Our Triune God Among the False gods
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | Putting into words the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
00:00:09.000 | the three persons of the Holy Trinity, has led to controversies for almost as long as there's been a church.
00:00:15.000 | And a library could be stuffed full of books on the topic to serve as proof.
00:00:19.000 | But to properly approach the Trinity, we must push through those debates.
00:00:24.000 | In 2010, Fred Sanders published an appropriately titled book, "The Deep Things of God, How the Trinity Changes Everything."
00:00:33.000 | In it, he wrote this, "The doctrine of the Trinity expels a host of unworthy ideas about God's love.
00:00:40.000 | God is not lonely or bored or selfish.
00:00:43.000 | This is what the doctrine of the Trinity helps us to learn with greater precision, that God is love.
00:00:50.000 | The triune God is a love that is infinitely high above you, eternally preceding you, and welcomes you in."
00:00:58.000 | That is powerful. In other words, the end of our pursuit is not merely knowing about this triune God more clearly,
00:01:05.000 | but knowing Him personally.
00:01:07.000 | In our theology, when it's done properly, it's an invitation to experience God's love and presence,
00:01:12.000 | and we delight in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
00:01:15.000 | That's the theme of an excellent book called "Delighting in the Trinity," written by historian and theologian Michael Reeves,
00:01:22.000 | who serves as the president and professor of theology at Union School of Theology in Oxford.
00:01:27.000 | I asked Reeves to explain why he wrote his book, "Delighting in the Trinity."
00:01:32.000 | I wrote the book out of a simple pastoral desire to have people know the living God better.
00:01:39.000 | I see, particularly amongst UK students, I see just an enslavement to idolatry, is really how I'd put it,
00:01:52.000 | meaning that there's such an impoverished understanding of God that people don't see the beauty of the triune God.
00:02:01.000 | Therefore, the whole Christian life is shrunken and withered because they're thinking,
00:02:09.000 | "Well, okay, I've got out of hell, but I'm not sure I want to be with this God."
00:02:14.000 | Particularly if you're thinking that Trinity is something awkward or difficult in God,
00:02:21.000 | then you've got something very, very schizophrenic in your faith.
00:02:27.000 | You're thinking, "Okay, I've got a God who produces a good gospel,
00:02:31.000 | but the God behind that gospel isn't actually himself good or beautiful or desirable."
00:02:36.000 | Yeah, and to show the beauty of the triune God in your book, you often contrast Him with Islam.
00:02:42.000 | Explain why. Why does this contrast work so well?
00:02:45.000 | Well, I want to draw this comparison really, I think, not just so you can see the difference to Islam.
00:02:52.000 | I remember as a teenager, I was interested in Islam for a while just because of the simplicity,
00:02:58.000 | the cleanness of its monotheism, and that's quite attractive and was attractive to me then.
00:03:03.000 | And I now see, no, that was horribly reductive.
00:03:10.000 | And by snipping out Trinity, you're not snipping out what's ugly or awkward, but what's beautiful.
00:03:16.000 | But it's not simply a contrast with Islam that I wanted to bring across.
00:03:20.000 | It's a contrast with single-person gods of whom Allah is the best-known example.
00:03:26.000 | And the reason I wanted to make that contrast is I think that so many Christians are assuming that the living God is a single-person God.
00:03:36.000 | But if He is a single-person God, then He looks very much like Allah and will behave like Allah,
00:03:43.000 | which means that not being as He is, He won't offer a gracious gospel. He won't offer us an intimacy because the very nature of God is different.
00:03:54.000 | Allah does not offer free grace. He doesn't offer intimacy because of His very nature.
00:03:59.000 | I wanted to draw out that what you think about the nature of God is going to change your very understanding of the gospel from soup to nuts.
00:04:07.000 | Yes, everything top to bottom. And that's why your book is so good and so valuable.
00:04:12.000 | And I want to step back in and look at the big picture of the inter-Trinitarian relationship we see in Scripture.
00:04:18.000 | You work with college students, and you have a heart for college students and to care for them.
00:04:22.000 | Imagine a student approaches you who wants to understand the Trinity. How would you explain the biblical doctrine of the Trinity to them?
00:04:29.000 | Yeah, I think I always want to start with Jesus. I don't want to start with abstract illustrations, shamrock leaves, eggs, that kind of stuff.
00:04:39.000 | I want to start with Jesus and say, look, when you proclaim Jesus, you proclaim a triune God. He reveals a triune God to us.
00:04:47.000 | So, for example, a sort of verse I'd like to go to is John 20, 31.
00:04:53.000 | John says he writes his gospel so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ.
00:04:58.000 | That means the one anointed by the Spirit, the Son of God.
00:05:04.000 | And so when you believe in Jesus, the Son, then you believe in the revelation of a God who's proclaiming himself to be Father.
00:05:14.000 | Who is Jesus the Son of? He's the Son of the Father.
00:05:17.000 | And that's the first thing I really want people to see in their understanding of God.
00:05:21.000 | He's not like any other. The God revealed in Jesus is a Father.
