Eternal Communion with the Trinity: What was God doing before creation? The Triune God enjoyed a loving fellowship and communion.
An Eternally Happy God
God did not have to create anything in order to ease His loneliness. He was already incomprehensibly happy, and in love. The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit (One God) enjoyed a loving relationship in eternity, before creation.
It’s difficult for our finite minds to comprehend eternity past, let alone the existence of three persons in One God.
In fact, in his book Delighting in the Trinity, Michael Reeves notes that only a Triune God can truly love. To summarize the concept, Reeves cites Richard of St. Victor,
Richard argued that if God were just one person, he could not be intrinsically loving, since for all eternity (before creation) he would have had nobody to love. If there were two persons, he went on, God might be loving, but in an excluding ungenerous way… Being perfectly loving, from all eternity the Father and the Son have delighted to share their joy and love with and through the Spirit. (Page 31)
For more, see the links under Further Reading below.
Christians share in that love
Christians get to share in the same Trinitarian love in eternity. Just as we cannot imagine eternity and a Three-Persons-in-One God, we cannot imagine the scope of that love.
Thomas Goodwin wrote,
…to sit down with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, and to have Them dwell in us, and to dwell in Them—this is Christ’s language; this is New Testament language. Oh, to be bound up in that bundle of life with the loving God and with Christ, who has life in Himself! Oh, let this be the whole strength of the aim of our souls, and let us so be moved and affected with it, so as to not lack a part and share in and with this good company! They were sufficient company to Themselves when They inhabited eternity, and They are sufficient to make us so, by taking us up into Their intimate converse.
Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. John 14:21
The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. John 17:22-23
But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” 1 Cor 2:9
…and though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, 1Peter 1:8
Let us comfort ourselves with these truths.
Maranatha!
Further Reading
The Happiness of God and the Trinity
Michael Reeves on Christianity’s Triune God
Sharing is caring!
