Father, Son and Spirit' s Romance With Humanity

"For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." 

                                                                       John 3:16-17

In the years that Jesus was born, walked the earth and was finally crucified, he revealed something so incredible about who our God (Father, Son and Spirit) is: The lover, father, brother and friend of Man. The fact that Jesus was the Son of Man revealed something incredible about us: We are perfect because our Father is perfect. We are beloved and pleasurable to Him; holy, blameless, spotless and without defect. The only thing "wrong" with us was that we became deceived about our own identities and deceived into an unbelief that said that God wasn't truly good, but that He held something back from His creatures, the creatures that fully expressed His own image and likeness. Never forcing Himself upon us, He gave us over to the depravity of our minds but, being Love itself, He would not be satisfied with such a devastating end to the ones that He'd predestined to be sons! (Sidenote: whenever I mention "sons" or "man" I'm including females. It's easier in my writing and my thinking if I refer to all of us as sons, both male and female).

He would woo back His human race even if it took thousands of years and cost Him unimaginable suffering and His very own life. (He is not slow as some perceive slowness. With him a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day). Father, Son and Spirit had their plan of redemption for man in place before the foundation of the world and it took effect immediately. Read the genealogy in Luke. Jesus' fleshly ancestry is traced all the way back to Adam! We were found in Christ before we were ever lost in Adam.
(A lot of what I've said above, in fact much of what I will say in this post, are thoughts taken from the revelation of four of my favorite teachers: Andre Rabe, C. Baxter Kruger, John Crowder and St. Athanasius. Check them out if you're tired of guilt, condemnation and demands).

Unfortunately, this amazing romance isn't the story that many of us were brought up hearing. I always assumed that pretty much everything Jesus did in his incarnation was to fulfill legal demands. He did this or that to fulfill the law. He said this or that to fulfill a prophecy. His death on the cross was the legal demand of his father, the Judge.
It is difficult to have any kind of real relationship or to even be remotely endeared to someone that you view in that light. There's no spontaneity, adventure or excitement to be had in communing with such a being. But, out of the fear of hell, I tried. If the choice is between eternal torment or streets of gold, my pick is obvious. Things got worse when I began to understand that the proof of this relationship and faith that would grant me entrance into the pearly gates is that I obey his commands...suddenly, Christianity became the exact same religion as every other religion on the planet! It was the ascent of an exhaustingly long stairway with no end in sight. I was eventually ready to jump off.

But I made my good decision (insert pat on the back here) and said the "Sinner' s Prayer" that completed "my part" of the legal, atoning blood agreement. I was in. Thus begun a life of proving just how in I was. My tone may sound snarky, but I'm just trying to expose the lie, because lies keep people bound in fear, while the truth sets people free in joy! I want to make it easy for us to begin to discern the ridiculousness of the deception. And you have to know that in spite of all of this, Papa was incredibly gracious. When I said that prayer, He was with me, loving me, making Himself known. When I worked to earn something I already had, He was with me, loving me, making Himself known. Sometimes, glimpses of truth broke through and other times the lies crowded it out, but He was with me, loving me, making Himself known.

I'd like to paint for you the picture that my blindness created of God, of the Trinity, to show you why it's a bad idea to try to paint in the dark. It's likely that you'll miss the canvas altogether.

Myth #1: The Father
He existed first of the three. He's the creator. He's the head honcho. He is the unbending judge. He's angry, distant and cannot forgive sin without a blood payment. He demands that someone must take the punishment to appease His anger and wrath and bloodlust/revenge. He is too holy to look upon sin.

Myth #2: The Son
He is the nice one. Jesus hangs out with sinners and really likes people, or at least feels sorry for them. He steps up to take our punishment from the Father - the divine spanking - as John Crowder jokingly refers to it. He forgives us and convinces the Father to like us. His role as mediator looks like that of one who is forever standing between us and the Father. When we sin and mess up and the Father gets mad, Jesus shows Him his scars to keep His wrath from smiting us. The Father is too holy to look on sin, but Jesus is free to dine and feast with sinners.

Myth #3: The Holy Spirit
He is the Great Conscience. He constantly reminds me of my sin so that I don't get too proud. When I do sin, he "convicts" me with guilt and shame. Before my conversion, he leads me to pray the Sinner's Prayer. He is the one who, with the right amount of faith, will heal me, knock me off my feet in prayer, and give me the giggles or the sobs and lots of other crazy manifestations of expression. (That last sentence is actually true if you remove the "drumming up of faith" part and add to it the fact that the Father and Son are in on the fun too).

The diseased frame of mind creates three different gods who aren't in agreement. Jesus was always my favorite because I could relate to him and he'd stand by me if his dad ever came into the room. Can you see why these lies are so toxic? The Trinity is the most beautiful relationship in the universe, but I  turned it into three, divided, shallow, greek gods. They are most certainly three distinct persons, but they are holy, whole, complete, one and perfectly in agreement. They are God. God is Love.

