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What's the Trinity like? I was thinking about this the other day, and though I know I risk heresy by even trying to liken the Trinity to something within human experience, this is what occurred to me:

John says that Jesus is the "Word" made flesh. He was the "Word" even before the beginning.

Marshal McLuhan said, "The medium is the message"—in other words, the method by which a message is delivered is then synonymous with that message. The two cannot be separated.

It strikes me that the Father is God eternal, and the expression of who God is can be found in Jesus Christ. Jesus IS what God is saying throughout all of time and space and beyond. Jesus IS what God is saying—the very embodiment of all that God expresses in words (through scripture, nature, divine revelation, etc.) and deeds (miracles, sustaining creation, etc.).

The Holy Spirit is the "medium" by which the message of God (His words and deeds as embodied by Jesus) is delivered to us and to all of creation.

With humans, what I say is separate from who I am, but not so with God. When God "says" something (whether in word or in deed), it is so reflective of who He is that what He "says" = who He is. If I say, "I love you" to my wife I mean that I love her insofar as I am able, and I want to love her more fully yet. However, when God says He loves us, it is so TRUE that the very essence of that "I love you" is a living breathing expression of Him—Jesus Christ.

That doesn't, of course, mean that Jesus is ONLY a limited subset of who God is (that would be very human), but rather that because God's Word (in words and deeds) is so very intimately TRUE it cannot help but be, in all actuality, God Himself. What God "says" is who God is.

The Holy Spirit, then, is the medium through which God's true nature is delivered. Again, this doesn't mean that the Spirit is "only", as it were, the telephone wire through which Jesus (the Word) is delivered—that too would be too human. Rather, as McLuhan said (saying more truly than he knew), the Holy Spirit also is, in a sense, that message of "who" God is, so truthfully spoken, that the Spirit is inseparably and indistinguishably God himself.

Now, there is what I have been thinking about the Trinity. What do you think?

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