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Paradoxology: An Introduction

Paradoxology: The Trinity and God’s Massive Love

The Trinity and the Cross

When we understand the infinite depth of the Father and Son’s loving relationship, it helps us to understand and appreciate the cross even more.

The Trinity tells us how much the Father gave

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16)

“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

“In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:9-10)

How does the Trinity change our understanding of these well-known and beloved verses?

My point here is simple. Our understanding and appreciation of God’s love towards us depends on how much God loves his Son, whom he sent for us. If God loves his son a little, then his love for us diminishes. He wouldn’t be giving up much to save us.

But we know from our understanding of the Trinity that the exact opposite is true: the Father loves his Son more than anything. He has for all eternity been pouring out perfect love towards him in the form of glory–in the divine commendation, “this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”. How great was this love? It was the Father’s love for the Son that exploded into the creation the world; he wanted the whole world to see just how beautiful his Son is.

Sometimes you’ll hear a skeptic say, “What kind of Father is God that he sends his Son to breathe the dirty air of earth and suffer a shameful death upon the cross, while he stays up in Heaven? Our understanding of the Father’s love for the Son should put that accusation to rest once and for all. Ask any father, and I’m sure he would say that he would much rather suffer in place of his child.” Make no mistake, it pained the Father to restrain his greatest instinct–to pour glory and love upon his Son–and to pour out instead the full angry wrath, meant for sinners.

Do you remember the line from the hymn?

“How deep the Father’s love for us, how vast beyond all measure. That he should give his only Son to make a wretch his  great the pain of searing loss, the Father turns his face away. As would which mar the chosen One, bring many sons to glory”

The Father’s love for us is deep and vast beyond all measure. So much so that it pleased him to crush his only Son so that we might be saved. We look with thankfulness to Paul’s rhetorical question in in Romans 8:31: “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”

The Trinity tells us how much the Son lost

In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed to his Father: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me” (Mt. 26:39). Luke, the physician, records that Jesus was under such great duress that he began to sweat great drops of blood.

We are jarred to see the Son of God so unnerved and distraught. Jesus, throughout his ministry, was always calm and always collected. He was always strong and compassionate. What was in this cup? What was it that was so terrible about the cross that made the Savior ? Was it the torture, the abandonment of his disciples, the mocking? Was it the excruciating pain of the cross?

It couldn’t be that. We know from church history that many disciples were abandoned, beaten, mocked, and scorned, but still endured with great courage and confidence. Many of the disciples later faced their crucifixions with great strength and courage. We know that the disciples were not greater than their master. The only explanation is Jesus was about to experience something far more painful than even the pain of the crucifixion.

What about the cross made Jesus tremble? Matthew captures the heart of Jesus’ pain in his agonizing cry as he hung on the cross:

“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”

When we understand the eternal love between Father and Son, we understood how great Jesus’ love is for us. We understand that for all eternity the Father has been loving on the Son. They have never been apart. They have been one in every sense of the word. But on the cross, the Son gives up this fellowship in the most drastic way possible–instead of receiving the Father’s glory and love–he receives God’s full angry burning wrath.

When we understand the Trinity, we also understand Jesus’ cry from the cross as one of profound loss and loneliness. Jesus enjoyed perfect intimacy and union with his Father for all eternity. But on the cross, for the first time, Jesus finds himself utterly alone.

What great love the Son has showed us–that he would trade eternal infinite joy for eternal infinite pain and loneliness? For who? For us, sinners and enemies of God.

The more we meditate on God’s intra-Trinitarian love the more we will be amazed at the love of God at the cross!

In the next post, we’ll look at how understanding God’s eternal intra-trinitarian love expands and deepens the way we understand our relationship with God.

Paradoxology: An Introduction

The first biblical ‘paradox’ I’d like to talk about is the doctrine of the Trinity. There was a period in my life where I really struggled to understand and love the Trinity. As I wrestled with my doubts, I read several books on the topic hoping to find some answers. By far the most helpful book I read was Michael Reeve’s Delighting in the Trinity (You can read Challies’ review here). Reeve’s helped me to not just accept the doctrine of the Trinity, but to cherish it. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in growing in a deeper understanding of God.

That being said, I want to acknowledge up front that I’ve only scratched the surface in studying the Trinity. I write not as an expert, but as a beginning student. The Trinity is not an easy topic to study, so if you reach different conclusions in your study of the Bible, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.  I’m all for any disagreement and discussion that leads to a deeper biblical understanding of and love for our Triune God.

