“God is love” (1 John 4:8). Those three words could hardly be more bouncy. They seem lively, lovely, and as warming as a crackling fire. But “God is Trinity”? No, hardly the same effect: that just sounds cold and stodgy. All quite understandable, but Christians must see the reality behind what can be off-putting language. 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.

To dive into the Trinity is a chance to taste and see that the Lord is good, to have your heart won and your self refreshed. For it is only when you grasp what it means for God to be a Trinity that you really sense the beauty, the overflowing kindness, the heart-grabbing loveliness of God. If the Trinity were something we could shave off of God, we would not be relieving Him of some irksome weight; we would be shearing Him of precisely what is so delightful about Him. For God is triune, and it is as triune that He is so good and desirable.

I want to show you how.

Beginning with Jesus

The bedrock of our faith is nothing less than God Himself, and every aspect of the gospel is only Christian insofar as it is the expression and action of this God, the triune God. I could believe in the death of a man called Jesus; I could believe in His bodily resurrection; I could even believe in a salvation by grace alone; but if I do not believe that God is triune, then, quite simply, I am not a Christian. Let’s see that in Scripture.

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). That would be an admirable mission statement for any evangelist: to see someone come to genuine Christian faith. But even that most basic call to believe in the Son of God is an invitation to 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 the triune God who you get.

The name “Jesus Christ, the Son of God” is a window into the eternal, essential life of our God. In John 17:24, Jesus prays, “Father . . . you loved me before the foundation of the world.” And that is the God revealed by Jesus Christ. Before He ever created, before He ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was the Father loving His Son in His Holy Spirit.

The Father loves His Son in a very particular way, something we can see if we look at the baptism of Jesus:

And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matt. 3:16–17)

Here, the Father declares His love for His Son and His pleasure in His Son, and He does so as the Spirit rests on Jesus. For the way the Father makes known His love is precisely through giving His Spirit. In Romans 5:5, for instance, Paul writes of how God pours His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It is, then, through giving Him the Spirit that the Father declares His love for the Son.

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