide around like greased marbles.
Of course, aspects of the Trinity are a mystery — but a wild and wonderful mystery, a further-up-and-further-in mystery that we will spend eternity exploring and enjoying. Dull doctrine? Not a chance. Boring irrelevance? No way! The Trinity is not a problem but the pith of all our pleasure.
Where All the Beauty Comes From
Consider how delightful this God is: From all eternity, the Father has had a Son — a Son who is the flawless reflection of all his perfections, a Son who is the exact imprint of his nature. And the Father and the Son know and love and delight in one another so completely that their love and joy is a person: the Holy Spirit. C.S. Lewis puts it like this:
[This] is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not a static thing — not even [merely one] person — but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance. The union between the Father and the Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. . . . [It] is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God. (Mere Christianity, 175)
We see this “Great Dance” (as Lewis called it) perhaps most clearly at Jesus’s baptism. The Father expresses his exuberant delight in and love for the Son, and that affection descends on the Son in the form of the Spirit — Anointer, Anointed, and Anointing. Infinite delight and infinite love, eternally shared — this is the three-person God.
Karl Barth tells us, “The triunity of God is the secret of His beauty” (Church Dogmatics, II/1, 661). But we can say more than that: The triunity of God is the secret to all beauty. The triune God is the ocean of all goodness, the fount of all joy, the center of all life. The Trinity is where all beauty comes from.
Trinitarian to the Core
Why does this all matter? Because we were made to enter into the joy of our Maker, to be immersed in the unfathomable fullness of the triune God. Nothing can be more practical than knowing what we were made for. Lewis captures it perfectly:
The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it another way round) each of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in the dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made. . . . If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. (Mere Christianity, 176)
It turns out that, to be Christian Hedonists, we must be Trinitarian Hedonists. You cannot be one without the other. So, for the sake of joy and glory, we should be Trinitarian to the core — Trinitarian to our back teeth. If we do not know God as Father, Son, and Spirit, our theology is impoverished, and we cut ourselves off from the gigantic happiness we were made for. May it never be! Delight yourself in the Trinity.
Desiring God