In a previous blog, The Trinity is love we saw why we can know this is the very nature of the Trinity. As God tells us we were made to be in His image, so it is this love that should define us as well. Clearly it does not. So we need to explore what has gone wrong, what should be the inevitable consequences of this, but how the Trinity steps in to turn it around.
The book of Genesis tells us that early on there was a tragedy in creation. It is that Satan came and put doubt into Adam and Eve’s minds about the goodness of God. They then rebelled and we have inherited that same doubt and rebellion against God. Therefore, although we retain some of that love that God has created in us, we sin by no longer loving God nor loving each other in the way we were meant to.
So, we have ended up with a broken image. Our hearts are damaged, our desires are warped. Our love for God is all but destroyed and our love for each other is minimal compared to what it should be. Each of us who are married, know this all too well. We have a serious streak of selfishness in us. So what that leads to ultimately, is a love, turned inwards. A selfish love which is really the true nature of sin – a love for ourselves rather than for our heavenly Father and for each other.
Does this ring true for you and your experience in life? Although most of our songs are about love, they often turn out to be about love gone wrong, of tragedies. Even songs that state a forever love are often written by people who decided later that this love was not really forever as it didn’t suit them.
The amazing thing is that God doesn’t want to leave us in this mess. Instead, God steps into our situation by sending Jesus, one of the persons of the Trinity. Have you ever asked yourself the question, if I am made in the image of God but that image is all messed up, how can I know what I am meant to be? The answer is that out of the Trinity’s love for us, Jesus came as a man, revealing not only what God is like, but also what we are meant to look like, being made in God’s image.
It’s as though God says, “Do you want to see what I am like? I am going to send my son Jesus and you are going to see. But, as you are meant to be made in my image, you will then get to see what you are meant to be like”. Jesus therefore becomes our reference point, reflecting what it should be like to be made in the image of God.
But hang on a moment. If God is a just God, what should he do with rebellious people? God does reveal in the Bible that the consequence of sin is an eternity without the presence of the God of love where we will be tormented. It would be a life without exit from eternal torment, what the Bible calls Hell. That is our just dessert. And the more we look at what we should be like, we wring our hands in anguish knowing we can not only never be like Jesus, but we can never repay Him for all the wrong we do, nor for our rebellious hearts. No matter how hard we try, we can never undo the mess we are in.
In the blog The Trinity Pays the Price we see how God deals with this seemingly impossible situation – impossible because there is no exit to it that we can find on our own.