God is one God yet three persons. Don’t feel bad if that confuses you; you’re not alone. The doctrine that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct persons but are each themselves fully the one God has boggled minds for centuries. But if we treat it as merely a secondary, insignificant side doctrine, an intellectual problem to try to make sense of, we miss the whole point. The three-ness of God is actually the foundation of every wonderful thing we have as Christians.
What Jesus tells his disciples in this passage is that if you know one, you know all three. The lives of the Father and the Son so deeply indwell each other that if you have Christ, you have the Father as well. Better yet, the Spirit, who comes from both of them, indwells us with the divine presence of all three. And so our experience of lives of faith, whether you’ve ever realized it or not, involves all three! We know the Father as our creator and loving forgiver; we know the Son as our friend who died and rose for us; and we know the Spirit as our indweller who fills us with wisdom, guidance, and comfort. We know the Trinity because the Trinity is the foundation of our very lives!
In fact, even our salvation is Trinitarian. Christ has sent his Spirit to be with us and bring out the powerful effects of what Christ has done to save us, and so we are declared righteous by the Father, given righteousness by the Son, and made righteous by the Spirit. And what’s more, even our prayer is Trinitarian. We pray to our Father, because the Son’s finished work has made a way for us to him, empowered and helped and guided by the Spirit. It really is remarkable that our clasped hands capture the full triune attention of the Almighty King.
But perhaps the best part of our experience of the Trinity is how God empowers us to love. Love is what God does! Each of the three persons spends eternity in the infinite joy of submitting to and glorifying one another. And God is with us, inviting us to live in that same love by loving our fellow believers and loving God himself by submitting to his will and obeying his commands. What a life we get to live! By living in love, we live in the full glory of the triune character of God! Such is an abundantly worthwhile life—because there is no greater blessing than the Lord’s full presence with us.
As Paul says at the end of 2 Corinthians, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
