God is not an old man in the sky.

God created time and space and is therefore

beyond time and space. This means God is not short, tall, male, female,
young, or old. The challenge of talking about God is that God’s nature is so
far beyond our own that we can only catch a glimpse of God’s glory; it is
impossible to use human minds to understand everything about God or to use
human language to capture everything about God.

How do we know about God?

What we do know about God, we primarily know through the Bible. God
identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Old
Testament (Exodus 3:15; Acts 7:32). He also describes himself as “I am.” By
these two names, we know that God is both intimately personal and
concerned with individual people he loves dearly and he is the most supreme
being, even “being” itself. 

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are no random handful of names. In the Old
Testament, God makes covenants, which are oath-bound relationships, with
each of them. God proposes this covenant to Abram (who will be renamed
Abraham) in Genesis 12:1-3:

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and
your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a
great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will
be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I
will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”

When God makes covenants with his people, he always gives them a glimpse
of the kind of God he is first. In the case of Abram (Abraham), he
miraculously gives him and his wife Sarai (Sarah) a child in their old age.
Much later on, God frees Israel from slavery in Egypt and helps them across
the Red Sea to freedom. Then, he proposes to them that he be their God and
they be his people in Exodus 19:

“Then Moses went up to God; the Lord called to him from the mountain,
saying, ‘Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: You
have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings
and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep
my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.
Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom
and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.’”

In each generation, God’s relationship with his people is a story of rescue,

love, and commitment.

Then, God becomes incarnate — becomes a human being — revealing

himself to us more than ever before. In the Old Testament, God’s people had
hoped for, longed for, heard prophesies about, and looked forward to their
“Messiah,” translated into Greek as “Christ.” The Son, who was to be named
Jesus, was that long-awaited Christ.

God institutes the New Covenant, or New Testament. In Luke 22, we see
Jesus instituting this “New Covenant” — or God’s new way of having a
relationship of love and commitment with his people — at the Last Supper.
He says,

“Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and
gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in
remembrance of me.’ And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying,
“This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”

Just after this, Jesus is crucified for the sins of the world. In the words of 1
Corinthians 15: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,
and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance
with the scriptures…” Jesus Christ’s dying and rising from the dead in order
to save humanity ushered in a new epoch, or way of God being in loving
communion with his people - a way which had been longed for and
prophesied until that point.

What is the Trinity?

One of the most important aspects of the Christian understanding of God is

that God is triune. The fancy theological way to talk about the Trinity is to
say that God is one God and three persons (tri meaning three). Christians do
not worship three gods, but the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each distinct
“persons” (not individual, separate people as we know people) who are not
each other, but are all the same God. This is extremely mysterious to the
human intellect, and it is okay to be perplexed. If you’ve ever wondered “Is
Jesus God?” or “How did God create the world?” or “Does God sustain the
world or is he more hands-off?” or “Does God listen to my prayers?” you
have already been asking questions about the Trinity.

An excellent and helpful example of Trinitarian thinking is the Nicene Creed,

which is a statement of faith recited each Sunday in multiple denominations
of Christian churches around the world. The Nicene Creed expresses the
Son’s relationship with the Father with these words to express this reality:

“God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.”

Another tool for understanding the trinitarian dynamics is the shield of the
Trinity, which has been around for centuries and is pictured below. 
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

It is tempting to try to compare the Trinity to physical objects or realities that

we can see and understand, like an egg (yolk, white, shell) or water (solid ice,
liquid water, gas vapor). However, these illustrations ironically tend to
illustrate incorrect or “heretical” ways of thinking about the Trinity more than
they help. Water, for example, is a great illustration of what is called
“modalism,” which is the misunderstanding that God becomes Father, Son, or
Holy Spirit in different contexts, rather than always being all three, unified.
As frightening as “heresy” might sound, it is really just a way of helping us
stay within the boundary lines of Christian theology. If we can describe what
God is not, we have a better idea of what God is.

