The Love of God: The Intratrinitarian Love of God for His Persons (Part 1/4)

The world today seems to believe in no attribute of God’s essential nature other than His love, or at least what it assumes to be His love. Any concept of God that includes His holiness, justice, sovereignty, or wrath is excluded and is deemed incompatible with this contemporary God of love. God’s love is becoming sanitized, democratized, and sentimentalized with increasing overtones of syncretism and pluralism.[1] In short, the world and much of Christianity has lost a biblical understanding of this precious doctrine.

What is the nature of God’s love? This article stands as the first installment to a series of forthcoming articles in which I hope to answer this question. A.W. Tozer has rightly said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”[2] It must, therefore, be our ambition to make the Scripture the base for what informs our mind concerning the nature of the God we worship. In this series, I will argue that God is essentially love (1 John 4:8, 16) and that this love is best understood through the study of the scriptural testimony of God’s intratrinitarian love for His Persons, God’s love for everything that He has created, God’s general love for His unique creature, the human, and His special love for His chosen people, the elect. We must first devote our attention to the study of God’s intratrinitarian love for His Persons.

In order to gain a proper understanding of the love of God, one must begin by focusing his energies toward knowing God for who He is in His transcendence. Though God’s love as it is demonstrated through His immanence is certainly of great importance, it is necessary that one does not begin there.[3] God must be known for who He is in Himself, by Himself, apart from the created order.

Scripture clearly identifies God as one in essence (Deut 6:4; Isa 44:6; John 10:30; James 2:19), yet there is no doubt that He is three in Person (Gen 1:26-27, 3:22, 11:7; Isa 6:8; Matt 28:19; 2 Cor 13:14; Eph 4:4-7).[4] Grasping this essential truth of God’s plurality-in-unity is imperative to one’s comprehension of God’s perfections, particularly His love. Karl Barth asserts that one’s “Church dogmatics derives from a doctrine of the Trinity.”[5] He continues this point saying that “there is no possibility of reckoning with the being of any other God, or with any other being of God, than that of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”[6]

This is principally true with the doctrine of God’s love, since God has loved eternally and before there was anything created to be the object of His love. Jesus speaks of being the object of His Father’s eternal love when He tells His Father, “You loved Me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). He has always been the sufficient object of His Father’s love, and the Father has always been the object of His Son’s love (John 14:31; 15:9, 10).[7] God’s love has been described as God’s eternal giving of Himself to others.[8] The eternal sense of giving in which God loves only makes sense within the biblical doctrine of the Trinitarian God. A monistic god, such as the god of Islam, cannot eternally demonstrate his love on an object. There is nothing, or no person apart from himself, to actively love. Only the Triune God of the Bible can accurately be described as the God who is, from eternity, other-oriented in the expression of His love.[9]

Scripture is replete with passages which speak of God’s other-oriented love within His Intratrinitarian relationships. The Father loves the Son (John 3:35; 5:20; 15:9; 17:23-26), and the Son loves the Father (John 14:31). Jesus seeks to please not Himself, but His Father (John 8:29). The Father glorifies the Son (John 8:50, 54; 13:32; 17:1, 5, 22, 34), the Son glorifies the Father (John 13:31, 32; 14:12; 17:1, 4), and the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son, and thus the Father (John 16:14). The Father honors the Son (5:23; 12:26), and the Son honors the Father (5:23; 8:49).[10]

The love of God is not merely an attribute which He displays; love is something that God is (1 John 4:8, 16). God’s love is one of His essential attributes. That is, it is part of His being, His essence. Some have argued that God could have willed to be other than He is,[11] and thus, God could have chosen to be unjust instead of just, deceitful instead of truthful, and unloving instead of loving. Augustus Strong argues that,

“God’s will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God’s will. God’s perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be Himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes.”[12]

God’s love and all of His other essential perfections are, therefore, part of the Trinitarian God’s essence. God is, in His being, love. Love is, according to Carl Henry, “not accidental or incidental to God; it is an essential revelation of the divine nature, a fundamental and eternal perfection.”[13]

Based, then, on this understanding of God’s essential intratrinitarian love, one should conclude that God is infinitely happy within the communion of His Persons. This, however, is not universally understood to be the case. Some rationalize that the reality of a created world requires that God must have been lonely before He created. Some go so far as to portray God as one who is needy, as one who wishes to be loved as though He could not be happy without the reciprocating love from His creation. John Eldredge, in his Wild at Heart, says, “God wants to be loved. He wants to be a priority to someone. How could we have missed this? From cover to cover, from beginning to end, the cry of God’s heart is, ‘Why won’t you choose me?’ It’s amazing how humble, how vulnerable God is on this point.”[14] What Eldredge does not understand is that God is and always has been loved. That God should be the object of love has never been a reality dependent on any man or creature throughout history. The infinite love that God enjoys in His Godhead is incomparable to the weak and finite love that the greatest creature could stand to offer Him. It is within these eternal and perpetual intratrinitarian relationships that God receives His greatest joy.

