He is All Sufficient

Is there anything sweeter than a newborn baby? So warm and soft with such sweet breath. Perfect and beautiful. When my first child was born, I held her and realized just how important I was. I was everything to her. Whether she was warm or cold, hungry or content, safe or at risk – everything she needed had to come from me. She was completely dependant.

All babies are born into this world absolutely deficient. As we grow, we become more self sufficient – at least in terms of dressing ourselves, making our own meals, and providing an environment for ourselves to live. But our sufficiency is really just an illusion. Our current circumstances illustrate this clearly. Because of a tiny virus that cannot be seen by human eyes, almost eight hundred thousand people have died worldwide. In some countries, the unemployment rate hit 40% and world economies are struggling. And in our quarantine attempts to slow the spread of this virus, people are confined at home feeling lonely, isolated, and terribly afraid. We are completely deficient in knowledge and power, and for right now, there is nothing we can do to stop it, only wait.

Just consider, right now, what you cannot control. How much can you really protect yourself? Can you ever have enough money, knowledge, or power to guarantee that you will live a long, productive, healthy life? If you do happen to live to an old age, can you prolong the inevitable? When the inevitable comes, do you have any control over what happens after? No.

Are you so self sufficient that you need no one else for advice? Can you live a lifetime, no an eternity, without anyone else? Would you get lonely, bored, isolated? Do you rely on sources outside yourself for food, safety, entertainment, validation, or creativity? Is there even one thing in all the world that you can claim as completely under your control? Sorry, no. You are wholly at the mercy of the winds of life. Scary? Many people think so. They work their whole lives trying to grasp some ephemeral control over their money, safety, or health – only to lose it in the end.

That is our reality, but it is not the reality of who God is. He is completely self sufficient and in control. He has absolutely no needs. He does not rely on anyone or anything to feed him, clothe him, or to keep him safe. He does not depend on anyone to entertain him, talk to him, or keep him company. Never, in all eternity, has he wished for something that he didn’t have. He is the source of everything in the universe, like a spring of all matter and life overflowing into reality. He speaks and it happens.

Think about it in this way –
God is all knowing. Therefore, he does not need the instruction of anyone to advise him in the perfect way to do things. Who in all of eternity has counseled God?
He is all powerful. Therefore, nothing can stop him from doing what is right and best according to his plans. God is never backed into a corner and forced to wring his hands powerlessly.
God is eternal. Therefore, nothing can end his plans before coming to fruition. There is no force in the universe that supersedes anything that he purposes.
Consequently, there is nothing he could ever need that is not supplied just by who he is!

NOW, consider sufficiency through the lens of joy, or more specifically, enjoyment. If C.S. Lewis is correct, and I believe he is, joy in something is most enjoyed when we express it to someone. In his book Reflections on the Psalms he writes, “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.” Do you see? Sharing the enjoyment of something with someone else is what makes the enjoyment complete! Lewis explains that: “The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses [Romeo praising Juliet and vice versa], readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. .”
Enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise.

We as finite beings then, need someone else in order to completely enjoy something. We are deficient in the fact that complete enjoyment requires another person to validate it. God pronounced that it was not good for Adam to be alone, and so he made Eve. Man and woman were able to enjoy each other and the world God had made, completely, together.

What of God then? He has existed eternally in the past with only himself. Was he unable to consummate his joy without being able to express it? Did he create us out of a deficiency of need? Unequivocally, no! There is something very different about the infinite God in comparison to the finite us. The Bible tells us that though there is only one God, he is three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.

I realize that I cannot square this concept with you completely. It is beyond our comprehension to understand how one being can be three persons. We can only fully comprehend what we are: one being, one person. But just because we can’t understand it, does not mean we dismiss it as impossible. I could not understand the love my mother had for me until I had my own child. It was absolutely beyond anything I could have imagined. But that did not mean it didn’t exist.

And though we can’t completely grasp something so unfathomable, we can do much more than we have tried so far. You will remember in an earlier post, I stated that there is incredible benefit in approaching these divine tensions and pressing ourselves against them for glimpses of glory. It is what satisfies our appetite for awe. But we often take a brief look at God’s personhood and then step back to a safer distance to scratch our heads. In doing so, we miss countless joy deepening opportunities!

