Michael Reeves Quotes

Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.

the center, the cornerstone, the jewel in the crown of Christianity is not an idea, a system or a thing; it is not even “the gospel” as such. It is Jesus Christ.

There is something gratuitous about creation, an unnecessary abundance of beauty, and through its blossoms and pleasures we can revel in the sheer largesse of the Father.

Indeed, in the triune God is the love behind all love, the life behind all life, the music behind all music, the beauty behind all beauty and the joy behind all joy.

The triunity of God is the secret of His beauty. If we deny this, we at once have a God without radiance and without joy (and without humour!); a God without beauty.

There was the Son of God being so himself that even a Gentile executioner sensed it. On the cross we see the Bridegroom, loving to death; the Lord of glory, giving out his life; the Lord of hosts, crushing Satan; the King, enthroned. 

Creation is built upon the promise of hope, that things will get better, that tomorrow will be better than the day before. But it's not true. Cities collapse. Populations expand. Environments decay. People get ruder. You can't go to a movie without getting in a fight with the guy in the third row who won't shut up. Filthy streets. Drive-by shootings. Irradiated corn. Permissible amounts of rat-droppings per hot dog. Bomb blasts, and body counts. Terror in the streets, on camera, in your living room. Aids and Ebola and Hepatitis B and you can't touch anyone because you're afraid you'll catch something besides love and nothing tastes as good anymore and Christopher Reeve is [dead] and love is statistically false. Pocket nukes and subway anthrax. You grow up frustrated, you live confused, you age frightened, you die alone. Safe terrain moves from your city to your block to your yard to your home to your living room to the bedroom and all you want is to be allowed to live without somebody breaking in to steal your tv and shove an ice-pick in your ear. That sound like a better world to you? That sound to you like a promise kept?

We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul. If we would at once overcome Satan and have peace with God, it must be by “looking unto Jesus.

as the Father looks with pleasure and delight on this perfect Son of his, so he looks with pleasure and delight on all who are in him.

So next time you look up at the sun, moon and stars and wonder, remember: they are there because God loves, because the Father’s love for the Son burst out that it might be enjoyed by many. And they remain there only because God does not stop loving. He is an attentive Father who numbers every hair on our heads, for whom the fall of every sparrow matters; and out of love he upholds all things through his Son, and breathes out natural life on all through his Spirit.

God is love”: those three words could hardly be more bouncy. They seem lively, lovely and as warming as a crackling fire. But “God is a Trinity”? No, hardly the same effect: that just sounds cold and stodgy. All quite understandable, but the aim of this book is to stop the madness. Yes, the Trinity can be presented as a fusty and irrelevant dogma, but the truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity.

Sometimes we find ourselves tiring of Jesus, stupidly imagining that we have seen all there is to see and used up all the pleasure there is to be had in him. We get spiritually bored. But Jesus has satisfied the mind and heart of the infinite God for eternity. Our boredom is simple blindness. If the Father can be infinitely and eternally satisfied in him, then he must be overwhelmingly all-sufficient for us.

We cannot choose what we love, but always love what seems desirable to us. Thus we will only change what we love when something proves itself to be more desirable to us than what we already love. I will, then, always love sin and the world until I truly sense that Christ is better.

Archangel Michael, please sever and release any cords of fear. I am willing to let go of this unhealthy, unbalanced energy. I choose instead to align myself with love and light. I ask you to remove any negative energies from my body. Please release all effects of these cords now. Thank you.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God. To know and grow to enjoy him is what we are saved for... Nonetheless, getting to know God better does actually make for far more profound and practical change as well. Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving. Sensing the desirability of God alters our preferences and inclinations, the things that drive our behavior: We begin to want God more than anything else.

J. I. Packer once wrote: ‘If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

What we love and enjoy is foundationally important. It is far more significant than our outward behaviour, for it is our desires that drive our behaviour. We do what we want.

Knowing God as our Father not only wonderfully gladdens our view of him; it gives the deepest comfort and joy. The honour of it is stupefying.

Prayer, then, is enjoying the care of a powerful Father, instead of being left to a frightening loneliness where everything is all down to you.

Thus if your tendency is to think you’re rather wonderful, just remember your prayer life.