God is altogether worthy of loving Himself and doing everything for His own glory (Prov 16:4; Isaiah 43:7, 21; 48:11; Rom 11:36). Some charge God with ghastly conceit, arguing that He is not entitled to be jealous for His name and His glory.[15] This, however, is a faulty side effect of those who seek to equate God’s being to that of man’s. Certainly, man is created in God’s image (Gen 1:27). However, one should not conclude that God and man are identical in essence. God must love and delight in His own perfections above all things. For man to delight in and love himself is the epitome of vanity. For the Father to take ultimate joy in the face of His Son (2 Cor 4:6) is the essence of righteousness. The fundamental nature of righteousness is to place supreme value on what is supremely valuable. Thus, the righteousness of God demands that God take infinite joy and pleasure in what is of utmost value, namely Himself. John Piper is correct when He says that if God “were ever to act contrary to this eternal passion for His own perfections He would be unrighteous, He would be an idolater.”[16] Therefore, God must and does love Himself infinitely.

God did not have to create the universe; in fact, He could have done without it. He would still be the One who loves without ever choosing to create. God is sufficient in Himself as the object of His own love, and He is thus, no less loving if He loves no other object beside Himself.[17] Karl Barth rightly argues from God’s pre-temporality, suggesting,

“It was because God is pre-temporal that He does not owe us anything; either our existence, or that He should establish and maintain fellowship with us, or that He should lead us to a goal in this fellowship, to a hereafter which has a place in His own hereafter. He need not have done this. For He could have done without it, because He is who He is before it and without it.”[18]

It is from this eternal blessedness and happiness that God, though not constrained to do so, decided in His love and wisdom to create and invade His creation with Himself, seeking to commune in fellowship with His creation. God’s creative act is an act of love, mercy, and grace. In the exercise of His will, God brought forth this universe into being as an act of His other-orientation, giving of Himself as a gift, for He is the source of every good and perfect gift (James 1:17-18). God does not need man; yet, He finds enjoyment in creating man.[19] Barth, again, describes the situation well when he says, “[God] does not suffer any want and yet He turns to us in the overflow of the perfection of His essence and therefore of His loving, and shares with us, in and with His love, its blessedness.”[20] God acts and lives and loves in freedom; He is God because of this. His giving of Himself in this manner is the freest possible way to give, because He is not constrained to do so and is not improved because of it. His love, then, must be unconditional. It cannot, by definition, be conditioned on His benefit. Man, unlike God, cannot demonstrate love to someone unconditionally, without expecting some benefit. God “is the free Creator, the free Reconciler, the free Redeemer.”[21] This is the heart of God’s revelation of Himself to His creation. The remainder of this upcoming discourse discusses the outworking of God’s other-orientation in His self-giving.

[2] A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (London: James Clarke, 1965), 9.

[3] One must maintain a proper balance in his understanding of God’s transcendence and His immanence. The popular trend among Enlightenment thinkers and theologians of the twentieth century was to overemphasize God’s immanence, which resulted in the exaltation and elevation of man over and above God. For a thorough treatment of this shift in thought, see Stanley J. Grenz & Roger E. Olson, 20^th-Century Theology: God & the World in a Transitional Age (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1992).

[4] According to J. Scott Horrell, there are at least 106 New Testament passages that include the three divine persons together as mentioned in J. Scott Horrell, “The Eternal God in the Social Trinity,” in Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, ed. Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler (Nashville: B&H, 2007), 55.

[5] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics [CD], ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, vol. 2, The Doctrine of God, pt. 1, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), 261.

[6] Ibid., 261.

[7] Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, 39-40.

[8] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity, 1994), 198.

[9] Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, 39.

[10] Horrell, “The Eternal Son of God in the Social Trinity,” 57-58.

[11] This incorrect understanding of the relationship between God’s essence and will is called Voluntarism.

[12] Augustus H. Strong, Systematic Theology (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1907), 262.

[13] Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority (Waco: Word Books, 1982), 1:341.

[14] John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 36.

[15] Bill Maher demonstrates his lack of understanding on this topic on Larry King Live as seen in the transcript of the show, Bill Maher and Larry King, “Bill Maher Takes Aim at Politics, Religion” accessed 23 January 2009, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0808/19/lkl.01.html; Internet.

[16] John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Colorado Spring, CO: Multnomah, 2000), 42-43.

[17] Barth, CD, 2, pt. 1: 280.

[18] Ibid., 621.

[19] It is important to understand that God did not necessarily have to create. God’s will is not bound to His essence; this error is commonly referred to as Necessitarianism. God’s will was not bound to create the world; this would make God contingent on the world. Neither should one understand God’s will to be detached from His essence. God did not will His essence into being. This is, again, the problem of Voluntarism. One should adopt the view known as Essentialism, which asserts that God’s will accords with His essence. God cannot will anything contrary to His essence, and thus, His free choice to create is consistent with His essence. For a thorough treatment of these teachings, see Jay Wesley Richards, The Untamed God: A Philosophical Exploration of Divine Perfection, Simplicity and Immutability (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 15-250.

[20] Barth, CD, 2, pt. 1: 283.

[21] Ibid., 301.