The Trinity and the Outworking of Love

The Trinity has always been a complicated subject. After all, it is about God, who is himself complicated, as Paul exclaimed "who has known the mind of the Lord" (Romans 11:34).

If we look past the complicated nature of the trinity then we can see the beautiful truth that at the centre of all reality is a community: Three persons in one being, who exist in perfect love and communion. It is from out of this community of love that all creation comes into being. God did not create humans out of a need to be loved, as he is already loved; and God does not create us in order to have something to love, as God already has that within the Trinity. Rather creation exists as the overflow and outpouring of God’s love.

A couple that chooses to have a child does not do so because the love that exists between them is deficient or insufficient, but rather they do so as the overflow and outcome of the love that exists between them (at least in an idealised sense). So too does God create all things from out of this overflow. Therefore, God’s invitation to us is to become part of His community that already exists.

When we respond to God’s invitation, we become those who share in this love that exists between the members of the Trinity. Just as God’s love flows outwards to His creation so we are then called to share this love that we have received with those around us.

Rublev’s icon of the Trinity (below) has often been a comforting reminder of this reality. The image evokes an invitation to sit down with the three persons. Throughout our day we will hopefully feel this invitation being renewed, the call reissued to come and sit with God. Here we are reminded that our value does not come from doing or from our busyness but rather from our being. We exist from the overflow of God’s love and we are loved for who we are and not what we do.


Throughout this month may you know God’s presence and his invitation to be with him in this joyful community of mutual love and fellowship.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the fact
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in acco
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich comes f
Keep reading