I had an interesting conversation with Matt (works at Westside) a couple weeks ago. Some of the ideas floated into my message last weekend but definitely weren’t completely developed or (truthfully) ready for primetime.

The conversation centered around the fairly weighty topic of the meaning of life, or more specifically the purpose of life. What are we here for in terms of our relationship to our creator? Classically the church has answered that with any number of variations on the theme of; humanity exists to glorify God.

But that got me (and Matt, sorry to implicate you in my wonderings) wondering about what that does to the character of God. At some level the idea that an omnipotent creator would create for the sole purpose of having his creations praise him does seem a bit narcissistic. Almost as if God was feeling a bit unsure of himself and needed some positive reinforcement. Though, I suppose that, if anyone in the universe could be excused for a sense of narcissism, it would be God.

As I thought about it, I realized that for me at least, this is where the idea of the trinity in the large mystical sense becomes helpful and the idea of the trinity in the small attainable sense becomes… less than helpful.

In the small sense “trinity” gives us the picture of God in three states. Think of water as liquid, solid and gas. Now technically that is called modalism and is a heretical understanding of the trinity. Although in practice and language it often creeps into our thinking more than we might admit. In this sense the relationships within the trinity are largely instructive for us. They teach us about how things should be. Obviously God can’t have a relationship within himself so the picture of such, is about God’s instruction to us. So when transposed over to our lives, the relationship between Jesus and the Father or the father and the spirit, or Jesus and the Spirit, become models for our purpose in life. Essentially the trinity becomes God giving us pictures of what he wants from us.

In the large picture of the trinity God makes a lot less sense, and as we always do, the less something makes sense the larger the words we employ to describe that non-sense. Perichoresis is a 6th century theological term that we came up to talk about the non-sense of the trinity. It comes from two Latin words, Peri meaning around (it’s where we get the word perimeter from) and choresis, meaning movement (it’s where we get the word choreography from). The idea being that God is somehow, in himself, an ongoing movement of relationship. Within God there is this circling of giving and receiving, this movement around and around and around. Here, the relationships between the personalities of the godhead become less instructive for us and more of an indication of the base reality of creation. In this sense when we look at the trinity we see less of a model of instruction for us and more of a picture of identity for God.

God did not create and then give us a model to live up to in the trinity.
God created from the fundamental relational nature of the trinity.
Semantics maybe, but here’s where I think it becomes helpful.

God did not create one day at the beginning of time because he was bored or lonely or feeling inadequate about his status in the universe. There was no universe. There was no one to impress. What it means is that we are not here in some attempt to glorify God so that he feels better about who he is. We are here as the creative outflow of the relational nature of God. Perhaps we could look at it this way, we are here, less “for” God and more “because” of God. Maybe we could even say it this way, we are here less for God and more for ourselves.

Now that is not a statement meant to devalue the relationship we have with God, in fact, by that I am intending to emphasize the value of that relationship. I think we have, in an attempt, to use language that emphasizes God’s importance, actually given in to a religiously acceptable form of egocentricism. As if it is our decisions, choices and determinations that hold sway over God’s self-esteem. God didn’t create for himself because he was needy. He created for us, so that the overflow of his nature could find expression in reality.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to continue working to discover God and to find him in our lives. It simply means that we are the primary beneficiary of that relationship, not him. Perhaps as we discover, love and glorify God, his pleasure is not found in our adoration (as if he is incomplete without it) but in his opportunity to watch us discover the truth of creation for ourselves and come to adore the one who created. That is, we were built to know and be known; to be in relationship. To overcome the artificial distance that separates us from God and each other and to find the base relational nature of all creation. God’s pleasure is not found in our glorification of him for his sake but in our discovery of the practice of glorifying him for our sake.

Again, maybe it’s just semantics but I think it helps me put a framework on my relationship to God.