Before we begin, let me give a very quick refresher course on the doctrine of the Trinity:

• God exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are each distinct individuals, with distinct thoughts, feelings, characteristics, and actions. The Father is not the Son. The Father is not the Spirit, nor is the Son the Spirit.

• Each person is fully God: We believe that each person is fully and completely God. As God, each person is equally powerful and equally deserving of glory. None is more powerful or more glorious than the other.

• Yet there is only one true and living God: We do not believe in three gods. We do not believe in a one-person God manifesting himself in three different forms. We do not believe in one God and two super created beings. We believe there is one true and living God, who has existed eternally in three persons.

You can begin to see the difficulty of the Trinity. How are we to understand that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three separate persons, yet still one God?

In the past,  many well-meaning theologians have fallen into heresy trying to reconcile the Trinity with human logic. Others have concluded that Christianity is absurd, while others have tried to get rid of the doctrine altogether. Many of us see the perils of studying the Trinity and in our desire not to be heretics or apostates, we try to talk and think about the Trinity as little as possible.

Is it worth studying the Trinity at all? Can we grapple with the paradox of the Trinity and fall more deeply in love with God? I think so!

For me, the key that helped me see the beauty of the Trinity was understanding God’s eternal intra-trinitarian love. (Yes, I know. It doesn’t sound very beautiful, but hear me out). What do I mean? God’s eternal intra-trinitarian love means  that the persons of the Trinity–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–have been sharing perfect love among themselves for all eternity. God, in other words, has always been loving. Before time began, God experienced perfect love within himself.

In Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17, we get a tiny glimpse into the eternal inner life of the Trinity, and the results are some of the  most mind-blowing truths in all of Scriptures.

In John 17:24, Jesus prays: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am to see my glory that you have given me because you loved before the foundation of the world.”

Before time began, the Father was giving glory and love to his Son. How are we to understand the Father’s glory? We could describe it as acceptance, approval, and praise. Probably the best way to think about it is to imagine the Father telling the Son how immensely proud of him he is. He loved him with a great love and as a result showered the Son with great love. What does the son do? He responds with loving obedience and submission to his father.  So, for all eternity there was this perfect harmonious love between Father and Son. The Father pouring out love like a fountain and the Son responding in love to the Father.

Where does the Holy Spirit fit into this great love?

John 17 focuses primarily on the love between Father and the Son, but we can draw some clues from the rest of the scriptures.

We see elsewhere in the Scriptures that the Father pours out his love through the Holy Spirit. Do you remember Jesus’ at baptism in Matthew 3. As Jesus rises from the water, the skies open up, and the Father declares, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased”. The Father does what he has been doing for all eternity–he is giving glory, praise, and approval to the Son, whom he loves. But do you remember what happens as the Father declares his love? The Holy Spirit comes and rests on Jesus in the form of a dove. Paul, in Romans 5:5 explains how this truth works in our relationship with God: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us”.

Second, we see that in our lives, the Holy Spirit causes us to both know and respond to God’s Fatherly love towards us. In Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6, Paul writes about the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of adoption and sonship, who assures us that we are beloved children of our Heavenly Father. As the Holy Spirit brings God’s love into our hearts, Paul says, we respond by crying, “Abba Father”. If this is true for us, sinners, I think it’s reasonable for us to assume this is supremely true of Jesus, God’s Beloved Son.

We’re starting to get a picture of the massive weight of God’s eternal intra-Trinitarian love. The Father loving the Son through the Holy Spirit. The Son responding to the Father’s Love in the Holy Spirit.

Now, think about massive God’s love is. As humans, even at our best, we have conflict in our relationships. Why? Because we are sinners. When we love, our love is often tainted by our selfishness. Not only that, the ones we love are often selfish well. No friendship, family, or marriage is exempt from our sin. Sooner or later our selfishness will cause us to sin against one another.

It is not that way with God. The Father and Son’s love is perfect–there is no taint of selfishness or sin. The Father has every reason to love and glory in his Son and the Son has every reason to delight and obey his Father. They are united in the deep fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The Father pouring out his love through the Holy Spirit and the Spirit stirring in the Son to cry, “Abba, Father”.

When people talk about the Trinity, people are endlessly trying to come up with analogies and clever explanations to explain how God can be three, yet one. I don’t know if I’ve thought this through enough, but I think perhaps the best way is to think about the massive weight of his love.

