The Beauty of the Trinity
If asked, “What’s the most important thing to believe about God?”, we would give a diversity of answers. Some of us might focus on his love, some might focus on his grace, some might focus on his holiness, and some might focus on how he does not exist. For most of us God’s essence as one God in three persons, his tri-unity, would not be our first answer; and perhaps for some of us it seems like an assault on our ability to reason. However, when we consider how God has revealed himself in the Bible we see that God, as a tri-unity, becomes the focal point for knowing Him and the most beautiful truth about Him.
The Revelation of the Trinity
What would Jesus do? According to the Bible, Jesus revealed God to the world: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” (John 1:18) This is extremely important in understanding the nature of God: He has primarily revealed Himself as a father through a son. Jesus spoke about God as his Father, which by implication means he understood himself as the Father’s son. This gets to multiple aspects of our understanding of God. Firstly, God does not reveal Himself primarily as a concept, doctrine, or theory, He reveals Himself as a Person. Secondly, the one God does not reveal Himself as a single person, but as Father, Son, and Spirit. This takes the term “Trinity,” which many of us shun as a dusty theological idea, and turns it into a name.
The Love of the Trinity
One peek we get into the internal relationship of the Trinity is at Jesus’ baptism. It is so important that it is recorded in three out of the four books in the Bible about Jesus’ life. Jesus’ disciple, Mark, recorded it this way: “And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:10-11) Not only does the Son reveal the Father, but now we see that the Father loves the Son. In fact, God the Father only speaks verbally twice in the New Testament, both times He says the same thing: I love my Son.
Now we are beginning to see the importance of God’s tri-unity as it pertains to perhaps what we value most about God: God is love. If God is Father, Son, and Spirit deeply in love with eachother for all eternity, then God is essentially love, meaning love is who He is, not something He merely does. If God has not existed eternally as a tri-unity but only as a single-person God, then He is in need of something to love, since love requires an object. Therefore, all other gods are, by definition, less loving than the Trinity. If Jesus is not the beloved Son of God, then God is not love; this is the importance of the Trinity.
The Beauty of the Trinity
Another peek we get into the internal relationship of the Trinity is through a prayer of Jesus the night before his death: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you...I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” (John 17:1-5) There is much that could be said of this portion of Jesus’ prayer, but suffice to say that each person of the Trinity exists to glorify the other, for all eternity. Jesus desires that his father would glorify him in order that he might glorify his father. The glory that Jesus seeks for himself is not selfish, it is meant to bring glory to another. And indeed the Father would glorify the Son, for what would happen in the next few days would make the name “Jesus” the “name that is above every name.” (Philippians 2) The Father loves to glorify his son; the Son loves to glorify his father. The same can be said about the Spirit, whom Jesus described as better (John 16) and who, in like manner, points people to Jesus as the object of their affection. We can think of this deferment of glory within the Trinity like a parade where each person is constantly pushing the others to the front of the line to receive the most praise.
All in all, this makes the Trinity the most beautiful being in all existence. Recently the New York Times published an article containing a few definitions of beauty which help us to understand why the Trinity is indeed so beautiful: “Beauty, they have said, is: harmony; goodness; a manifestation of divine perfection; a type of pleasure; that which causes love and longing; and M = O/C (where M is aesthetic value, O is order and C is complexity).” The fact that God is a unified diversity (ordered and complex; harmony) is beautiful in and of itself. Is it possible for us to fully comprehend this reality? Certainly not! But why would we ever think that we could fully comprehend a God this beautiful and glorious. Beauty is not something to figure out, it is something to behold; and this Trinitarian beauty, once we behold it, “causes love and longing” to the point that we seek him for the rest of our lives and on into eternity, as King David was moved to sing: “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to meditate in his temple.”