God's Trinitarian Love

Consider that, as God, Christ enjoys the love of the Father and the Spirit.

So do we have a share in this Trinitarian love?

Not by nature. By nature, we are children of wrath.

But because God is love, he gives us access to this loving fellowship!

Consider how Jesus prays - talks to - his Father in John 17:

"The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

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 me before the foundation of the world.

O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."

Did you hear that? The love with which you have loved me may be in them - and I in them. Wow!

And how is Christ in us? By the Spirit. As we have already seen in Romans 5, "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

As the theologian Graham Cole says:

"Within the Godhead, there are three persons who relate to each other and do so in different ways as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Their equality does not collapse into homogeneity, nor does that distinctiveness lead to separation. They relate to each other in love not because they are the same or because they need each other in order to be fully God —each of them is fully God in his own right—but because they are an inseparable unity.

Furthermore, it is that same love that reaches out to us. We are not united to God by nature, nor even by being created in God's image. The image makes a personal relationship within him possible, but it is no guarantee that it will be sustained by love, because our love for God is not of the same quality as his love for us. His love reflects his nature—it is perfect and unchanging.

But our love reflects our nature—it is finite and subject to all the limitations which that implies."

Often we think of God's love in terms of God's love for us.

But what is the foundation of this thought? It is that God is love within the Trinity.

We are invited into an already perfect, whole, and complete love by a God of love.