THE INTERTRINITARIAN
LOVE OF GOD COMMUNICATED TO THE ELECT THROUGH UNION WITH THE GOD-MAN IN HIS OVERCOMING
THE FALL
Thomas Booher
Doctrine of
Salvation
May 2, 2013
Why did man fall?
For the reformed, it is because God in some sense planned for man to fall. For
others, it is because God foresaw what Adam and Eve would choose, and He
decided to let them choose rebellion. In either case, the greatest theological
problem remains the goodness of God in light of the existence of sin. How can
they co-exist? Free will does not satisfy as an answer because God knew
beforehand that man would choose to rebel and could have chosen not to create
man. In so doing He would not have violated man’s free will because there would
have been no men. The implication is that if God went through with creating man
knowing he would rebel against Him, God either had a good purpose for doing so,
or He was somehow constrained to create man and thus is not ultimately
sovereign. Thankfully, there is a purpose worthy enough to include the foreseen
and pre-planned fall of man into sin and despair. It is the God-Man, Jesus
Christ. God-man is a term intentionally used to emphasize both the full
humanity and full deity of Jesus so as to see how His glory shines in each
through the incarnation. Scripture testifies that God’s worthy plan and purpose
for the creation and subsequent fall of man is the glorification of the God-Man,
Jesus Christ.
What
could motivate God, who is perfect in Himself, to create? The answer must
ultimately lie in Himself because He is all there was in the beginning. He was
not deficient, or lonely, or bored (Acts 17:25). There is a love that exists
within the Godhead, an eternal relationship within God Himself where perfect
communion occurs. The creation was intended to display this love to a people
who were not God, to be brought into this love by grace, to see the expression
of God’s glory in its fullness. This seemed good to the Godhead from eternity
past because, as Jonathan Edwards has argued, if God loves who He is, He must
also love who He is in action, in expression.[1] Not only do His creatures experience His
diverse glory in varying ways, but He Himself as a man tasted His own judgment
and, because man receives by grace all the good that God gives, Christ also
received God’s grace as a man.
The incarnation
then was an act of love within the Godhead, executed in time, that allowed God
Himself as the man Christ Jesus to experience
Himself as a creature and to express
Himself to a people, some fit for everlasting destruction, others fit for His
grace and mercy (Rom. 9:22-23). This love within the Godhead manifested itself within
redemptive history, and the love spills over to the bride of Christ. All of
history is an expression of the love and eternal satisfaction that has
eternally existed within the Godhead. Each glorifies the other in redemptive
history, as the Father predestines, plans, and sends His Son, the Son goes
forth imaging the Father, overcoming sin, and redeeming His people through the
power of the Holy Spirit, who executes the plan of God in creation, strengthens
the Son, and indwells the bride of Christ.[2]
We see a bit of the satisfaction and intimacy between the Father, Spirit, and
Son in Christ’s high priestly prayer in John 17, and we discover that God
created and sent Christ in order to bestow upon His own people and Christ as a
man the very love and glory that has eternally existed within the Godhead
alone, a love which penetrates into man and is experienced by man (including
the God-Man) through the gift of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5):
Father, the hour has come. Glorify
Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You…. I have glorified You on the
earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do. And now, O Father,
glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before
the world was…. “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will
believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are
in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may
believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them,
that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they
may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me,
and have loved them as You have loved Me.
“Father, I desire that they also
whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which
You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. O
righteous Father! The world has not known You, but I have known You; and these
have known that You sent Me. And I have declared to them Your name, and will
declare it, that the love with which You
loved Me may be in them, and I in them.
