Torrance Tuesday: The God We Know

Wrap your mind around this. T.F. Torrance writes:Â

We believe that what God is toward us in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, He is in Himself, antecedently and eternally in Himself; and that what He imparts to us through the Spirit who sheds the love of God into our hearts, He is in Himself, antecedently and eternally in Himself. It is thus that through Jesus Christ God has given Himself to us and through the Holy Spirit takes us up into communion with Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the one God of all grace whom we know as the God of our salvation.

Think of the immense revolution this means for our understanding of God.

It means that God is not some remote, unknowable Deity, a prisoner in His aloofness or shut up in His solitariness, but on the contrary the God who is free to go outside of Himself, to share in the life of His creatures and enable them to share in His own eternal Life. It means that God is not limited by our feeble capacities or incapacities, but that in His grace and outgoing love He graciously condescends to enter into fellowship with us, to communicate Himself to us, in such a way as to be received and be known by us. But of course the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means that the more we know God in Himself in this way the more wonderful we know Him to be, a God who in His inexhaustible Nature infinitely transcends all our thoughts and words about Him, but who in spite of that reveals Himself tenderly and intimately to us through His only Son and in His one Spirit who are of the same divine Nature as God the Father (The Christian Doctrine of God, 3-4).