The Explanation For Our Difficulties

    From My Utmost for His Highest

. . . that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us . . . —John 17

Chambers encourages us to know that we will one day be one with the Father just as Jesus is one with the Father. 

But what does that mean? How can we know the nature of OUR relationship with God if we don't try and grasp the relationship that God and Jesus have with each other.  Let's look at this as we consider . . 

. . . this excerpt from A Rooster Once Crowed:

Tim Keller is the pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. In 2006 he started a sermon series titled “King’s Cross” where he distilled for me three things that we can discern from these interactions:

First, if the heavens and the earth were created by a triune God, then ultimate reality is relational. Said another way, the ultimate focus of the world and our lives, in order to use them both within warranty, is within community.

Second, the nature of the Trinity is LOVE. This is shown in the singular example of the Three being in the same place in the presence of man [in Mark 1:9-11], where Jesus is literally covered in love—You are My Son Whom I love—and the Spirit fills Him with power. Each honors the other with love and service.

And third, this community among the three, sharing in love from all time, is Their essence. It is why we can say that God is love.

I love how Cornelius Plantinga [in Engaging God's World...] puts it:

At the center of the universe, self-giving love is the dynamic currency of the trinitarian life of God. The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, defer to one another. Each person, so to speak, makes room for the other two. I know it sounds a little strange, but we might almost say that the persons within God show each other divine hospitality. After all, John’s Gospel tells us that the Father is ‘in’ the Son and that the Son is ‘in’ the Father (17:21), and that each loves and glorifies the other. … each of the divine persons harbors the others at the center of His being. In a constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others.

Later in the same sermon series, Keller points out the excellence of the Trinity, and that its existence is one of the most powerful examples of the truth of Christianity. No one would ever come up with it; the Trinity’s complexity overloads the brain, and yet it fits perfectly within the framework of the Gospel.

Without the Trinity, we run into all kinds of problems. Consider love. Love exists between one being and another. Without the other, love cannot exist. So if God is fundamentally love—true love—then without the Trinity, without the others, before Creation, there could have been no love. God created us to love out of love, and the existence of the Trinity makes that possible.

If God is One, and not Three, then He would have sought love from us. If that had been the case, then His essence would be something other than love. But the dynamic of the Trinity is off the spectrum. It represents the unity of absolute truth that comes from One (Three in One), but the diversity of community involvement that comes from the Three (One of Three).

Those cultures that worship one god celebrate the individual, but polytheistic cultures (those that worship many gods) tend to look to the family as the ultimate object of worship. The Trinity transcends a linear scale and honors individual sacrifice toward each member of an extended family unit (all of humanity). So begins the great dance of each orbiting around the other.

EXCERPTED FROM A Rooster Once Crowed: A Commentary on the Greatest Story Ever Told, Chapter 1—In the Beginning God (pgs. 20-22). AVAILABLE FORMATS are linked at Full Porch Press.

This idea of the Great Dance as our purpose on earth is so great. You can find more on it here under posts tagged #thegreatcefuldance or in Chapter 10-The Great-ceful Dance in A Rooster Once Crowed. I'd love to hear your comments on this.

I love you.

#inthebeginningGod