This
is a beautiful plan. God is going to bestow upon His people the very same love
that has been bestowed upon Christ the Son from before the foundation of the
world. This love is of such quality that it is costly. Jesus had to become a
man to show God to man and to bring man into the loving fellowship of the
trinity through the Holy Spirit. This is not theosis. The bride of Christ does
not become God, but they receive all the privileges and blessings as if they
were God through spiritual adoption. The bride becomes children of God. Adopted
not to be demi-gods, but children of God with the image of Him restored in them
in such a way greater than Adam and Eve experienced. This experience is
adoption. The essence of adoption is joining a family that one is not by birth
or by right a part of. The only way God could manifest His love to His
creatures that He has for Himself within the Godhead would be to adopt His
creatures, a people for Himself, through His natural Son. In so doing God
creates a family of children for Himself and displays His glory to them.[3] The
only way the bride could be adopted is through a marriage with the Lamb. This
marriage would require a union between man and God. Christ the God-Man is that
union, and all who are in union with Christ are also in union with God. This is
what Jesus is getting at in John 17. The cross makes possible the mystical
union between God and men, a union which brings all the privileges of being
Christ Himself. Christ won these privileges for His bride as a man, and in so
doing also won privileges and glory as a man for Himself and His people. Thus,
we see the wisdom and glory of God’s plan in the Fall- He was demonstrating His
own glory in action, and enters into His own glory and story through Christ,
winning in His humanity experiential glory for Himself and a people for Himself.
The
question remains- why did Christ have to win these privileges for Himself and
His people through sin and suffering? Could He not have won these privileges
some other way? Could man not have kept God’s command, abstaining from the
fruit, and then Christ become a man and enter into union with them? The answer
is apparent. The union would not be the same, if any union could occur at all.
The blood of the New Covenant, Christ’s, is the bonding agent between Him and
His bride. Without the shedding of blood on behalf of His bride there is no
bond, no covenant, no union, no expression of His love, and therefore no
experience of His love, which is the same love that has eternally existed in
the Godhead. The covenant of works would unite man on terms of his righteousness,
his own love, not Christ’s. Thus it would not seem possible for a union of man
to the God-Man, but only of man to Christ in His humanity. This is because it
is the Holy Spirit by which Christ resisted sin as a man, submitted to the will
of His Father, and loved His Father, Himself, and His people in His life and on
the cross. The Spirit could indwell Him because He was without sin, and because
He was God. For fallen man to come into union with the God-Man, they need this
Holy Spirit, because it is the penetrating Spirit of Christ’s love, which is
the love of the divine, rooted in eternity past and enjoyed within the Godhead.
This Spirit is Christ’s Spirit, and its relation to adoption is seen plainly in
Romans 8:14-17:
For as many as are
led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you did not receive the
spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom
we cry out, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit
that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint
heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer
with Him, that we may also be glorified together.
We see, then, that
receiving Christ’s Spirit was necessary to become children of God, and that the
suffering of Christ and the suffering of the saints is necessary for the saints
to taste the love which God the Father and God the Son have shared forever. The
suffering itself embodies the love, and the depth of God’s love for Himself,
within Himself, and for His people united to Himself is that He is willing to
suffer for Himself. Though it is impossible for God to die (in His deity), the
sense is that each member within the trinity so loves one another that they would
die for each other, and this is indicated by Christ dying as a man not only for
man, but for God the Father. The wonder of it all is that while at the very
same time Christ is coming to save His people and the cosmos by overcoming sin
and death, He also comes to prove and express His love to the Father, and His
Father is expressing His love to His Son. Christ gains glory as a man through
suffering, but the suffering in His humanity gives flesh and bones, a theatre
film for the eternal love within the Godhead!
So then, the
Spirit of adoption is enriching experientially because of all that the God-Man
did, acting as His people’s elder brother. While He was saving man as a man, He
was also for the first time expressing God in human form in His fullness (Col.
2:12). Without a fall, man could not image the fullness of God for the same
reason that God, being perfect, could never experientially dispense His wrath
before creation and the fall of Satan. There was nothing worthy of God’s wrath!
Man could not image God’s grace then either, or His mercy, because nothing
existed for grace or mercy before the Fall (Satan was not an object intended
for grace or mercy). This Spirit of suffering, which is the Spirit of adoption,
could not be given unless Christ Himself lived in the Spirit as a man in a
fallen world. Thus it was necessary for Christ to take on human flesh, to
become the God-man, and to live righteously in the Spirit so that His Spirit
could be given and indwell His bride whom He purchased with His blood through
the atonement. The atonement covered His bride’s sins and expressed the
intertrinitarian love of God, and at conversion Christ’s righteousness,
including the righteousness of His loving suffering, is imputed to His bride.
