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God so loved the world that he gave his only Son
God himself gave what he asked but did not require of Abraham. He stayed the hand that would have offered Isaac as a sacrifice but did not hold back from giving his only Son as the savior of the world. We might wrongly imagine God to be someone infinitely rich, rich enough to solve any problem from a distance simply by pouring into it his abundant resources. And we know there are people in our own world that are willing to give of their abundance as long as they never need to get overly involved. But from the beginning God's plan was not to give merely some extraneous resources. It was rather to give himself. The point of his plan was specifically to be involved. Thus we see in his theophany to Moses: God revealed himself in order to be in relationship with Moses and the people.
If I find favor with you, O Lord,
do come along in our company.
This is indeed a stiff-necked people; yet pardon our wickedness and sins,
and receive us as your own.
But what does it mean to be in relationship with God? Is it merely something he adopts because we are relational beings? Or is his existence defined in some way by relationship even apart from the created order? The doctrine of the Trinity teaches us that God is not only acting relational in order to be intelligible to us. Rather he is a set of subsistent relationships himself, always has been, and always will be. The fact that we are relational creatures is not accidental. It is so we can correspond to this deep truth about God. He himself is the primary relationship for which we are made.
Mend your ways, encourage one another,
agree with one another, live in peace,
and the God of love and peace will be with you.
God's very essence is that of perfected relationship, or, in other words, love. That fact means that he doesn't enforce morality on us for external or arbitrary reasons. God is Love. And thus love is the primary principle ordering all of reality down to and including the meaning of our lives as individuals. We are thus called to correspond to the deepest nature of God and the world by being loving individuals ourselves, and insofar as possible being defined by love just as is God himself. The doctrine of the Trinity, far from an abstraction, has real consequences for our lives. If God is the kind of God who enters into loving relationships, and if that is what he cares about, then we are not only meant to be recipients, but also givers of love, since that is what it means to participate in the love that is at the very heart of God's nature. And this is a reasonable definition for theosis, which means becoming God. We don't become God in the sense that we become all knowing or all powerful. But we do become transformed more and more into love itself, both giving it and receiving it.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world. But the world was required to respond to the revelation it received, and make a choice about whether or not to believe in the Son. There may have been other ways God could have addressed the symptoms of the problems sin unleashed in the world. But he sought to heal our relational nature that was at the heart of the issue. Thus he couldn't stay away or intervene from a distance. And therefore the only answer that would suffice was relationship with him. The possibility of not believing and of condemnation was a consequence of the fact that none of this could be forced. God had no answer to give other than himself. Any other answer, taken to the extreme, would prove to be hell. But he would not and could not compel anyone to accept his offer. Love freely given had to be freely received.
We tend to talk about love and celebrate it in an abstract and sentimental sense. But from the way that the Trinity intervened in human history in the life, death, and resurrection, of Jesus, we see what love really means. It is always the right choice. But it is not always an easy choice. In fact, God came to become one of us because we were so often unwilling to choose love over selfishness. He not only demonstrated how to choose love, but he gave us the Spirit. Filled with the Spirit choosing love consistently and cheerfully is possible, the first of the fruits we are meant to receive from him.
To the glorious God who chose to stoop down and teach us how to love let us repeat the refrain of today's psalm in all sincerity: "Glory and praise for ever!"
David Crowder Band - How He Loves
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