Clearly the salvation of this God is better even than forgiveness, and certainly more secure. Other gods might offer forgiveness, but this God welcomes and embraces us as his children, never to send us away.

if God is not a Father, if he has no Son and will have no children, then he must be lonely, distant and unapproachable; if he is not triune and so not essentially loving, then no God at all just looks better.

Such are the problems with nontriune gods and creation. Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centered beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything else to exist. Wouldn’t the existence of a universe be an irritating distraction for the god whose greatest pleasure is looking in a mirror? Creating just looks like a deeply unnatural thing for such a god to do. And if such gods do create, they always seem to do so out of an essential neediness or desire to use what they create merely for their own self-gratification. God’s Ecstasy Everything changes when it comes to the Father, Son and Spirit. Here is a God who is not essentially lonely, but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son in the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all; it is at the root of who he is.

Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief. Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in His beams. Feel His all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in His almighty arms. . . . Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in Him.2 Yes!

It is not that he is all that will matter, as if the final conquest of evil and the resurrection of our bodies were trifling things; he is the center in that he is the fountainhead and source of all the blessings of the new creation.

Jesus Christ, God’s perfect Son, is the Beloved of the Father, the Song of the angels, the Logic of creation, the great Mystery of godliness, the bottomless Spring of life, comfort and joy. We were made to find our satisfaction, our heart’s rest, in him.

While these ‘five points of Calvinism’ reveal a growing interest in predestination among Calvinists, they were drawn up to protect what the Calvinists believed were important truths denied by the Arminians. They were never intended to be a summary of Calvinist belief or Calvin’s own thought.

What is your Christian life like? What is the shape of your gospel, your faith? In the end, it will all depend on what you think God is like. Who God is drives everything. So what is the human problem? Is it merely that we have strayed from a moral code? Or is it something worse: that we have strayed from him? What is salvation? Is it merely that we are brought back as law-abiding citizens? Or is it something better: that we are brought back as beloved children? What is the Christian life about? Mere behaviour? Or something deeper: enjoying God? And then there’s what our churches are like, our marriages, our relationships, our mission: all are moulded in the deepest way by what we think of God. In the early fourth century, Arius went for a pre-cooked God, ready-baked in his mind. Ignoring the way, the truth and life, he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father; thus alone, he is not truly love. Thus he can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know him. Arius was left with a very thin gruel: a life of self-dependent effort under the all-seeing eye of his distant and loveless God. The tragedy is that we all think like Arius every day. We think of God without the Son. We think of ‘God’, and not the Father of the Son. But from there it really doesn’t take long before you find that you are just a whole lot more interesting than this ‘God’. And could you but see yourself, you would notice that you are fast becoming like this ‘God’: all inward-looking and fruitless.

Yet if God is absolutely solitary in his supremacy, then surely evil must originate in God himself. Above and before all things, he is the source of all things, both good and evil. Clearly, it is not good for God to be alone. The triune God, however, is the sort of God who will make room for another to have real existence. The Father, who delights to have a Son, chooses to create many children who will have real lives of their own, to share the love and freedom he has always enjoyed. The creatures of the triune God are not mere extensions of him; he gives them life and personal being. Allowing them that, though, means allowing them to turn away from himself—and that is the origin of evil. By graciously giving his creatures the room to exist, the triune God allows them the freedom to turn away without himself being the author of evil.

Ongoingly in his creation, the Spirit vitalizes and refreshes. He delights to make his creation—and his creatures—fruitful. Isaiah writes of the time when “the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the desert becomes a fertile field, and the fertile field seems like a forest” (Is 32:15). The psalmist sings: “When you send your Spirit, they [the creatures] are created, and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104:30). Small wonder, then, that creativity, the ability to craft, adorn and make beautiful, is a gift of the Spirit: Then the LORD said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts—to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship.” (Ex 31:1-5) The Spirit makes his creation alive with beauty.

Sibbes sought to draw his audience’s eyes from their own hearts to the Saviour, for ‘there are heights, and depths, and breadths of mercy in him above all the depths of our sin and misery’. How so? Because, since ‘God’s love resteth on Christ, as well pleased in him, we may gather that he is as well pleased with us, if we be in Christ!’ Thus Christian confidence in our spiritual state rests not on our strength of faith or performance, but upon ‘the joint agreement of all three persons of the Trinity’, that the Father loves the Son, and it is in the Son’s merits, and not our own, that Christians are loved. Because God is a loving community, Christians can be confident. Then, instead of simply laying moral burdens on young and struggling Christians, Sibbes showed them Christ’s attractiveness so that they might love him from the heart. From then, the Christian’s first task is ‘to warm ourselves at this fire of his love and mercy in giving himself for us’. Only when Christians do that do they truly stop sinning from the heart (whereas when they merely alter their behaviour it does nothing for the sin of the heart). In other words, Sibbes believed that the solution to sin is not the attempt to live without sin, but the gospel of God’s free grace.

Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God ‘does’ being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old ‘God’. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation. The French Reformer, John Calvin, appreciating this deeply, once wrote: we ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us . . . To conclude once for all, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time bear in mind that . . . we are indeed his children, whom he has received into his faithful protection to nourish and educate . . . So, invited by the great sweetness of his beneficence and goodness, let us study to love and serve him with all our heart.3 It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence. We might acknowledge that the rule of some heavenly policeman was just, but we could never take delight in his regime as we can delight in the tender care of a father.

it is especially the love of God shown in the cross that turns and transforms the hearts of sinners. In the horrifying torture and crucifixion of Jesus we see the highest proof of the highest love.41 His bleeding makes our hearts bleed, and his shame makes us ashamed. In the cross we see a divine disgust at sin that makes sin appalling in our eyes too.42 But further, through the cross we see a love so livid that it pierces our apathy and overwhelms our desire for other things. Sinners, Spurgeon said, are naturally held back from God by lack of desire for him; “but the cross will breed desire. They are held back by love of sin; but the cross will make them hate the sin that crucified the Saviour.”43 The cross is the quintessence of that love which makes us love (1 John 4:19).

Puritan’: the word has always been more a weapon than a description. For the vast majority it is verbal mud that, once hurled, makes the victim look a laughable, lugubrious James Ussher, lemon-sucking prig. For the small minority it is brandished as a description of a united golden team with the most impeccable theological and spiritual credentials.

A justificação, portanto, não trata de Deus nos fazer justos, mas de nos declarar justos. Essa é a linguagem de um tribunal de justiça, e não de um hospital. A justificação não é um processo de cura, mas uma declaração de que temos uma posição justa e positiva diante de Deus.

Reeve problem. Things could only

It is ever the Holy Spirit’s work to turn our eyes away from self to Jesus; but Satan’s work is just the opposite of this, for he is constantly trying to make us regard ourselves instead of Christ. . . . We shall never find happiness by looking at our prayers, our doings, or our feelings; it is what Jesus is, not what we are, that gives rest to the soul.

Yet is all this fair to Erasmus? Was he not the one who made the Greek New Testament available, so providing the coals for the Reformation? Certainly he did, and yet his possession of the Scriptures (and his deep study of them) changed little for the man himself because of how he treated them. Burying them under convenient assertions of their vagueness, he accorded the Scriptures little practical, let alone governing, authority. The result was that, for Erasmus, the Bible was just one voice among many, and so its message could be tailored, squeezed, and adjusted to fit his own vision of what Christianity was. To break out of that suffocating scheme and achieve any substantial reformation, it took Luther’s attitude, that Scripture is the only sure foundation for belief (sola Scriptura). The Bible had to be acknowledged as the supreme authority and allowed to contradict and overrule all other claims, or else it would itself be overruled and its message hijacked. In other words, a simple reverence for the Bible and acknowledgment that it has some authority would never have been enough to bring about the Reformation. Sola Scriptura was the indispensable key for change.

This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until he is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete!109

Prayerlessness always goes hand in hand with a lack of Christian integrity. This is even more so for Christian leaders – to put it bluntly, if they are not enjoying communion with God, then they are selling a product they don’t really believe in.

What to do? “The only palliative,” said Lewis, “is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.[11] Were

In Christ the Word, we exchange darkness for light as we think of God. For he perfectly shows us an unsurpassably desirable God, a kind God who is against all that is wrong, a God who thaws us. And only when we see that will we truly love him.

Let’s consider the leader who forgets that he is a sinner saved by grace and not his own efforts, the leader who finds his identity not in Christ but in his pastoring: how will his ministry play out? If he slips into thinking he is justified by his works—and the most orthodox Christian can make this error—he will be driven by his works. If he forgets he is a sinner saved by grace, he may try to fake his own perfection in front of his people. This is surprisingly common! If he forgets the cross and his justification before God and seeks to find his worth instead in the approval of others, he will never lead, but will merely pander to whatever makes him popular.