Therefore, I will do my best to briefly describe how God can be three persons. However, I challenge you to dive as deep as you can into this truth. Probably the most helpful source I have found, beyond the Bible, is Jonathan Edwards’ “An Unpublished Essay on the Trinity”. And from this essay springs many commentaries, books, and sermons by other great thinkers on the personhood of God. Press up against this for a time. This is guaranteed to deepen your joy.

God the Father: This is the person of God we have been talking about. He exists eternally from forever in the past to infinitely into the future. He is the source of all matter, life, and purpose in the universe. He is ultimate reality.

God the Son: Jesus – he is the Father’s own image of himself, perfectly reflecting his glory, as in a mirror, back to himself. God’s comprehension of himself, and who he is, is so perfect and so complete, that it stands forth as a person – the person of Jesus. The Bible makes very plain that Jesus Christ is the exact representation of God. The very image of God. He may be called “Son” in the sense that he is eternally generated by the Father, but he is still 100% God.

God the Spirit: This is the will of God, which in scripture is synonymous as the love of God. God’s loving will is so encompassing and powerful that it stands forth as a person – perfectly doing the will of God the Father in all things. He is the love and comfort of God who lives inside all those who love Jesus. He is referred to as the breath, wind, and fire of God, accomplishing all that the Father purposes in love.

Can you imagine that the perfection, completeness, power, and self-awareness of God is so comprehensive that it manifests as persons? It’s breathtaking! And in doing so, there is community and joy within God. He is all sufficient because of this. He is perfectly capable of enjoying all he has made within the community of himself. Flawless joy and love shared in one person.

We may not be able to completely understand how this is possible, but it should not come as a surprise that this is who God is! In fact, when you contemplate all other gods, this is so glaringly obvious. If joy cannot be consummated without sharing it, then all gods are deficient in some way. They will either not be able to experience complete joy, or they will have to make beings in order to be fulfilled. Only the God of the Bible claims to be three persons in one, and only he can truly be all sufficient. Remember this when others call into question the “triune-ness” of God!

Do you see why the writers of the Bible were so clear about Jesus being God? Not only does the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, to cover the debt for our sins, hinge on this truth, but the very sufficiency of God. Take away the triune person of God and you are left with a being – powerful, but impotent in pursuit of joy.

And if all of this is not awesome enough, consider the following:
Your joy is finite. It can only contain your limited perspective and is contingent upon another person for consummation. It waxes and wanes. No matter how satisfying something is, you lose joy in it. Of course it can be rekindled, but it is humanly impossible to sustain the level of joy in something or someone that there was from the first. We know this to be true. We chase satisfaction only to clutch it and lose it again. Yet God’s joy never changes. It is perfect from the start and preserves into eternity. In fact, you cannot begin to grasp the bottomless depths of His joy. Our God is a supremely happy God, with joy beyond measure. Those who know Him, who spend time in his presence in the Word, know this. It is where our ephemeral joy is replenished.

In Matthew 25, Jesus tell the Parable of the Talents. To the servants who had been faithful with what had been given to them, the master blesses them: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ The last sentence seems such an unlikely thing for a master to say to a servant in this situation. The words are too strong or too outside the normal language of the setting. But here we see reality breaking through the story Jesus is telling. Jesus is saying to his listeners: “Upon my return, the faithful will enter into the joy of the Lord.” Notice that the joy does not enter into us, but we enter into it. Like a ship put to sea in the vastness of a blissful ocean.

‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’

Therefore, when this earth is remade, and we live in the presence of Christ, our joy will not be our own finite happiness. It will be the bottomless depths of an all-sufficient, incomparably contented, unsurpassably joyful God. We will live forever because, firstly, God loves us. But secondly, and this is what keeps me on my knees in worship, we will live forever because it will take that long to plumb to depths of God’s joy. Every day in eternity will be more joy filled than the last as we experience the riches of his delight. We will never, in all infiniteness, find the bottom.

That, my friends – brothers and sisters, is the source of all our hope and what “makes the sufferings of our present time not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Romans 8:18