00:05:25.000 | If you think of John 14, 6 as well, Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father, but through me.
00:05:34.000 | And so when you come to see Jesus, the Son, you see the God that he reveals is a Father, eternally a Father, eternally, therefore, one who has a relationship, who loves his Son.
00:05:46.000 | And that sort of thing, Jesus says in John 17, 24, Father, you loved me before the foundation of the world.
00:05:54.000 | This isn't something that started at some point. For eternity, God has been a Father loving his Son.
00:06:01.000 | And he's loved him by pouring out his Spirit on him.
00:06:06.000 | It's the Spirit is the means of his blessing to him.
00:06:09.000 | The Spirit personally works on the Son to make the Son enjoy the love of the Father for eternity.
00:06:16.000 | And so what I want students, for example, to see is I'm talking about the Trinity is very quickly to be able to see this isn't some abstract, strange math we're talking about.
00:06:26.000 | We're talking about a beautiful fellowship of love.
00:06:30.000 | So that even if they're not immediately understanding it, they're seeing this is something desirable.
00:06:35.000 | Amen. Amen. So it seems that this eternal relationship and eternal love within our Trinitarian God is really what most distinguishes him from other single person deities, right?
00:06:49.000 | Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a real tension within Islam.
00:06:54.000 | I mentioned this in the book at one point where one of Allah's 99 names, these 99 names are supposed to describe how he is in eternity.
00:07:02.000 | One of those 99 names is the loving. But that's really problematic.
00:07:06.000 | Now, of course, that's a lovely thing to say. But how can he be loving if there's no one there for him to love?
00:07:13.000 | And so because he's a single person, God, he cannot be essentially, eternally loving.
00:07:20.000 | And that's really why he's not going to offer a gospel of grace or offer close fellowship with himself.
00:07:28.000 | For the Muslim in paradise, they never get to see or be with, let alone be sons of Allah.
00:07:34.000 | Yeah, that is so important. I want to change gears a little bit and talk about creation.
00:07:40.000 | In the book, you write in one place, quote, "Absolutely singular supreme beings do not like creation."
00:07:49.000 | Yeah. What do you mean by that statement?
00:07:52.000 | What I mean by that is that if you have, if God is an absolutely singular being, a single person and has been so for eternity,
00:08:04.000 | then that's how he likes things to be. It seems a very unnatural thing for such a God to cause anything else to exist.
00:08:13.000 | Why would he want to cause anything else to exist?
00:08:15.000 | For eternity, he's happy entirely by himself and has never known relationship, never known what it is to love another.
00:08:22.000 | And just as you look at other systems of thought that have an absolutely singular supreme being,
00:08:31.000 | again and again, you see they veil the physical and the feminine as slightly embarrassing things.
00:08:41.000 | Creation is a slightly awkward thing with a single person God, as is femininity.
00:08:47.000 | Wow. You have to keep expounding on that. Explain this to us further.
00:08:52.000 | Yeah. It's that if God is a single person who's never enjoyed loving another,
00:08:59.000 | there's no real rationale for loving relationship being a good thing.
00:09:05.000 | There's certainly no eternal rationale for that at all. I think one good example of this would be in second century Gnosticism.
00:09:16.000 | One of the strains in Gnosticism, which Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, made out to be a kind of proto-feminist movement,
00:09:23.000 | which is a pack of lies. In second century Gnosticism, you start with a monism,
00:09:31.000 | that the single being is good, the spiritual realm only is good, and the existence of a second thing, the physical, the creation, is a bad thing.
00:09:42.000 | And the Gnostic hope is that the physical, the creation, will be slurped back up into the spiritual realm one day.
00:09:48.000 | Now, if you've got that view of reality, imagine then reading Genesis 2.
00:09:53.000 | We have a man who's all by himself. Well, that's a good thing, right? That mirrors the ultimate spiritual reality of being all by itself, which is good.
00:10:04.000 | The existence of a second thing beside it, woman, is considered a bad thing.
00:10:11.000 | Hence, you see, at the end of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Peter says, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of eternal life."
00:10:19.000 | And Jesus corrects Peter slightly and says, "No, women who make themselves male may enter the kingdom of heaven."
00:10:28.000 | And so, with this idea that only one is good, therefore, women were very devalued.
00:10:38.000 | If you have a relational God, you have the Father who is eternally the loving head of the Son, then suddenly a marriage becomes deeply affirmed and a beautiful thing.
00:10:55.000 | The Father and the Son relationship being echoed out in a marriage relationship.
00:11:03.000 | Beautiful. That was historian and theologian Michael Reeves talking with us about his incredibly good book, Delighting in the Trinity.
00:11:10.000 | If you're looking for a good summer read, consider this one.
00:11:13.000 | Dr. Reeves serves as the President and Professor of Theology at Union School of Theology in Oxford.
00:11:19.000 | Tomorrow, I'm going to ask him what it looks like in practice to delight in the Trinity.
00:11:23.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and I'll see you tomorrow.
00:11:25.000 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
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