Our going out to the world with the gospel is not an endeavor that Christians have to hitch on to knowing God, bringing to the task a vigor and vim outsourced from elsewhere. Rather, the heart-gladdening, feet-quickening reality of God is itself at once all the motivation, the content, and the zest of our going. It is precisely because God, from his own glorious fullness, fills us with joy in him that we begin to bubble over with it to those around. This is the theological dynamic of mission. The wellspring of healthy, happy mission is God himself.

Time and again, Scripture is clear that sinful humanity languishes in unknowing darkness, and, left to our imaginations, we dream up a miserable god, quite deserving of our dislike and mistrust. The unique and cheering work of Jesus is to be the light in the dark rooms of our hearts and minds, showing us the Father. As John Calvin put it, “We are blind as to the light of God, until in Christ it beams on us.

To learn Christian theology is to clear out the junk that has accumulated in our minds through years of listening to the world around us, and to replace it with truth. It is to put on the mind of Christ and so sift out the lies in our culture that otherwise would drive us. It is refusing to drift with the assumptions of our society.

When your culture is hedonistic, your religion therapeutic, and your goal a feeling of personal well-being, fear will be the ever-present headache.

the word grace is really just a shorthand way of speaking about the personal and loving kindness out of which, ultimately, God gives himself.

The Lamb was coming. When the Lord visited the temple as a boy, it was not his first time there. On that same mountain, he had dwelt in the Most Holy Place, enthroned in his glory above the cherubim on the ark of the covenant. He had seen the generations of high priests entering behind the curtain on the Day of Atonement, watched the blood sprinkled on the mercy seat, and seen his people represented as precious stones over the heart of the Levite (Ex. 28:15–30). He had heard as the people outside celebrated when the high priest reemerged with atonement completed, and he had always known that his hour would soon come. And so, it was to Jerusalem, four days before his crucifixion, that the Lamb of God made his way (Luke 9:51).

The glory of the Christian is always Jesus Christ and him crucified. “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’s sake,” says Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:5; and “far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14). Knowing that we are empty ones, now full of him, we always place Jesus himself at the foreground, rather than ourselves. It is Jesus we have to offer to the world, and not ourselves.

His mercy accentuates your wickedness, and your very wickedness accentuates his grace, leading you to a deeper and more fearfully happy adoration of the Savior.

Happiness, beauty, and humility flow from the lives of those who are restored in the image of God.

This counterintuitive embrace of our own weakness and dependence is the way the glory of God will shine in and through us. Our own attempts to be impressive, whole, and strong in mission will actually only betray our fallen emptiness and selfishness:

The things he had understood to be sin (murder, adultery, etc.) he now understood to be mere symptoms of the real problem: unbelief.

Calvin wrote to a friend, ‘The Lord has certainly inflicted a severe and bitter wound in the death of our baby son. But he is himself a Father and knows best what is good for his children.

And for those getting ordained, there was a new expectation: now it was clear that becoming a minister was not about being a priest who offers sacrifices (in the Mass), but primarily about preaching. To that end, those being ordained, instead of being invested with priestly clothes, were given a Bible.

Knox spent a while in England, trying to push Cranmer to speed up his Reformation, but when ‘Bloody’ Mary came to the throne, he left for Geneva. For Knox, Geneva was paradise: ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles’, he called it. It got him dreaming of what his native Scotland could be like.

Sermons up to seven hours long were not unheard-of. Laurence Chaderton, the extraordinarily long-lived Master of that nursery of Puritanism, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, once apologized to his congregation for preaching to them for two straight hours. Their response was to cry, ‘For God’s sake, Sir, go on, go on!

Talking of beasts and birds, have you ever noticed this contrast: that when you read a scientific account of any animal’s life you get an impression of laborious, incessant, almost rational economic activity . . . but when you study any animal you know—what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out.

Luther never believed that he should devise any great programme for spreading the Reformation. He simply wanted to unleash the word of God, and let that do all the work.

A lamb he was born, a lion he became for the Lord who saved him.

Faith is a passive thing, simply accepting, receiving, believing Christ—taking God seriously in what he promises in the gospel.

When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus: ‘I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also.

Neither a problem nor a technicality, the triune being of God is the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy.

