Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)
God, the one God, eternally exists in three distinct Persons. He is known, eternally, as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This is the Triune nature of God. It is the most profound mystery in all of existence, and it brings to us both Gospel fear and Gospel joy in their greatest measures. For, the doctrine of the Triune God reveals God to us as both Personal and Inter-Personal. That is, God is a relational God in His very essence.
Before the world was, God was. And God is, eternally, the God of love. When Jesus says, “For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself does” (John 5:20), His Words reveal to us the eternal love that has existed between the Persons of the Godhead from eternity past. These are mysteries that reveal to us the nature of God, and thus the purpose for our own existence.
Who is the Lord? He is the one God who eternally exists in three distinct Persons:
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)
In whose image is man created? God created us, male and female, in His own image. The image of God is not shared with angels. Therefore, when God says, “Let Us make man in Our image,” there is a plurality of Persons within the Godhead revealed through the creation of man in the image of God.
And who, then, are these Persons within the Godhead? The God of Scripture entrusted His Prophet Isaiah, His beloved Prophet, with the recording of these wondrous mysteries:
“Come near to Me [this seems to be Christ Himself speaking here], hear this: I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, I was there. And now the Lord God and His Spirit have sent Me.” (Isaiah 48:16)
And then, in the sixty-third chapter of the book of Isaiah, the Prophet preaches the Triune nature of God through the revelation of the lovingkindnesses of the Father, and the afflictions of the Son, and the grieving of the Holy Spirit on account of the sins of God’s own people Israel [Isaiah 63:7-10]. Moreover, it was from the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah that Jesus Himself, preaching in the synagogue at Nazareth [Luke 4:16-22], declared both His Person and His work in the language of the Triune God:
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” (Isaiah 61:1)
No one has ever seen God, but the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, came to reveal the nature of God to us. At His baptism, that divine nature was revealed to be Trinitarian:
When all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also was baptized; and while He prayed, the heaven was opened. And the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven which said, “You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:21–22)
Therefore, when the Lord Jesus commissioned His Apostles to baptize others, the commission was, indeed, Trinitarian:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name [singular!] of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19)
Our faith is Trinitarian because our God is eternally Triune in nature. The one body of the Church, which guards the one faith and one baptism of the Gospel, is ruled by the three Persons of the Godhead [Ephesians 4:4-6]. This, then, defines us as the saints of God:
[We are]…elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:2)
How, then, does John, the Beloved Apostle, greet the churches that are in Asia? He greets them in the name of the Triune God:
John, to the seven churches which are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from Him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven Spirits who are before His throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler over the kings of the earth. (Revelation 1:4–5)
We, then, reject every teaching that denies the doctrine of the Trinity. We see every such false teaching as proceeding from Antichrist. And we hold fast the Historic Christian defense of the doctrine of the Trinity against equal but opposite perils. For, just as the carpenter on the high extension ladder leans neither to the right, nor to the left, lest he fall to his own peril, so too do we totter neither towards the belief in three separate gods, nor towards an understanding of the Persons of the Trinity that is merely modal or symbolic, and not eternally distinct. There is one, eternal God, who eternally exists in three distinct Persons. Away, then, with the Mormon abominations! And what shall we say of Islam? For Islamic doctrine dishonors God by denying the Triune God with such demonic vehemence that it makes even other heretical sects blush at its brazen blasphemies.
God is triune. Therefore, God is love. And thus, dear Saints, the Apostolic command, “Let all that you do be done with love” (1 Corinthians 16:14), comes to us with great, convicting power. For, we confess, with sorrow in our hearts, that we do not do all in love, but rather with a mixture of love and selfish aims. Far too often, we play our instruments of speech with a strong grip on our pride, much like sounding brass. We speak rashly, without humble, cross-bearing love for our neighbor, and so utter empty words.
Nevertheless, the world today defines love backwards, and so according to the twists and distortions of Satan, the deceiver. It takes worldly love, which is a love that does not fear the Lord, and uses it to define God’s love. Yet true love, which is the true love of Christ, comes not from man, from below, but from God, from above. That is to say, the phrase “do all things in love” must be defined not by man, but by God Himself. For, God loves first. He Himself “does all things in love.” We, therefore, learn what love is only by watching what God does.