I'll get back to debunking the myths in a bit, but before I continue, let me give you some delicious scripture references that begin to shed light on just how much in agreement our triune God is:

Matthew 10:40 - "Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me." Jesus

John 12:44-45 - But later, Jesus cried aloud: "Every man who believes in me is believing in the one who sent me: and every man who sees me is seeing the one who sent me. I have come into the world as light, so that no one who believes in me need remain in the dark."

John 14:7, 10 - "If you had known who I am, you would have known my Father. From now on, you do know him and have seen him...The man who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" Jesus

John 14:20 - "On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you." Jesus

John 15:26 - "When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father-the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father-he will testify about me." Jesus

Romans 8:15-16 - The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father." The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.

Colossians 1:15, 19-20 - The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation....For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Hebrews 1:3 - The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

1 John 5:6-7 - This is the one who came by water and blood-Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testified, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that testify: The Spirit, the water and the blood; and these three are in agreement.

The truth about the Trinity: They have been in relationship from all eternity. There was no single, alone, pre-existent being. This cannot be denied if we believe that God is love. Love cannot exist alone because its focus is always on someone else, not itself. If there was a lone being, then his reason for creating would be self-centered and he could not be love. But if the Father, Son and Spirit were always together, ever loving each other, in need of nothing more, then their reason for creating came completely out of Love and a desire to share their pleasure and express their love, their image, in a race called Man. They are in total agreement, total oneness in love for each other and love for Man. Andre Rabe says that it's much like a marriage: while the two become one, they remain distinct persons. Likewise with the trinity, the three are one, though they remain distinct persons.

The truth about Abba Father: He has always loved us. His heart, His desires, His character and nature were FULLY expressed in Jesus. It pleased Him to offer his son, not because He needed appeasement for sin that He could not otherwise forgive, but because He was in His son reconciling the world to Himself. He was making peace with US. We were the ones who needed to be convinced and convicted of his love for us. Jesus was not changing his father's mind about us, he was changing our minds about his father!!!! This is huge!!! Does this not completely endear you to our great Abba?? I mean, what a lover! And as for this idea of him being too holy to look upon sin, if this is true, then Jesus must not not have been holy, which means he must not be God...kind of a dangerous path to venture down, don't ya think? Jesus feasted with sinners BEFORE he even died to make them holy or worthy to stand in his presence.

The truth about Jesus: He has always loved us. He knew that he would become a man before the creation of the world. He did not just feel sorry for us, he knew the truth about who we were! He knew that we were predestined to adoption as sons and that we were created to share and enjoy the same free relationship with his father that He did. It pleased Him to experience our brokenness, our fallenness so that he could heal us. He brought love into our deepest darkness, our scariest hell and our worst confusion to rescue us from the lies that bound us. It pleased Him to offer his life, because in him all of us existed, so in his crucifixion, he ended the diseased, sinful adamic race! In his resurrection, He raised up sons, born from above, begotten of His Father. He began a new race of whom he was the firstborn of many brothers.

The truth about the Holy Spirit: He has always loved us. He has always been for us. From the first verses of Genesis to the last verses of Revelation, the Spirit is constantly moving, working and revealing Jesus who reveals the Father. He persuades us of the truth. He convicts (which just means to show convincing evidence) the world of sin, not through condemnation, but by revealing the goodness of the Father, which in turn exposes our unbelief! Not unbelief in his existence, but unbelief in his loving, kind, merciful nature, which then persuades us to believe. He also convinces us of our righteousness by showing us that Jesus has gone to the Father and now sits at his right hand, proving that our righteousness is secure. And he convinces us that the prince of this world (satan) has already been judged.

Now, before you ask, I know one of the burning questions that many have: "What about the scary god of the Old Testament? If you're saying the Father, Son and Spirit are all expressed in the loving person of Jesus, then how am I to make sense of the other god?"

Here's the thing. I believe that every word of the Old Testament is true and is written and inspired by the same Spirit that compiled and inspired the New Testament. The difference is that in the Old Testament, the Spirit is showing us a completely veiled, human perspective of who God is. It is all in the context of broken, fallen relationship. Jesus was the full revelation of God. He even cleared up for us the difference between himself and Satan by saying, "The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy, but I come to give life and to give it abundantly." In the Old Testament, the line between the roles of God and Satan, light and dark, is a bit hazy. God did not change from the Old Testament to the New Testament, we did! Jesus tore the veil of our understanding! Jesus even had the audacity to say that NO ONE knows the Father except the son. Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, King David, Isaiah, the scholarly Pharisees who had the Old Testament mostly memorized, none of them knew the Father. How could Jesus say that? Their fallen state had completely blinded them and veiled their perspective of the loving Father. In fact, they were so persuaded that the god depicted in the Old Testament was who God was that they killed Jesus for being too opposite of that depiction! Now if we go back and reread the Old Testament, we can see Jesus hidden all through its stories and pages. We can know him through the Old Testament, but only if we first know the New.

