Dear Friends,
I am reading a wonderful book called Embracing the Trinity, which has a chapter with the charming title ‘Within the Happy Land of the Trinity’. You may well be thinking to yourself, “Happy? Confusing, difficult, awkward, yes, but not happy.” The point, though, is not so much that we should be happy but that God is happy in himself. He has always been happy being God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As the author, Fred Sanders, puts it: “The Trinity isn’t for anything beyond itself, because the Trinity is God. God is God in this way: God’s way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
We need to distinguish between who God is and what God does, even if all that he does flows out of all that he is: “Things like creation and redemption are things God does, and he would still be God if he had not done them. But Trinity is who God is, and without being the Trinity, he would not be God. God minus creation would still be God, but God minus Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would not be God.” God didn’t need to do anything – such as create the world, reveal himself, or redeem us – in order to be happy. That means that what God does, and what we experience of him, is the overflow of his happiness. That makes his blessings all the more secure, because he is utterly secure in himself and doesn’t need us to prop him up in any way. God doesn’t need us to make him happy!
Yours in Christ
Chris Hobbs