Born of Mary, he had already come to share our flesh and blood; on the cross we then gave to him all our sin, our death, our shame.

The wrath of the triune God is exactly the opposite of a character blip or a nasty side in him. It is the proof of the sincerity of his love, that he truly cares. His love is not mild-mannered and limp; it is livid, potent and committed. And therein lies our hope: through his wrath the living God shows that he is truly loving, and through his wrath he will destroy all devilry that we might enjoy him in a purified world, the home of righteousness.

Creation is about the spreading, the diffusion, the outward explosion of that love. This God is the very opposite of greedy, hungry, selfish emptiness; in his self-giving he naturally pours forth life and goodness. He is, then, the source of all that is good, and that means he is not the sort of God who would call people to himself away from happiness in good things. Goodness and ultimate happiness are to be found with him, not apart from him.

The greatest benefit of union with Christ is Christ. This marriage is made so that we may know and enjoy him. Union with him is the foundation, the beginning: communion with him is the goal.

Here then is a God who could never be anything but communicative, expansive, outgoing. Since God cannot be without this Word, he simply could not ever be reclusive. For eternity this Word sounds out, telling us of an uncontainable God of exuberance and abundance, an overflowing God of surplus, a glorious God of grace.

Sin in a believer is a sickness, a sickness he hates, but which draws out his compassion. In glory, Jesus’ first reaction when you sin is pity. Where you would run from him in guilt, he would run to you in grace. 

Jim Packer once wrote, ‘If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

If God is like Jesus, then, though I am sinful like the dying thief, I can dare to cry, “Remember me” (see Lk 23:42). I know how he will respond. Though I am so spiritually lame and leprous, I can call out to him. For I know just what he is like toward the weak and sick. In

But for the Reformers preaching was more than simply the transfer of information. The reality is that most of the time most of the congregation know the truths contained in the sermon. If you view preaching as simply a process of education, then you will pursue novelty, and that is a dangerous path to pursue. instead, we come to the preaching of the Word as those who need to hear Christ's voice and encounter his presence. We need to hear from him words of reassurance or words of challenge. Sometimes we will learn new things. But this is not the measure of good preaching. A wife does not want new information on her wedding anniversary. She wants her husband to reassure her of his continuing love. This is what Christ does for his bride each week through the preaching of the Word.

in 1534 he completed his translation of the Old Testament into German and published it with prefaces, marginal notes, and illustrations. ‘Here you will find the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies’, announced the preface. Luther always emphasized that all the Scriptures are only ever about Christ, for it is only through faith in him that any could ever be saved.

The Reformer, John Calvin, wrote that ‘in the cross of Christ, as in a magnificent theatre, the inestimable goodness of God is displayed before the whole world. In all the creatures, indeed, both high and low, the glory of God shines, but nowhere has it shone more brightly than in the cross.

True religion, in great part, consists in . . .’ Everything we have seen means that life with this God is as different from life with any other God as oranges are from orang-utans. If, for example, God wasn’t about having us know and love him, but simply about having us live under his rule, then our behaviour and performance would be all that mattered. The deeper, internal questions of what we want, what we love and enjoy would never be asked. As it is, because the Christian life is one of being brought to share the delight the Father, Son and Spirit have for each other, desires matter. As Jonathan Edwards put it, ‘True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.’15 He was thinking primarily of love for Christ and joy in him, and he wrote one of his main works (Religious Affections) largely to unpack that conviction. What Edwards was getting at was the fact that the Spirit is not about bringing us to a mere external performance for Christ, but bringing us actually to love him and find our joy in him. And any performance ‘for him’ that is not the expression of such love brings him no pleasure at all. Edwards compares such loveless Christianity to a cold marriage, asking: if a wife should carry it [that is, behave] very well to her husband, and not at all from any love to him, but from other considerations plainly seen, and certainly known by the husband, would he at all delight in her outward respect any more than if a wooden image were contrived to make respectful motions in his presence?16

Just so, our great bridegroom has taken all our sin, our death, our judgment, and he shares with us all his life and perfect righteousness. He has become poor that we might share his riches. It is the great marriage swap, or what Luther called the “joyful exchange.” Christ is one with his people, and so all theirs is his, and all his is theirs.9

Such are the problems with nontriune gods and creation. Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centered beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything else to exist. Wouldn’t the existence of a universe be an irritating distraction for the god whose greatest pleasure is looking in a mirror?