Because of these things, so many misunderstandings can be undone as we see the cohesiveness of God. For example, I can conclusively say that on Jesus' cross, the Father did not pour His wrath on His beloved son to satisfy His own need for revenge- or what is commonly renamed as justice. WE - fallen humanity - poured our fallen, confused, and deceived wrath on God! He offered Himself as our most beautiful scapegoat as we vented our anger, like misguided little children, one painful lash at a time. Isaiah prophesied that we would esteem him stricken by God...oh, how right he was! We didn't know that the Father was in the son reconciling the world to Himself, or that the Holy Spirit was smeared all over and inside of Jesus (Anoint means "to smear"). Yet it pleased Him to yield Himself to our crushing iniquities!!!! Why??? Because He is love and there's no greater love than this! This was the act of love that He put absolute faith in to break the grip that darkness had on us...all of us. Not one person, in their most evil action or most determined unbelief, has the power to change the love that they've been baptised in through Jesus. All anyone can do is try and resist it, deny it and live in contradiction to it. And we do...all of us...until, one at a time, we realize that it's already holding us...tight...and has been all along, so we let go and allow it to sweep us off our feet into the most wonderful intoxication! Whew...it's the liquid love wine.

(Sidenote: I'm not downplaying the devastating effects of resisting His love. Resisting it causes a very real experience of evil in all it's various forms. And knowing that we've all been embraced by him in his death does not cause passivity in sharing the Gospel. It does the exact opposite! It ignites a fire in the heart and an urgency in the feet to run and tell everyone what has happened to them; that they are no longer defined by sin or experiences of the soul realm. They have been heroically rescued! I used to be ashamed of the gospel I thought I had to proclaim, now I want to beg people to believe this Good News so that they may enjoy and participate in the benefits of their dramatic rescue and freedom!).

The fullness of God was there on that day. And, to be sure, there was wrath on His part. But it was the burning wrath of His Father love, His Lover love, His Brother love, His Friend love, that embraced humanity while destroying our sin by dying our death, so that all of fallen creation that exists in the Word made flesh would die too, without being harmed. Then, on the third day, Jesus raised up - and all of us with him. And in his ascension he brought us, brand new, to the right hand of the Father, face-to-face. As proof of our new glorification, he poured out the Spirit on all flesh, that we may all now cry "Abba! Father!" He declares our righteousness and teaches us the truth.

On that Great and Terrible day, there was a divine substitution, but it was nothing to do with a legal, warped form of justice to appease an angry, disappointed, distant father. It was a substitution in which the fullness of God fully accepted and entered into our brokenness. He gathered up the entire burden of our sin and the judgment that we pronounced on him and he baptized us into his own suffering and death, while preserving his own image and likeness that was always in us, though the disease of sin had made it unrecognizable.

I feel like I'm doing a huge disservice by even attempting to delve into this subject because it's just so big! The beauty of what happened to our Lord and what happened to us in him (all of humanity) is something I can only barely try to grasp. But I feel the Spirit pulling me into his river of joy.

Masses of us have given into the temptation to build our theology on the contradiction of experience rather than the truth. We still see sin all around us and its absolutely devastating effects. We experience it in our own lives. So rather than henge our entire faith on what Jesus believes and has told us is true right now regarding the crucifixion of sin, we've pent all of our hope on His elusive "second coming". As if his second coming will be a greater, more significant event than His finished work on the cross! We've made the same mistake as the Pharisees in pushing our Messiah to the future. Jesus is not coming back to establish his kingdom or do away with sin. His faith and utterances on the cross have me convinced that He's done it already. Faith recognizes that it's true and sees beyond the soul realm. I shudder now when I hear people say "He came the first time as a humble servant, but He'll come the second time as a conquering king." NO! A thousand times, NO! He is the same yesterday, today and forever! The fact that he is the humble servant is exactly why he is the conquering king. Notice that Revelation portrays him as the slain lamb. Even when an elder says "See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah has triumphed and is worthy to open the scroll", he comes forth as a lion who is a slain lamb! How scary would it be for us, all of us, if his nature were going to change? He is not overcoming the world at some future date or event, it's a done deal!

Andre Rabe brilliantly says, "The Gospel is the Good News, not the Good Prediction." He also points out that Jesus always pulled the future into the now. "The time is coming and now is!" "As He is...(present tense: glorified, sanctified, righteous, perfect, holy, face-to-face with the Father)...so are we in this world." He does not have to rapture the believers away, out of this world and burn up the rest in order to remove evil and finish what he started. He actually prayed in John 17 that we wouldn't be taken out of this world, but that we would be protected from the evil one! Why? Because He really does believe he has overcome it. And we have the joy of proclaiming it!

I don't understand it all, but I love it. I feel at home in its truth. As I recently heard someone say, "It's the mystery revealed, not the mystery solved." I like that. Father, Son and Spirit are romantic and alive; not cold, systematic and dead. Breathe in the fragrance of their love...it's ours to freely enjoy!