From what I can tell, when the Bible talks about oneness, it’s intimately connected to love, commitment and unity. We find for instance, the Bible talking about oneness between husband in wife: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and shall hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” The beauty of marriage is that two different individuals are joined in spiritual, emotional, and physical union. We see in Philippians 2, we see that as we, the Church, grow in our knowledge of Christ and our participation in the Spirit, we will increasingly grow in humility and have “the same mind, the same love, being in full accord and of one mind”.  The love of the Gospel can take diversity and bring about wonderful oneness as we grow in our love for Jesus.

A husband and a wife may be spiritually, emotionally, and physically one (what a beautiful way of viewing God’s good design for sex!), but they are not literally one. The church can be one in purpose and love as members serve one another humbly, but they are not literally one. But God’s love is so great, his unity and fellowship so perfect, that he is actually one, in every sense of the word. That doesn’t resolve the paradox logically, but that is a kind of paradox that leads me to humble amazed worship.

So far, we’ve seen that if you start with the Trinity, you have a wonderful sharing God of love. What happens if you get rid of the cumbersome doctrine of the Trinity?

Well, if you take away the Trinity, you lose any possibility of God being eternally loving. By definition, in order to be loving, you need someone else to love. You could say you love yourself, but that’s not the kind of love we’re talking about. Instead of being eternally loving, and looking outward to other persons, this God would have been eternally by himself, self-centered, and looking inward.

Whether or not God was eternally loving may seem like semantics, but if you think about it, it’s hugely important for how we view creation. Depending on how you look at it, Genesis 1:1 can either be good or bad news.

If the Triune God creates, it is great news! Here is a God who is fundamentally sharing and loving; so sharing and loving, in fact, that it overflows and explodes into creation. God wants to share his own life with us. The Father wants us to know and understand the beauty of the Son which he has been enjoying for all eternity! We can have great confidence in God’s love because he has forever been a Father in the deepest part of our identity.

On the other hand, if a single-person God, it would be bad news. Why? I can think of only two reasons why he would create. Either he is lonely and needy and wanted someone  to praise him. That God would not be very worthy of our worship, would he? He would be weak, insecure, and dependent on his creation. The other reason would be that God created us to rule over us. That would be scary! We see what happens when men are given free-reign and absolute authority to do whatever they want with no accountability, they become terrifying dictators.

In the next post, we’ll look at how understanding God’s eternal intra-trinitarian love expands and deepens the way we understand Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the Cross.

Paradoxology: An Introduction

“Paradoxology”, as you can probably tell, is a wordplay off of Paradox and Doxology. The idea here is that the most difficult paradoxes of our faith can lead us the  deepest worship. Paradox leading to worship? How can that be?”  G.K. Chesterton. in his book Orthodoxy gives us some provocative. yet insightful thoughts:

“The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.” (20)

Now this exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth but it is stubborn about the subtle truth…it is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth (75)

Chesterton acknowledges that there are paradoxes in the Christian faith; certain things are mysterious, even seemingly illogical. But he notices there is always something funny about biblical paradoxes–if you can humbly accept them, everything becomes wonderfully and beautifully clear; but if you try and explain them away, what’s left of your religion neither makes sense, nor inspires worship. Christianity says odd things, but they turn out to profoundly explain some of the most complex realities of our world.

Biblical paradoxes, in other words, do not prove that our faith is incoherent or absurd. It’s exactly the opposite. They give us some of the most powerful evidence that our faith is true. The wisdom of the world is polished, smooth, and logical. Yet, upon closer examination, these explanations are woefully inadequate to explain reality. The wisdom of God on first glance seems strange, even laughably contradictory–who in their right mind would think of something so odd?–but upon closer examination, it possesses divine beauty and truth. And in Chesterton’s words, when we allow some mystery, everything becomes marvellously and wonderfully clear. We are left in awe, saying, “We could never have thought of this. Truly, this is the Word of God. Glory be to his name”

For now (we’ll see if I can think of more paradoxes later), I plan to write first about the Trinity and afterwards, the sovereignty of God. I’ll be drawing most of the material for this series from two great books: Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves and The Sovereignty of God and Evangelism by J.I. Packer. These are some of the most important books I’ve read. They have  not only helped me to better understand the Trinity and God’s sovereignty, they have also led me to deep thankful worship  .

My hope is that through these series, you would realize we don’t have to uncomfortable or embarrassed with the paradoxes of our faith. Rather, we can respond as Paul did as he emerged from one of the densest, most difficult parts of Scripture at the end of Romans 11:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Romans 11:33-36 ESV)

Next post on its way soon!