For whether the Trinity is compared to shrubbery, streaky bacon, the three states of H2O or a three-headed giant, it begins to sound, well, bizarre, like some pointless and unsightly growth on our understanding of God, one that could surely be lopped off with no consequence other than a universal sigh of relief.

All that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you,” says the bride to her groom on their wedding day. This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about the cross. For on the cross we shared with Christ all that we have. Born of Mary, he had already come to share our flesh and blood; on the cross we then gave to him all our sin, our death, our shame. The loving Bridegroom took the sorrows and sickness of his Bride down to death to bury them forever.

Out of sheer and boundless love for his Bride, he took her sicknesses upon himself, with all the consequences of her sin. He took her ugliness that she might have his loveliness.

In Jesus Christ we find the unshakably righteous Holy One who is worthy to live on God’s holy hill. He is the Last Adam who ascends back up to be where the first Adam was: with God. Exodus 23:19 commands: “Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God.” He is the firstfruits and forerunner of the new humanity (the humanity that in Adam had first been taken from the soil or dust of the earth) now taken into the house of the LORD. It means that there is now a man, a real man with our flesh and blood, our experiences of the world, our humanity, in heaven. A man now sits next to God in perfect harmony.

Bursting through death, out of the grave, the Son overturned the old order—or disorder, we should say—of Adam. The reign of death and corruption was undone, and a human being now stood, body and soul, wholly beyond the reach of the curse.

The Father loves his Son, and so hates sin, which ultimately is rejection of the Son; he loves his children, and so hates their being oppressed; he loves his world, and so hates all evil in it. Thus in his love he roots out sin in his people, even disciplining them that they might be freed from their captivity to it. In his love he is patient with us. And in his love he promises finally to destroy all evil as light destroys darkness.

Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief. Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in His beams. Feel His all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in His almighty arms. . . . Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in Him.

Belief in the Trinity works precisely against chauvinism and for delight in harmonious relationships. And that told historically as Christianity first spread through the ancient Greco-Roman world. Studies have shown that in that world it was quite extraordinarily rare for even large families ever to havemore than one daughter. How is that possible across countries and centuries? Quite simply because abortion and female infanticide were widely practised so as to relieve families of the burden of a gender considered largely superfluous. No surprise, then, that Christianity should have been so especially attractive to women, who made up so many of the early converts: Christianity decried those life-threatening ancient abortion procedures; it refused to ignore the infidelity of husbands as paganism did; in Christianity, widows would be and were supported by the church; they were even welcomed as ‘fellow-workers’ in the gospel (Romans 16:3). In Christianity, women were valued.

the Lord God in Isaiah 42 is not a single-person God, desperately hugging himself and refusing to share as he whines: ‘I will not give my glory to another.’ In Isaiah 42, the Lord is speaking of his servant, his chosen one, the one he anoints with his Spirit (v. 1).

if God’s very identity is to be The Ruler, what kind of salvation can he offer me (if he’s even prepared to offer such a thing)? If God is The Ruler and the problem is that I have broken the rules, the only salvation he can offer is to forgive me and treat me as if I had kept the rules. But if that is how God is, my relationship with him can be little better than my relationship with any traffic cop (meaning no offence to any readers in the constabulary). Let me put it like this: if, as never happens, some fine copper were to catch me speeding and so breaking the rules, I would be punished; if, as never happens, he failed to spot me or I managed to shake him off after an exciting car chase, I would be relieved. But in neither case would I love him. And even if, like God, he chose to let me off the consequences of my law-breaking, I still would not love him. I might feel grateful, and that gratitude might be deep, but that is not at all the same thing as love. And so it is with the divine policeman: if salvation simply means him letting me off and counting me as a law-abiding citizen, then gratitude (not love) is all I have. In other words, I can never really love the God who is essentially just The Ruler. And that, ironically, means I can never keep the greatest command: to love the Lord my God.

