The Mystery Of The Trinity Is That ‘God Is Love’

The mystery of the Trinity is the central mystery of all Christian faith. Without this mystery, there is nothing. That God is one; that God is three. The mystery is not mathematical, so don’t worry if you didn’t do good in maths. We are not going to go into the maths of this because how could one be three, or three be one, that’s another story.

The best way we can explain it is the difference between the who and the what. The who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The what is a God; the Godhead, the God who is one. Many scholars have tried to understand this and many analogies have been used, like a cloverleaf and all kinds of things, and they all fall very very pale in comparison. But what we do know is what the Scripture has revealed to us, and that’s what we’re going to go with in understanding this mystery of the Trinity.

We know that the gospel reading we have today says that God loved the world so much that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him may not be lost, but may have eternal life. I want you to hear the text again. God loved the world to such a radical extreme extent; this is not a love that is the pale or watery kind of love. God loved the world with such a radical extreme extent, that he did the unthinkable of sending his Son to be sacrificed so that you and I may know the radical extreme extent of that love. It is that that is at the very core center and heart of this mystery of the Trinity.

John in one of his letters says ‘God is love’, and that alone explains everything that we need to know. ‘God is love.’ It’s the simplest sentence in the entire Bible. It’s the most profound sentence in the entire Bible. It’s the most confounding sentence in the entire Bible – ‘God is love.’

Love is something you do on behalf of another. You can’t love when there is no one to love. You can’t love and there is no receptor. Love is a verb. It’s an action word. It is something a person does for somebody else; and if God is love, God can’t be one person because that would be a strange and really eerie kind of love. God is love and that’s why God is Trinity. Because the Father has everything that he has, and he takes everything that he has and he gives it over to the Son; and we see that in John 17; and the Son takes everything he has and gives it over to the Spirit. The Spirit gives everything back to Father and Son. The Spirit is the love that proceeds from the Father and the Son, and in this sense, love is really the logic of the Trinity. We believe in a triune God because it’s the only way to explain that sentence that God is love because if God is love, that love has to be outflowing from one to the other, and that outflowing of love is really the central mystery that there is; and if we understand that, then you have to understand the logic of the world is love.