Knowing God

“For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” (Ephesians 2:18, ESV)

The Trinity, not the doctrine of the Trinity, is the life of the people of God. We live in communion with the triune God by faith, and in like manner, the triune God lives in us. Each member of the Godhead lends His own unique shape and color to this relationship.

The great Puritan thinker, Thomas Goodwin, in his book The Object and Acts of Justifying Faith described these contours like this:

“Sometimes a man’s communion and converse is with the one, sometimes with the other; sometimes with the Father, then with the Son, and then with the Holy Ghost; sometimes his heart is drawn out to consider the Father’s love in choosing, and then the love of Christ in redeeming, and so again the love of the Holy Ghost, that searcheth the deep things of God, and revealeth them to us, and taketh all the pains with us; and so a man goes from one witness to another distinctly .… We should never be satisfied till all three persons lie level in us, and all make their abode with us, and we sit as it were in the midst of them, while they all manifest their love unto us.”

John Owen took this thought to an even higher level in his meditation on the traditional Pauline benediction from the end of 2 Corinthians when Paul offers this blessing: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

Summarizing Owen’s interpretation of this verse, we can say that our relationship with God the Father is particularly and prominently one of love. In like manner, our relationship with the Son is particularly and prominently one of grace, and our relationship with the Spirit is one of fellowship. None of that, of course, means to deny the loving nature of both the Son and the Spirit, or for that matter the gracious nature of both the Father and the Spirit. Owen simply means to describe the distinctive flavor that each member of the Trinity brings to our souls when we approach them.

When we come to God the Father, we come to One who loves us with the totality of His being. He is the One, John says in those familiar and warm words, who “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son ….” God’s love for us, Owen says, is eternal (it never had a beginning), unchangeable (it never waxes and wanes like the lengthening shadows of the day), and free (nothing outside of God’s own benevolent disposition constrains Him to love us). He loves us because He loves us.

This in turn begs the question: How do we come to such a Father? The answer is that we come through the Son, and in particular the gracious Person and work of the Son. Jesus is the personification, the incarnation of God’s grace (Titus 2:11 ff). His life and death on our behalf reveals God’s gracious disposition to us; His determination is not to reward us according to our sins, not to deal with us according to our iniquities. When we come to Jesus, we come to One who sits on a throne of grace. What a wonderful truth it is that Jesus will never turn us away because we are unworthy or because we somehow don’t deserve Him. Grace stoops to receive even the worst, the last, the lost, and the least. Grace excludes none. Grace receives all. “All who come to Me,” Jesus says, “I will never ever cast out” (John 6:37).

This begs another question: How do we come to the Father through the Son? The answer is, “by the Spirit of fellowship.” The idea behind the Greek word for fellowship (koinonia) is one of sharing. This beautifully sums up the Spirit’s ministry. He exists in the life of the believer to share the Godhead to us, with us, and in us. He is, Calvin says, the bond that unites us to Christ, a bond that the Spirit creates by faith. This is the thrust of Paul’s great prayer at the end of Ephesians 3:

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith ….”

Without this sharing ministry of the Spirit, we have no access to Christ and His grace, and thus, we have no access to the Father and His love. As Calvin says in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3:

“(S)o long as we are without Christ and separated from him, nothing which he suffered and did for the salvation of the human race is of the least benefit to us. To communicate to us the blessings which he received from the Father, he must become ours and dwell in us. Accordingly, he is called our Head, and the first-born among many brethren, while, on the other hand, we are said to be ingrafted into him and clothed with him, all which he possesses being, as I have said, nothing to us until we become one with him.”

It is the Spirit’s job to effect this union and to share these benefits.

When we pray, therefore, we should remember these distinctions and come to the Holy Spirit, asking Him to strengthen our faith and so fill us with Christ. We should come to Christ and ask Him graciously to lead us to the Father. And then, as we come through Son and by the Spirit to the Father, we should bask in His love, confident that we are His well-beloved children.

Describing such communion, Joel Beeke says,

"We must not stop with knowing that God is three persons; we must know each of these divine persons with our heads and hearts. The more we know the triune God in spiritual experience, the stronger our faith will grow in the doctrine of the Trinity. Owen said that though no Christian doctrine is so glorious and mysterious as the Trinity, we must not hide it from people, but help the simplest believer to taste the goodness of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Then “he will with more firm confidence adhere to this mysterious truth, being led into it and confirmed in it by some few plain testimonies of the word, than a thousand disputers shall do who only have a notion of it in their minds.”