Editor's note: Enjoy today's devotion from Fully Beloved by Timothy Jones.
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When God created alps and oceans and woodland owls, according to the biblical account, He said, “Let there be...” But when it comes to our making, it is “Let Us make.” To speak about making uses a verb that is more active, dynamic, and involved. Here the Trinity helps me see even more.
Not only does God exist, but God has a delightful time making things.
To create only befits a triune being who overflows with life and love.
God seemed to enjoy setting off fireworks of creativity — not for sport but for the possibilities of relating. The sparkling majesty of meteor showers pales next to the way he showers human life with kindness.
To speak of the Trinity is to say that the great, vast God of all draws close and cares for you and me.
It’s another way to say, “God is love,” a verse that prefaces this with “and so we know and rely on the love God has for us.”1 Here we see a God who is not only infinite but Someone a child might feel invited to address as Dear. As a Father.
In the ancient world, this was astonishing news. In one old creation story, the Mesopotamian “Enuma Elish,” the gods fight, and the victors make the losing divinities their slaves. Tired of the abject work, one goddess creates humans to take over the hard labor. And while these humans are made from clay, like Adam in the Bible, they aren’t honored with a name — they are anonymous workers. It’s all very impersonal. Worse, the gods in that story act moody, careless, and even hostile toward humans. They have high-maintenance needs.
Compare that to Genesis. God creates Adam and Eve with attention and love. This deity gives the first couple names and treats them with care, even after they disobey. The Creator keeps hanging around the neighborhood. Doesn’t get flummoxed or decide to back off.
The idols of Israel’s pagan neighbors — their false gods — couldn’t act or help, as Psalm 115 taunts:
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel,...
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.2
Next to these fickle or passive idols, what a relief: a heavenly Being, robed in glory, who makes, sees, speaks, and even feels.3 And while God showed special affection for Israel, again and again, God stressed that He is Creator of all people, that that affection overflows to every nation, tribe, and people. That would be you and me, not to put too fine a point on it.
I like how Paul J. Pastor described creation as a “world utterly founded on love.”4 God wants us around. God is eager to hear us talk. God constantly invites us to know him better, to relate more deeply and contentedly. God even offers kinship — an old-fashioned word for connection, one that comes from the same historical root as our word kindness.
Those early hearers of the biblical creation accounts, especially any pagans in the audience, must have been rocked back on their heels. Kindness and kinship? From the scary gods of thunder and moody nights? Wouldn’t that seem too good to be true? Yet some of them did see something attractive in Israel’s God.
- They wanted what the prophets called steadfast love, what the New Testament would eventually call grace.
I wonder how your early experiences of God’s presence left you. Did you feel drawn closer? Or did you worry that God was mad at you, frustrated that you weren’t doing “better”? Or maybe you felt God was faraway and uninvolved.
It’s a perennial temptation. There would be a revival of that latter view of a stand-offish deity in more modern times. Deism, as a philosophical movement, as some of us remember from high school history classes, had its heyday during the American Revolution. Deists stressed that God does not intervene in the world He created. God is most like a watchmaker who built the universe, wound it up like an old-fashioned clock, and then retired. Or went off to other exploits.
I share this bit of history because I still see its effects. I think of my own upbringing in an established denomination and suburban church. We absorbed an approach to piety that stressed formality. We heard calls from the pulpit to be decent people who love our neighbors. But was this God too kind, too gentle, to overwhelm me with grandeur or leave me awestruck by His beauty and power?
God isn’t some overly sweet, sentimental figure. For one thing, God exists fully and completely in and of and from God’s very self.5
God needs nothing from us to be God. And this God aches for justice. Sides with those who are sinned against. Here is a Spirit who comes as a mighty wind. Here is a Jesus who overturns the tables of the moneychangers in the temple. It’s possible to so emphasize the God of grace that we lose sight of the biblical call to please God.
Trying to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength and working to love our neighbor as ourself, as Jesus called us to, has a way of making us humble.
At the same time, this impressive God who calls us to faithfulness becomes intimate. The Trinity helps us avoid two extremes: thinking of God as too soft and mild, or as too distant to reach out to us. In it we see both an open invitation of grace and the chance to be transformed by love.
Growing up, I didn’t hear much about the encounter possible through a vibrant faith. What I did see of God — though I didn’t fully understand — was a kindly figure never eager to punish. My church didn’t try to scare or pressure people. I wasn’t traumatized by intimidating or threatening sermons like some others were. And for that, I’m grateful.
With the Trinity, however, we watch a story unfold where more is at stake than pleasant feelings after sitting in a pew for an hour. There’s drama here.
This living God commits fully to the world He made, never distant or stand-offish.
Within God’s very Self we glimpse an outgoing relational movement, a conversation with us born of love and hope. Which lays upon us some responsibility. He is supremely involved in the world He makes and wants us involved too. For that same love reaches out — catches us up in that movement toward others. This living God engages against that which opposes God and wants to subvert the good. We get front-row seats for the unfolding of all kinds of action. Action that keeps the creation moving toward further good.
Which makes the theater of creation all the more astonishing as a gift. If God doesn’t need us but still wants us simply out of generosity, we gain a new glimpse of the universe’s order and reliability. We see a divine trustworthiness behind it. A steadfast love. Vocabulary like sturdy and unshakable applies. Theologians talk about God as immutable, unchanging and not reliant on our advice to know what to do next. God’s changelessness does not suggest monotony or lovelessness but rather a steadfast, burning constancy. Did you, perhaps, trigger an impatient parent while growing up? Did you face bursts of irritation when you disappointed someone?
Here in creation, we see God’s love as steady action — not reaction. This love does not fluctuate or fly off the handle. In this classical doctrine that buttresses God’s eternal steadiness in complicated language, we see a constant kindness, a commitment to us. Covenant is a big word in the Bible. It refers to God’s faithful promise to care. And God enlists us in this work of justice being established in the world’s broken places and unjust situations.
More good news: Looking back, I see that my starry brush with the heavenly realm was not an invitation to a submersion into some vast oneness. The interconnectedness of creation does not mean each person becomes a drop in an oceanic limitlessness, a speck merging into cosmic vastness. These pictures seem to exhaust some folks’ view of God these days. But God’s loving attention to human persons means we have a role to play in the lives of others around us, whom God likewise cares about.
1. 1 John 4:16.
2. Psalm 115:5–7.
3. Terrence Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament (Abingdon, 2005), 18. It should be noted, though, that any talk of God’s having feelings needs a healthy bit of cleansing of any human limitations. We don’t want to limit God. God always “feels” in ways that are pure. We do so only sometimes.
4. Paul J. Pastor, The Face of the Deep: Experiencing the Beautiful Mystery of Life with the Spirit (David C. Cook, 2016), 34.
5. The technical word for this quality is aseity: God is fully God, in need of no help, dependent on no one or nothing, a se in Latin. It means “God is life in and of himself. He is independent of the created order, independent and self-existent.” See Matthew Barrett, Simply Trinity (Baker, 2021), 319.
Excerpted with permission from Fully Beloved by Timothy Jones, copyright Timothy Jones.
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Your Turn
Do you wrestle with the idea that God cares about you? Did you grow up believing that He was more of a “watchmaker who built the universe, wound it up like an old-¬fashioned clock, and then retired”? What would change if you stepped fully into God’s unshakeable, sturdy, and steadfast love for you? ~ Devotionals Daily