Glorious Trinity

Meditation on Ephesians 1:4-12

Glorious Trinity was my first attempt at writing something that could be sung in church, designed primarily to communicate truth rather than get all our emotional juices flowing. The structure is basic, it utilises only 3 chords (which was about as many as I could play when I sat down with my guitar to write my first batch of songs!) 

However, it is also part of my meditations on Ephesians: it is what I saw when I studied the first half of Ephesians 1 when I was in a dark place. So, Glorious Trinity represents so much more than a theological quest. It was my ‘Eureka’ moment: the moment where the knowledge I’d gleaned from years of church upbringing and theological study, suddenly met my heart. 

The verses declare some of the attributes of the Trinity that we find in the passage (the Father choses, Jesus redeems, the Spirit seals) but the central ‘heart’ message features in the chorus:

1. God is relational and has been loving himself for all of eternity. 

In love, the Godhead exists: The Father, whom we might think of as ‘God’, is the invisible originator but is not some impersonal force. Rather, he is inherently relational. Ephesians 1:6 declares that Jesus is the One whom God loves. Jesus – the Son – is the living, breathing, speaking Word, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation, there at the beginning, the exact representation of God’s nature, eternally begotten because he is the expression of the perfection of the Godhead.^[1]

And the Holy Spirit? He is where “the divine essence itself flows out and is, as it were, breathed forth in love and joy.”^[2] At the risk of oversimplifying, we might tentatively say this: if Jesus is the personified Word of God, The Holy Spirit is the personified Love of God. As CS Lewis puts it, “What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.”^[3]

Or to quote John Piper, “…the love between the Father and the Son is so perfect, so constant, and carries so completely all that they are in themselves, that this love stands forth itself as a Person in his own right.^[4]”

In other words, God is and has always been trinitarian: loving himself, enjoying himself and expressing that love to himself. This might boggle our brains, but there is a precious take-away from this truth:

2. God, despite his trinitarian form, chose to share his love. 

One of the set texts in my degree was “God for Us” by La Cugna, a 448 page exposition of Trinitarian doctrine. Not the sort of book you dip into in the downstairs loo. Now I’d be lying if I claimed to remember the contents of this text fifteen years after reading it, but the title has always stuck with me. God, in his trinitarian magnificence, is for us. 

Let’s turn back to Ephesians. God chose us before the foundation of the world, in love he predestined us to be adopted into his family. (Ephesians 1:4-5) In short, the impeccable love that God has for himself within the Trinity, he did not keep to himself. He could have been gloriously happy for all eternity existing with himself. But he chose to share. He chose to create us.^[5]

And He chose to be for us. The person of the Son took human form as Jesus Christ and stooped into our world. Then, when Jesus ascended, he ensured his presence remained in the Spirit.

“…love comes from God…God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him… if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is made complete in us.” 

1 John 4:7-12

And that means something else. If we are trusting in Jesus, God can never not be for us. He has chosen to be for us, and he shall not change his mind. Ephesians confirms this. The Holy Spirit is our seal of the promise (v13) proving that God has acted for his pleasure (v9), that he delights to save us, lavishing his grace on us (v8) as a rich man lavishes gifts on the woman he loves. 

When I was young, I thought I knew a decent amount about God (the older I get, the more I realise how little I know!) Still, I doubted God’s love for me. I saw unanswered prayer and interpreted it as carelessness. I felt the burden of a standard I couldn’t attain and doubted the Holy Spirit’s work. 

Until I saw this– God doesn’t need me. But he does want me.

He existed in perfect love long before I was born. Yet, he chose to love me in all my filthy mess. And that is something unbelievably glorious. His love is not affected by anything I do or fail to do. Nor does his love need evidencing in the provision of my vending machine of requests. The perfect expression of his love for me is this: He gave me himself!

And He is all I need.

3. Bags of Gold

At the ACW (Association of Christian Writers) conference this past weekend there was a theme: Gold. And, there were plenty of nuggets to chew on. Yet this gold is not to be conjured up from somewhere inside us. Adrian Plass very helpfully reminded us on the Sunday morning that God gives us bags of gold (Matthew 25:14-30) and the gold we are given is love, which is of God, because God is love. 

God chose to share himself – love – with us. The challenge is, are we sharing him with others?

Glorious Trinity

^[1] See Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:3, John 1:1

^[2] Jonathan Edwards, Writings 121

^[3] CS Lewis, Beyond Personality 21.

^[4] https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/can-we-explain-the-trinity

^[5] See the Trinity at creation: “In the beginning God created (Father)…and the Spirit of God (Spirit) was hovering over the waters…and God said– (Word:Son).” Genesis 1:1-3. “In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God…Through him all things were made…In Him was life.” John 1:1-4.