The God of Love
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What’s the Most Important Thing there Is?
If you asked people what is the most important, most beautiful, best thing there is, there’s a good chance most of them would say, “Love”. And they’d be right.
Love is, at the end of the day, the most beautiful, worthy thing there is. If there were something to adore, that would be it. But then we could ask another question, which is this: Do we ever really see an instance of pure, perfect love?
Isn’t it true that in all human relationships, love is partial, imperfect, and compromised by selfishness?
Do we ever actually see someone who exhibits the love St. Paul talks about: patient, kind, not jealous or boastful or arrogant or rude. A love that doesn’t insist on its own way, is never irritable or resentful; a love that never rejoices in the wrong but only in the right. Have you ever seen a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things?
Have you ever actually seen a love that never ends?
In other words, we have a problem. On the one hand, Perfect, Pure Love seems to be the proper object of our adoration since it is the greatest, most important thing there is. On the other hand, when we look around, it seems as though perfect, pure love doesn’t exist.
The only way our natural instinct to venerate, to bow down before perfect, pure love could be validated, would be if there were a God who was Himself Perfect, Pure Love
And there is such a God. It is the Trinity.
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The Triune God of Love
No God who was just one person could be a God of love. To be a God of love means that there must be within God, more than one person, so that love can be perfectly, infinitely, and eternally shared. There is no love without a sharing of goodness and a celebration of the goodness of the other.
There can only be One God. But that God is not a lonely God. That God is a community, a tri-unity.
It is, as the Catechism says, “God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.”
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The Gift of the Father to the Son
All love is a gift of goodness and a celebration of the goodness of the other. In the Trinity, that gift of goodness is absolute – there is no holding back.
So the Father, the original Giver, gives everything – everything. He gives the infinite goodness of God to another and that other is His Son. That’s why Jesus says, “I have received everything from my Father” He doesn’t just mean He has received everything humanly, He means He has received everything divinely. That’s why the Son is just as much God as the Father, in fact, the Son is the same God as the Father, because the Father doesn’t hold anything back from the Son, so He has nothing more than the Son. The Son doesn’t receive anything from any other source, so He has nothing more than the Father.
What makes them different is that one gives everything He possesses, and the other receives everything He possesses. But all the infinite goodness that is God is shared fully by both. And the only thing better than having a good thing is to share it with another. Which the Father and the Son do to an infinite extent.
That’s why it’s so good to be God!
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The Gift of the Father and Son to the Spirit
But there are Three Persons in the Trinity, not two!
So how is there a Third Person?
If the Father just made a second gift of everything, then the Holy Spirit would be no different than the Son and then there would be no difference between the Son and Spirit. So what makes the Holy Spirit different from the Son?
Just this: that the Holy Spirit receives the full, complete, infinite goodness of being-God not just from the Father, but from the Father and the Son together. He comes from both of them, He receives everything from both of them.
Does it sound complicated? Does it sound difficult to understand? Yeah, that’s because it’s God, it’s an infinite mystery. But hopefully you can get the sense that each of the three Persons is distinctive, each stands in a unique relationship to the others, each delights in the goodness of the others, and each shares everything He has with the others.
So It’s like the happiest, most loving family you could imagine, scaled to infinity. That’s the best thing there is. That’s God. That is the right object of your adoration
That is the right goal for your life.
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Only God of Love on the Market
All this brings us back to where we started. What’s the most important thing there is?
If you would be willing to answer “Love,” then you should be a Christian. Because only the God of Jesus Christ is a Trinity. Only the Trinity is a God that is pure love. All the pagan gods are gods of caprice and selfishness. Non-Christian monotheistic gods are single and solitary. As GK Chesterton said, “It is not good for God to be alone.”
And God is not alone. God is a community.
If you care about love, you should worship the Christian God because the Trinity is the only God of love on the market.