In this way God sees Christ’s bride as His child, righteous and spotless like
His Son Jesus who demonstrated the eternal
love which He, the Father, and Spirit had planned to express through the cross
from eternity past. The Spirit of adoption realizes this and communicates all
this to the bride through the formation of the spiritual union with Christ.
Because the Godhead is perichoretic, because they all have the same essence,
same spirit, to have the Holy Spirit is to have not only one member of the
trinity, but to have all three.[4] The
bond of love is cemented.
One may wonder in
what sense Christ’s Holy Spirit could have entered man if man did not fall. It
may be possible, but the purpose and scope would necessarily be different (in
the experiential realm of suffering). The Holy Spirit enters to sanctify fallen
man, but unfallen man would not need to be sanctified or made holy. Man would
presumably not need to live by the Holy Spirit but could live by their own holy
spirit, a spirit ignorant and devoid of the eternal love shared between each
member of the Godhead. Man would not be adopted into the family of God in the
same sense because Christ would not have died for His bride, paid for her sins,
and given her His righteousness and obedience of suffering and dying. Again,
Christ’s righteousness is the righteousness of the God-Man, containing the
privileged eternal love between God the Father and God the Son.
To be the bride of
Christ and an adopted child of God, one needs life in Christ, not a life of their own righteousness. We need
participation in the life of Christ, which comes to its consummation in
glorification. To be glorified with Christ, we must be raised with Christ.
Colossians 3:1-4 makes this clear:
If then you were raised with
Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the
right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.
For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is
our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.
We
must be wedded to the God-man through His Spirit and the imputation of His
righteousness. This is why the fall was planned and sin exists. The imputation
of Christ’s righteousness and the gift of His Spirit indwelling man go beyond
God dwelling with man in the Garden
of Eden, but now to the place of God dwelling in man and man in God. This dwelling is not one of man becoming the
same substance of God, but becoming conformed to the image of God through
Christ the suffering servant. It’s a union of holiness, of character, of
reception and giving of love, not of essence. But most specifically, it is to
be like the Father in relation to Him, as
His Son. If man had his own righteousness, He would be like God as a
creature, indeed a creature made in the image of God, but in Christ, man has
Christ’s righteousness as if man himself were a natural born son. That is a far
richer righteousness than man’s own, because Christ’s righteousness as the
God-Man, as made clear by passages like John 17, communicates more than the
righteousness of a man not in union with God the Son, namely the eternal
bond of love that God the Son and God the Father reciprocate to one another.
Colossians 3 speaks of a bond of perfection, love, which is the character of
the new man made in the image of Christ the Lord, the heavenly man, surpassing
the image of Adam, the earthly man of dust(1 Cor. 15:46-49):
Therefore, as the elect of God,
holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness,
longsuffering; bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone
has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must
do. But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection.
In Adam was the
seed form of man, which dies and blooms into the image of Christ the God-Man.
The image of Christ the God-Man loves through dying, forgives through suffering
and death. Resurrection will fit us for our spiritual bodies, made after the
likeness of Christ the God-Man who is the full bloom, but we already have the Spirit
of adoption and are seated in the heavenly places in Christ (Eph. 2:5-7). The fall
then was the necessary death of the first man that there may be the blooming of
the second man, Jesus Christ. Further, the giving of God’s own Son for His
people was the act by which God gave His Son (as a man) glory and dominion over
the world and everything in it as a concrete demonstration of His love for His
Son, and the Son as the God-man perfectly embodies and images the glory of God
(which is who He is in His being) in resisting and defeating sin and death,
giving rise to the expression of His justice, wrath, grace, mercy, and love. The
fall is necessary and as seen in this light is not an aberration of God’s
goodness and glory, but a manifestation of it since the fall itself and all
that follows from it glorifies Himself in His totality, chiefly through the
God-Man Jesus Christ.
[1]
John Piper, God's Passion for His Glory (paperback Edition): Living the
Vision of Jonathan Edwards (with the Complete Text of the End for Which God
Created the World) (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 147-148
[2]
Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity: in Scripture, History, Theology, and
Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2004), 365-367
[3]
Sinclair B. Ferguson, Children of the Living God (Edinburgh:
Banner of Truth, 1989), 5
[4]
Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity: in Scripture, History, Theology, and
Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2004), 366-367
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