part 2/4
if that seems sort of out of the blue, that’s because it was.
i read The Reason for God by Timothy Keller for the first time freshman year after my dad recommended it to me and said that it had the best explanation of the Trinity he had ever seen. the best way to describe the book is that it’s basically like Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, but in today’s language, so it’s a little easier to understand.
when i read the chapter on the Trinity for the first time, it blew my mind, just completely changed how i look at God and others and how i live my life. and every few months or so, i go back and read it again. the day before Madie spoke at church, i had just been talking to a couple squad mates about it and how it changes my life every time i read it.
so when she asked, “what does it look like for you to have a love encounter with Jesus?”, i knew exactly what it was for me. i pulled out my kindle, and i started rereading.
to sum it up, we believe, as Christians, that God is “one being whole exists eternally in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” this means that God is, in essence, relational. John 16:14 and John 17:4-5 go more in depth into what this looks like, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been glorifying each other for all of eternity. to glorify something means to “praise, enjoy, and delight in them.” you enjoy something simply for what it is, not what it can do for you; you sacrifice your interests to make someone else happy; your ultimate joy is to see them in joy.
Keller says it best when he writes, “the life of the Trinity is characterized not by self-centeredness but by mutually self-giving love. When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other…each one voluntarily circles around the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them.” if you think about it, the image of three people, each centered on the other two, circling around and around; it kind of starts to look like a dance. the divine dance of God, which has been going around since the beginning of time.
but why does it matter? if God is unipersonal, then until He created other beings, there would be no love, since love is something one person has for another. He could be power, great, and sovereign, but He could not be love. but if God is triune, the loving relationships in community are at the center of reality.