This is love. What God does is always true love. Yet this gives the lie to the compromised churches of the world. For, God does an abundance of things which the world calls hateful. Yet He does them because He is love. Thus His testing of Israel in the wilderness, even allowing them to hunger in the wilderness, and then striking them with wrath when they grumbled against Him in unbelief, was done—all of it—in love [Deuteronomy 8:2-3; Psalm 78:31]. If God abandons His holy Temple in Jerusalem, such that the attack of the Babylonians will find no defensive God in Jerusalem to thwart it, and the people in the besieged city will eat the flesh of their own offspring because of the greatness of the famine within the city walls [Ezekiel 10:18-19; Jeremiah 19:9]; or if He tells His Apostle to deliver up Hymenaeus and Alexander to Satan, so that they may learn not to blaspheme [1 Timothy 1:20]; or if the risen Christ casts the false prophetess in Thyatira into a sickbed, and kills her children with death, in order to display His wrath against her adulterous teachings [Revelation 2:22-23], He does all of these things in love. His love betroths formerly adulterous Israel to Himself in righteousness and justice, in lovingkindness and mercy [Hosea 2:19], and weeps over Jerusalem [Luke 19:41], and promises us, His disciples, that in His Father’s house are many rooms, and that He has gone ahead to prepare a place for us there [John 14:2]. Yet His love also judges and makes war [Revelation 19:11]. It saves the chief of sinners [1 Timothy 1:15]. It casts “the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars” into “the lake which burns with fire and brimstone” (Revelation 21:8).
O dear Saints, the nature of love is found in God. It is defined pre-creation, through the doctrine of the Triune God. Yet this means that to know love, one must know God. And yet to know God, that is, as the one, true God, the only God, who is the God revealed in the Scriptures, and made known through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, with power, one must fear God. For, the Triune God of love has revealed Himself to be three-times holy. His judgments are to be dreaded. His holy presence is to be feared. He is a consuming fire, and it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Therefore, true love is a love that trembles at God’s Word. True love is that which fears the Lord of the Heavenly hosts.
Summation: Christ, the Object of the Father’s Infinite Love!
We are taught by the Spirit to know the Triune God. And as the anointing of the Holy Spirit teaches us to know God as Triune, He instructs us in the eternal Father’s infinite love for His eternal Son, and thus in the uncreated Son’s infinite love for His uncreated Father:
The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into His hand. (John 3:35)
The Apostle John, in particular, was chosen by God to record the sayings of Jesus regarding the eternal Father’s love for His eternal Son. God is Triune. And the Father loves the Son, even as the Son loves the Father, throughout eternity—in timeless, boundless fashion:
Then Jesus answered and said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” (John 5:19)
And,
Then Jesus said to them, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things.” (John 8:28)
And, speaking of the eternal mystery of the indescribably glory of the infinite love shared between the Persons of the Godhead prior to the creation of the world:
“Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17:24)
Who can even begin to articulate the Father’s love for the Son before the foundation of the world? Who, then, can look, by faith, upon the crucified Christ, with blood streaming from His brow, and pouring out from His hands and His feet, and even attempt to begin to articulate the love of God for His elect children as expressed through Christ’s cry to His Father in Heaven, “My God! My God! Why have You forsaken Me?” (Mark 15:34)?
God’s main interest is in Christ. His care is for His eternal Son, through the love of the Holy Spirit. He does love us, even us, unworthy servants, who have been born of His Spirit, but only in Christ, and only through His indwelling Spirit. He loves us only because, by faith, we have Christ in us, the hope of glory. He loves us through His love for His Son.
Behold, then, what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called His children, and that we, when Christ is revealed, shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is [1 John 3:1-3]! God is one God in three distinct Persons. We, the Church, which is Christ’s Body, are one Church, yet with many distinct gifts of the Spirit. Yet the love of God in us compels us to use all of our distinct gifts for the one purpose of worshipping the Father by worshipping the Son, in the Spirit. For, in the Kingdom of Heaven, the distinction of persons and gifts amongst the saints of God shall be used, harmoniously, to sound the one music of worship, and the one refrain, “All is for Christ! All is unto God! All is by His Spirit!” And thus God, our relational God, shall dwell with us, and quiet us with His love, and rejoice over us with singing. And Christ, our loving Christ, shall sit upon His throne, and shepherd us and lead us to living fountains of waters. And God shall wipe away every tear from our eyes.
And so may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the Father, and the communion and fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
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