Wrapped in Trinitarian Love

“… be filled with the Spirit.“ Ephesians 5:18

Man was created to enjoy a relationship with God the Holy Spirit … to be filled with Him, living under His gentle embrace. Human existence was to find its meaning in man living in a functioning union with God, his body the dwelling place of God. The fall of man was essentially a separation from that purpose … from that adventure … from that “great dance” as C. Baxter Kruger would say.

With man separated from his purpose, what was man left with? Man was left with finding his meaning and purpose in himself … in what he did, his success (or failure) in life, his possessions, and so on … or in his relationships with others … who he knew, in their acceptance of him, their approval, and so on. The Biblical idea of this is that man sought his purpose in his “flesh” existence, and there was a great void where once the Spirit made His home. The search to find an adequate substitute for the Spirit is the obsession of man’s existence from the awakening of self-consciousness to the grave.

The Ephesians passage above tells us of how one substitute (among many) for the Spirit filling our lives is to become drunk with wine. But this text is not so much dealing with only this particular substitute; the text is calling us to be done with ALL substitutes and to return to the meaning of our existence … being filled with the Spirit.

To me, one of the most important things to come to grips with is our beginnings. How did man get the way he is today? What was man’s purpose from the beginning? If a person does not understand this, he will struggle much with his Christian life and basic Biblical interpretation. If we go back to the very beginning, man was made for a functioning union with God. This is never an option, a hobby for the “religious” human. It is the way man is, and he is not fully functioning as a human unless he totally embraces and is wrapped in Trinitarian love.

Persons living apart from union with God are existing at a subhuman level. They are incomplete humans. They are out of harmony with the blueprint and, therefore, lack the sense of wholeness, harmony, adventure, peace, and joy that is present when everything is an integrated whole.

Such a union of God with His creature, man, was always meant to be implemented by the third person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. All creation followed the same pattern: It originated in the mind of the Father, was patterned after and spoken by the Son (who is the Word of the Father), and that Word was taken and made substance by the Spirit. The process is easy to see in the Genesis 1 account of creation.

Man was made in the image of God. He is a person, self-conscious and rational. We might call this the “natural image” of God in man, but there is more to it than that. The image of God is ultimately in His holiness which is shown to us in Jesus, the Man, who is the image of God. There is much confusion about what the term holiness means, and we will deal with that extensively in future blogs. Suffice it to say right now, man cannot produce that holy image from his humanness; it must be produced in him by the Spirit. True man can only be known when he is yielded to the Spirit. To embrace total acceptance through Jesus Christ, and to live in that adventure is the true understanding of holiness (but more on this later).

Man, this amazing creature set apart from all other creatures to be like the Creator, must choose to be who he is. He must freely choose dependency upon God, to be a container of God. He is not a robot. And so, the place of choice, where his faith must express itself in complete dependency upon the Trinity, is set up in the Garden of Eden.

I would encourage you to read the story of the fall of man in Genesis again. Here we meet with the temptation and choice to be independent of God … a center unto himself … the beginning of a futile attempt to find another meaning to life other than that of union with God. Basically, man believed he would be an independent god.

His seeking to be a god left him pathetically naked, cringing in the bushes holding a fig leave in front of him, afraid of his nakedness before his woman and his God. Man was suddenly in darkness and a slave of the devil, but he clung to the promise of the liar that he, within himself, could be a god. In spite of thousands of years of failure in this, man still clings to this lie.

At that moment man disintegrated inside. He lost his focus, his reason and meaning for being, which was a relationship with the Creator, a “dance” with the Trinity. Without that focus to live, he was lost. He wandered down dead ends, going nowhere. Jesus’ favorite phrase for man was not “sinner” but “lost” (for example, Luke 19:10). But think about this … if man is lost, then that implies that man has a destiny and purpose. And where we find man today is part of his false belief that “in this thing” or “in that relationship” he can finally find his meaning and purpose in life.

To this very day, in every fad and philosophy that comes down the turnpike, mankind continues the futile search for meaning, wholeness and inner integration. He will believe anyone who promises him a fulfillment of the devil’s original lie … well, he will believe everyone that is except God.

(to be continued)
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