Letters From Mike - Who is God?

"Then God said, "Let us make man in our image…"
"Let us?"
God is…plural?
Well…yes.

This is what the church holds to be true.
Mystery though it may be, the God we worship is a trinity.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Now, mystery must be welcomed here as analogies fail.

As Tozer exuded,
"When we consider the fearful mystery of Thy Triune
Godhead we lay our hand upon our mouth.
Before that burning bush we ask not to
understand, but only that we may fitly adore Thee,"

Though there is one comparison I've found wondrously helpful.
Jonathan Edwards compared the Trinity to the sun.
The Father is the Star itself.
Jesus, the light of the world, He is the beam of light traveling to earth, 
the image of the invisible God.
The Holy Spirit? He is what we feel. He is the warmth on our skin, the cause and effect.
Three persons, one essence.
A community if you will.
The trinity is the communal eternal exchange of other directed love.

And this, my friends, is unimaginably encouraging.

Think about it.
Were God only one person then we may be certain of a great many things about Him,
but how could we ever truly know He is loving?
I mean, we could know He is strong.  We could know He is powerful, but love?
Love would be outside his nature, because He could not love until after creating someone to love.

But, if God is uncreated community, existing in perfect relationship with Himself for all time, then we can be absolutely certain He is loving, for love is essential to his very existence!
Love is who He is.
It is his nature.
And this also means, He did not create us because He was lonely.
He wasn't sitting around making people out of boredom or out of some need for fulfillment!
God doesn't need us, God wants us!
God isn't waiting to love us once we earn it.
He doesn't love us, because of who we are, but because of who He is.
In fact, I would argue He made us because He was too full of love!
He couldn't contain the beauty of this relationship He had within Himself,
so it spilled over into creating the world, and creating us.

We are here, because God is love.

And since are made in the image of a community,
it should be of no great surprise Jesus does not merely call us into relationship with Himself.
(It isn't just "Me and my homeboy Jesus")
He also calls us into relationship with His body, the church.
Which is fantastic, because it calls us to the same supernatural love He bestows on us.
In case you hadn't figured this out yet, the church is full of struggling people.
It's full of people who aren't "worthy of love," by human estimation.
But that's the beautiful of it, we get to love them the way we were loved.
Tapping into the unearned, unstopping, relentless eternal love of the Trinity,
we are suddenly given the power and desire to love others as they are,
and hopefully, loving them into who they could be.

You and I my friend, we are not meant to be alone.
Even Adam was given a helpmate.
We were made to commune with God and with one another.

So, if you're living like an island, come back to the mainland! No shame is so great, no mistake so large, that you cannot come back to the body!

And, If you're beating yourself up because you're lonely, don't do that. You're made like God! You should feel unnatural in isolation.

"May they all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you."
-Jesus

Or as John Donne famously mused,
"No man is an island."

May the community who made us, open our eyes to the community all around us.

-Mike Donehey