Did a people ever hear the voice of God
speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?
We could go on to ask whether any other people received the revelation that God was the unity of three persons in one God that we call the Holy Trinity. We can delight as did the Israelites in the fact that God desired to be known to us, and this so that we could be his people, those especially his, and to live as such.
This is why you must now know,
and fix in your heart, that the LORD is God
We do not backtrack on the strict monotheism of Israel by entering into some kind of qualified polytheism. The sense in which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are persons is a different sense than that in which pagan deities were thought to be like men and women. The persons of the Trinity are persons in a greater sense than we are, but a sense does not require the strict separation each to the other that we find in all the other examples of persons of which we have experience.
We can see something of what it means to be a person of the Holy Trinity when we see God relating to himself in the Scriptures. When the Father sends the Son, when the Son goes forth in obedience to the Father, and when the Father and the Son share in the same Holy Spirit, what we are seeing in the the world of time are the relations of God to himself that exist from all eternity and which relations are themselves the persons that have been made known to us.
When we relate to each other our relationships are not so real as to become themselves persons. But this is not so for God. God is so fully actualized and complete that his relationships within himself are more real than any merely human relationships. The relationships of God themselves can be described by terms we recognize, Father, Son, and Spirit. But though these terms are familiar, they mean even more in God than they do in humankind (see Ephesians 3:15). We image those relationships in a way that happens over the course of years, more or less perfectly. But God is always the complete fullness of the meaning of the relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit without beginning or end, from all eternity. Because this is so we are permitted to say that God is love. Not merely is he loving as something he does, but rather love is what he is. God is relationship and so God is love. This is why the name revealed by Jesus in the Gospel today is only one name, "the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" and not 'the names of' as our human expectations might have caused us to guess.
Did a people ever hear the voice of God
speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?
God desires to be known by us, to take us and to make us his people. The fact that he is not easily understand, reducible to logical formulae and description should give us evidence us the fact that he is exalted, holy, and lifted up. We should not expect a God that is easily comprehensible to us. And yet the fearful reality is that it is the God who is thus exalted that we are called to come to know. This is why the reality of the Trinity isn't an optional extra for the consideration of theologians. But he does not desire to be known so that we can pass a test correctly describing him so much as so that we can enter into the reality of his life.
you received a Spirit of adoption,
through whom we cry, “Abba, Father!”
The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit
that we are children of God,
and if children, then heirs,
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ
We dare to call God our Father because we have been taught by the Son and have received the Spirit of adoption. Jesus invites us to enter into and share in his own position as favored child, to enter into the same interchange of love between himself and the Father which is itself the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is made known to us so that we can enter in, so that we can become sons and daughters of the Father, living the life in the Spirit. Because we are made to share in this love of God who is in fact one God we are able to overcome the limits of our own self-isolation and our need for self-protection.
In the life of the Trinity it is OK for us to be vulnerable enough to have relationships which really and deeply connect us with others. Because he is not merely three different gods we too can be elevated above the isolated individuality that is ours apart from him. Further, he is not simply one God showing different faces, for then his love would be mere pretense, or something he did. Because of that our own love can become more real and less pretense. We can become partakers of the divine nature (see Second Peter 1:4), which is to say, partakers of an existence which is itself a dance of love.
Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
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