At the beginning of the fourth century, in Alexandria in the north of Egypt, a theologian named Arius began teaching that the Son was a created being, and not truly God. He did so because he believed that God is the origin and cause of everything, but is not caused to exist by anything else. ‘Uncaused’ or ‘Unoriginate’, he therefore held, was the best basic definition of what God is like. But since the Son, being a son, must have received his being from the Father, he could not, by Arius’ definition, be God. The argument persuaded many; it did not persuade Arius’ brilliant young contemporary, Athanasius. Believing that Arius had started in the wrong place with his basic definition of God, Athanasius dedicated the rest of his life to proving how catastrophic Arius’ thinking was for healthy Christian living. Actually, I’ve put it much too mildly: Athanasius simply boggled at Arius’ presumption. How could he possibly know what God is like other than as he has revealed himself? ‘It is,’ he said, ‘more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.’2 That is to say, the right way to think about God is to start with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, not some abstract definition we have made up like ‘Uncaused’ or ‘Unoriginate’. In fact, we should not even set out in our understanding of God by thinking of God primarily as Creator (naming him ‘from His works only’) – that, as we have seen, would make him dependent on his creation. Our definition of God must be built on the Son who reveals him. And when we do that, starting with the Son, we find that the first thing to say about God is, as it says in the creed, ‘We believe in one God, the Father.’ That different starting point and basic understanding of God would mean that the gospel Athanasius preached simply felt and tasted very different from the one preached by Arius. Arius would have to pray to ‘Unoriginate’. But would ‘Unoriginate’ listen? Athanasius could pray ‘Our Father’. With ‘The Unoriginate’ we are left scrambling for a dictionary in a philosophy lecture; with a Father things are familial. And if God is a Father, then he must be relational and life-giving, and that is the sort of God we could love.

John wrote his gospel, he tells us, so ‘that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31). But even that most basic call to believe in the Son of God is an invitation to a Trinitarian faith. Jesus is described as the Son of God. God is his Father. And he is the Christ, the one anointed with the Spirit. When you start with the Jesus of the Bible, it is a triune God that you get. The Trinity, then, is not the product of abstract speculation: when you proclaim Jesus, the Spirit-anointed Son of the Father, you proclaim the triune God.

And what Arius demonstrated was the reverse: when you don’t start with Jesus the Son, you end up with a different God who is not the Father. For the Son is the one Way to know God truly: only he reveals the Father.

There is a fascinating tension at just this point in Islam. Traditionally, Allah is said to have ninety-nine names, titles which describe him as he is in himself in eternity. One of them is ‘The Loving’. But how could Allah be loving in eternity? Before he created there was nothing else in existence that he could love (and the title does not refer to self-centred love but love for others). The only option is that Allah eternally loves his creation. But that in itself raises an enormous problem: if Allah needs his creation to be who he is in himself (‘loving’), then Allah is dependent on his own creation, and one of the cardinal beliefs of Islam is that Allah is dependent on nothing.

God is love”: those three words could hardly be more bouncy. They seem lively, lovely and as warming as a crackling fire. But “God is a Trinity”? No, hardly the same effect: that just sounds cold and stodgy. All quite understandable, but the aim of this book is to stop the madness. Yes, the Trinity can be presented as a fusty and irrelevant dogma, but

Reliance on ourselves is no option in light of the cross. However fantastically marvelous we may think we are, the cross is God’s verdict on us as sinners. It annihilates even the possibility of finally placing our trust in ourselves. Meaning we can know a far greater assurance, anchoring it in firm ground outside ourselves, in Christ. Christians are people who have given up all claims to both our badness and our goodness—and instead gotten him. 

Luther discovered as ‘justification by God’s word’ instead of ‘justification by faith’, because it is God’s word that justifies here, not our faith. Faith, thought Luther, is not some inner resource we must summon up; if it were, it would by his definition be sin! For him, the question ‘Have I got enough faith?’ completely misunderstands what faith is, by looking to and so relying on itself, rather than Christ. Faith is a passive thing, simply accepting, receiving, believing Christ—taking God seriously in what he promises in the gospel.

Moreover, our problem is not so much that we have behaved wrongly, but that we have been drawn to love wrongly.

Made in the image of the God of love, Augustine argued that we are always motivated by love—and that is why Adam and Eve disobeyed God. They sinned because they loved something else more than him. That also means that merely altering our behavior, as Pelagius suggested, will do no good. Something much more profound is needed: our hearts must be turned back.

A little over a thousand years later, Martin Luther picked up Augustine’s line of thought to define the sinner as “the person curved in on himself,” no longer outgoingly loving like God, no longer looking to God, but inward-looking, self-obsessed, devilish.