If we drew our walk with Jesus topographically, the shape of the land would look more like the Appalachian Mountains than the Central Plains. We all experience highs and lows, vistas and valleys, uphill climbs and downhill drifts. The predictable unpredictability of our spiritual journey raises a pressing question: When (not if) I am in a spiritual valley, what paths will lead me back to higher ground? Susanna Wesley (1669–1742), mother of John and Charles Wesley, regularly found her way out of spiritual valleys in a way that might surprise us. She meditated on the Trinity.
Many of us have thought of the Trinity as a puzzle to be solved or a mathematical equation to ponder. We might pull out our Trinitarian knowledge when taking a theology exam, but it stays on the shelf when we encounter doubts, trials, or spiritual drought. Susanna’s practice prompts us to consider how well we know the Trinity. Her deep understanding of the triune God changed her life, and we would do well to follow in her footsteps.
Susanna’s Surprising Comfort
The Wesley family’s life was not lacking in hardship. At least seven of their children died at a young age. Susanna suffered ill health most of her adult life. Finances were a constant concern for their large family, and in 1709, they lost everything when a fire destroyed their home. In spite of many earthly trials, however, Susanna’s greatest concern was for her own soul and the souls of those she loved. One of her journal entries records a conversation she has with herself in a season of personal spiritual distress:
You still fear that your repentance is partial. . . . ’Tis the grief and exceeding trouble of your soul that you have not, nor cannot (as you apprehend) serve God any better. . . . Discouraged by the experience of daily renewed failings . . . you seem to stagger at the promise of God through unbelief.
In the grip of fear, grief, discouragement, and unbelief, how does Susanna respond? She rehearses what she knows about the Trinity:
Consider the infinite boundless goodness of the ever blessed Trinity, adore the stupendous mystery of divine love! That God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost should all concur in the work of man’s redemption! What but pure goodness could move or excite God, who is perfect essential blessedness! That cannot possibly receive any accession of perfection or happiness from his creatures. What, I say, but love, but goodness, but infinite incomprehensible love and goodness could move him to provide such a remedy for the fatal lapse of his sinful unworthy creatures? (Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings, 224–25)
In one small paragraph, Susanna confesses at least three things all of us should know about the Trinity.
The Trinity Is Ever Blessed
First, the Trinity is “ever blessed.” In himself, without reference to anything else, the triune God is “perfect essential blessedness” (or happiness). He is complete and sufficient; he has no needs, and he serves no other purposes than his own (Acts 17:25).
This means, as theologian Fred Sanders explains, “The Trinity isn’t for anything beyond itself, because the Trinity is God. . . . God’s way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simultaneously from all eternity, perfectly complete in a triune fellowship of love. . . . God the Trinity is the end, the goal” (Deep Things of God, 68). In the happy land of the Trinity (as Sanders puts it), God has “all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself. . . . He is the alone fountain of all being” (London Baptist Confession 2.2).
God’s happiness in himself gives great comfort to Susanna and to us. Our broken world and our wayward hearts make it far too easy for us to conceive of God as less than happy. But if God is happy in himself, without reference to us or even the universe, then his happiness is forever constant, however inconstant we may be. Faced with her failings, Susanna comforts herself by remembering the “ever blessed Trinity,” and so might we. God’s happiness does not depend on us, but all our happiness flows from the heart of the happy God.
The Trinity Is a Mystery of Divine Love
God’s “essential blessedness” leads to something else we should know: The Trinity is a mystery of divine love. Christians understand that redemption is marvelous and mysterious. We marvel because the perfectly happy God did not need to create the world or redeem it. The great mystery is that he chose to create and redeem us all the same.
In a letter to a friend, Susanna understands the motive God had in redemption: “He loved us because he loved us” (Complete Writings, 173). Our salvation springs from the mysterious love of God alone. The pure graciousness of God’s love prompts Susanna’s praise: “What, I say, but love, but goodness, but infinite incomprehensible love and goodness could move him to provide such a remedy for the fatal lapse of his sinful unworthy creatures?”
Such incomprehensible love can come only from a God who is love (1 John 4:7–8). To confess the Trinity is to confess that, from all eternity, the Father has loved the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit. As Michael Reeves writes, the Father has always been the Father, “loving and giving out his life and being to the Son.” And the Son has always been the Son, “the going out — the radiance — of the Father’s own being.” And the Spirit has always been the Spirit, stirring up “the delight of the Father in the Son and the delight of the Son in the Father, inflaming their love and so binding them together” (Delighting in the Trinity, 27–29).
There is no greater assurance in the midst of discouragement than to remember that we are loved by the God who is Love and freely gives love to whomever he pleases. Freed from the burden of earning God’s love and the fear of losing it, we simply receive it with deepest gratitude.
The Trinity Is the Gospel
Finally, the Trinity is revealed most clearly in redemption. The gospel is the good news, as Susanna marveled, “that God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost should all concur [or work together] in the work of man’s redemption!” When we think “gospel,” we should think “Trinity,” because, as Fred Sanders says, “the Trinity is the gospel” (Deep Things of God, 170). The gospel declares that for our salvation, the triune God gives himself to us and comes to dwell in us. The Father gives his beloved Son to make us his own sons and daughters by providing our ransom and placing his Spirit in us, thus making known the depths of divine love for us. When we share in the life of Christ, C.S. Lewis says, we are
sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life, we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as he does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. . . . The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else. (Mere Christianity, 177)
In giving us himself, God makes us partakers of his own happy love. Such is the “infinite boundless goodness of the ever blessed Trinity” that Susanna adores.
Susanna Wesley’s Trinitarian theology not only comforts her in the trials of this life; it leads her to delight in the life to come. An eternity in fellowship with the God who is infinite Happiness and incomprehensible Love can only be, as she describes in her journal, “full and perfect enjoyment of solid inexpressible joy and felicity. . . . We shall behold him as he is, shall know as we are known” (Complete Writings, 395).
When we find ourselves weighed down by discouragement or tested by trials, as we surely will, we too can lift our eyes to the infinite happiness, mysterious love, and life-giving grace of the ever-blessed Trinity and find much-needed comfort. To be Christian means being Trinitarian, and thus to delight in the life of God, depend on the love of God, and desire the glory of God.
Desiring God