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A tickle fight with your kids. Laughing with friends. A date with your significant other. Love. Love is relational. It only happens between people. And yet the Bible says that God is love. How? How can He need nothing from the things He has made, and yet still be love?
God is quite unlike any other being in the universe. He is one in being and three in Person; a community in unity. What in the world does that mean? The word “being” refers to what you are. I am a human being. I have human “stuff”—bones, teeth, skin, fantastic hair! I am also a Person. The word “person” refers to who you are; you might be “Mark”, or “Jane”. My Person is my “self”, or my “I”. My “I” is the thing that possesses thoughts, emotions, feelings, and dreams.
God is only one what, and yet three whos. He is one being, and yet three Persons. You and I are individual beings and individual persons. We are two (or more) persons in two beings. Yet this God is a mystery that cannot be comprehended; a harmonious multiplicity in one being. He is not a community of three gods; somehow, He is only one God, and yet three Persons: Father, Spirit, and Son.
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The Father is the source of the being of God. He is authoritative over all things. In an act of love, He pours forth all of what He is into the Son. All of His authority, His thoughts, His characteristics flow from Him to the Son, and are fully shared with the Son. His own thought-life is shared, in a way where the Son and the Father are so unified that they share the same thoughts. The Son is the spitting image of His Father; He never came into existence, since the Father has always poured everything He is into the Son. Everything that was created was made through Him. The Father and the Son have always loved each other; and their love is so strong, so full, and so personal, that there somehow springs forth a third Person: the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is called the “breath” of God; He is the means by which the Father and the Son breathe creation into existence. All things, then, are from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.
The unity that these Persons enjoy is so complete that each Person is fully God. It is not as though each Person only has part of God’s being; somehow, each Person fully shares God’s being. The Father is fully God, the Son is fully God, and the Holy Spirit is fully God. At the same time, each Person remains distinct and fulfills different roles. It can be represented like this:
How can this be? Well, trying to understand “how” such a God could exist is a hopeless task. If I were a stick figure, living in a two-dimensional world, I couldn’t hope to understand a cube! An author named CS Lewis explains it like this: “The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings – just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal – something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already.”
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When you see robins dancing around each other, a swing dance in the night, the abundance of stars shining together, the light of the sunset against the canvas of the sky, you are seeing something of an eternal dance that has been going on forever. Any image of multiplicities working together in unity is a pointer to THE multiplicity working together in perfect unity: God.
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And when you see people love each other so completely that they give themselves to each other, share everything they are with each other, and delight in each other, you are beginning to glimpse the three-in-one Love that was and is the pulse at the heart of reality. In God, there has been a divine dance of sorts; an infinite flowing of love from Person to Person. He wants you to come and enter into that dance.