We were made for communion with God
This post concludes the series exploring the book Forsaken (The Trinity and the Cross, and Why it Matters) by Tom McCall. For other posts in the series, click a number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
McCall notes that God created humanity "to know and experience the holy love of the triune life" (p143). He emphasizes this vital truth by quoting C.S. Lewis who addresses this issue in a comment on the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity:
It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.... If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not the sort of prizes which God could, if he chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality (Mere Christianity, p137).Indeed, we were made for intimate, never-ending communion with our triune God. However, as McCall notes, there is a problem:
We are sinners, we have plunged ourselves (individually and collectively) into utter ruin. We have shaken our fists at God in rebellion; we have turned away from the holy light of his life and into the blindness of our own stupidity; we have turned away from the shalom of God's own life and into the confusion, disintegration and depression of our own futility; we have turned away from his life-giving holy love and into the hatred that destroys. Indeed, we have killed the Lord and Giver of life (pp143-144).Even so, God has not abandoned us. In love, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are at work drawing us into their triune love and life:
We have been faithless; he has been faithful. He has pursued us with a steadfast affection that only the impassible triune God can maintain. He has redeemed sinners, and here again to be fully Christian we must be resolutely trinitarian. God has not pardoned us to live as criminals who cower and scurry away; he has saved us for nothing less than participation in the holy love of the triune life. So the action of the triune God is grounded in, and flows from, the nature of the triune God as holy love. But further, this same holy love is the telos of his action. It is the end for which God made us, and it is the end for which God is remaking and cleansing us.... Sanctification is the gracious provision of the triune God in the death and resurrection of the Son, applied by the continuing ministry of the Holy Spirit, to make us whole, to make us truly fitting for communion with the triune God. It is God's work to make us what he intends us to be, to make us more than we could ever ask or even dare to dream. It is God's work to bring health and wholeness and shalom and true justice to his people (as individuals and communities). It is, in a word the work of the Trinity to make us holy (p144, emphasis added).Father, thank you for your work of grace for us in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. May we yield to that work more and more, and in doing so experience ever deepening communion with you. Amen.