Today we celebrate one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith: the Trinity of Persons in the Unity of nature of the one God.
Though this mystery cannot be understood in its eternal fullness by finite minds, it can be known and in fact, it has been made known by Our Lord Jesus Christ himself. Its acceptance marks one an orthodox Christian holding the biblical faith of the Apostles, the Fathers, and the Saints. Its rejection makes one a heretic, a person who has broken faith with the Church founded by Jesus and the truth she guards.
Though the Church did not agree until the 4th. century on the technical - and necessarily analogical - language to speak about the mystery of the Triune God, these technical words guard the exact meanings and sense found in Holy Scripture, to wit:
Therefore, in God's inner life there is found a dynamism of love, in which the Father and the Son love each other with an eternal, subsistent law who shares all their attributes and who is the Holy Spirit. Eternal life means our submersion, in the order of grace, into the heart of this very Divine Life. That's what "heaven" is.- That there is only one God, not three, not a hundred, but just one. "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4).
- That Jesus Christ is the Son of God according to nature, and not to grace, election, or indwelling. Since nature "begets" - an analogical term - according to its own nature, what God "begets" can only be "God" just as what man begets - here the words is used in its accepted meaning - can only be human. Remember, "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9) and "No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known (John 1:18)
- That the Holy Spirit is God, and not an "active force" or an angel is plain, for "The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God" (1 Corinthians 2:10) and no created being or impersonal force can do that except God himself in Person.
- That these Three are not "modes, masks" or "label" assumed by an unitary God in different dispensations, but real distinctions within the one Godhead: three Persons - understood in its philosophical, not clinical sense and again, analogically applied - sharing the same divine, inner life in a single divine nature.
- That these three Persons indwell each other: the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father: "Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work" (John 14:10)
The fact that many so-called Christian sects deny this foundational truth saddens God, because these poor people are then incapable of conceiving of God who is Love and who shares his Triune indwelling with man out of the very fountain of love feeding and maintaining the universe in existence. It has been my experience, when I talk to people who only conceive of a unitarian, uni-personal God, that they are incapable of communing with God with the same depth, intensity, and joy that a Christian potentially can reach in his or her walk with God. A Christian is able to start experiencing heaven on earth, whereas an unitarian usually cannot - and when the latter does, the experience is different in its depth and intensity from that of the Christian. I am talking here specifically about the experience of God sensed by our elder brothers of the Jewish faith.
In conclusion: God has come to us. He has revealed the depths of his very nature in the Person of the Son, and the Spirit sent by the Father through the Son, who empowers us to reach in the order of grace what Jesus is in the order of nature: sons and daughters of God the Father. What belongs by right is ours as a gift.
Heaven is to join Jesus in the eternal Dance of Love taking place in the inner life of the one God.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all (2 Corinthians 13:14).