The point of Trinitarian theology is not that we describe God as three, but
that we encounter God as three. We primarily understand the Trinity by
means of the Trinity’s interaction with us. In creation, God the Father created
by means of the Word (who is the Son), as the Holy Spirit hovered (or
brooded, if you like) over the face of the waters as they formed and
separated.  The trinitarian God brings about our salvation similarly, which is
sometimes thought of as re-creation: God the Father brought about salvation
by means of Jesus’ becoming human, dying a human death, and rising from
the dead as the “firstborn from among the dead” (Colossians 1:8). After Jesus
ascended back to God the Father, God sent the Holy Spirit to be with (and
indeed in) his people. The church, as God’s people, are now charged with the
identity and task of being the body of Christ on the Earth. 

It can be helpful to keep God’s Trinitarian life in mind in order to understand

how we pray — We pray to God the Father (Matthew 6:9), through Jesus as
he unites our humanity with divinity (Hebrews 7:25), and in the power of the
Holy Spirit who moves us to pray (Romans 8).

Is God gendered?

God is neither male nor female. Although we are in the habit of using the
pronoun “He” when we refer to the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, or the
Trinitarian God, it is a categorical error to apply gender to the Trinity or any
of the three persons of the Trinity. The words Father and Son are used to help
us envision the kind of relationship the “persons” have wherein the father
begets the Son (John 3:16). We could just as well be talking about God our
Mother as indeed some have done throughout Christian history. In Genesis
1:27, we are presented with a poem which emphasizes the climactic moment
in the creation narrative:

“So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”
This poetic structure communicates clearly that to be in the image of God is
to be male and female. This poem about humanity would be absurd if God
were strictly male. There are plenty of metaphors in the Bible that portray
God as motherly, and these are good to remember (Genesis 1:1-2, Genesis
2:7, Deut. 32:11-12, Proverbs 1:20, Matthew 11:19, Luke 3:22, John 3:5-6
for a start).

What is God like?

One way Christians like to think about God is by remembering God’s

attributes, sometimes called Divine Perfections. Here are some of them:

1. God is one. Deuteronomy 6:4, a line called the Shema, says “Hear, O
Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (See also Mark 12:29 and
James 2:19.) This is first and foremost a statement about monotheism
— there is one God. Additionally, within Christian doctrine, the three
persons of the trinity are one. The human and divine nature of Christ is
one. All of God’s attributes are one. They are not aspects or
characteristics of him, but God is One, Almighty, Wisdom, Love, and
more. (This is sometimes called “divine simplicity,” meaning that God
and his attributes are perfect, whole, and unified.) While we may divide
these attributes into lists and fragments due to our finitude of
understanding  — as we are locked in time, space, and language —
God is uniquely one. God is the one God of the universe, and he in his
being is one. This is a wonder and a mystery for us to behold.
2. God is omnipresent (all-present). God is not a thing among other
things. He is not an object somewhere in the universe, for he is the
Creator of all things. He is invisible; this is even sometimes called
“divine hiddenness.” It is because of this that God can be our refuge
and hiding place. Although the Son took the form of a human and now
— even today! — is forever a resurrected human being, the One
Trinitarian God is not confined to one specific place. As the Psalmist
says, “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol,
you are there” (Psalm 139:8). God is present everywhere in his created
order. God is with me and with you, always and everywhere.
 3. God is omnipotent (all-powerful). The Almighty God is sovereign
over all of creation. It is not that God has power or exerts force; he is
power. Yet, unlike most earthly power, he cannot become corrupt. It is
by this power that, “In him we live and move and have our being”
(Acts 17:28). It is by this power that he created and sustains our
universe out of a superabundance of love. And it is in this power that he
chose to take the form of an infant, giving up kingly glory in an act of
humility and love, in service of humanity’s good (Philippians 2:6-11).
This is the kind of power that God is — God is, at once, Power,
Goodness, Humility, and Love.
4. God is omniscient (all-knowing). This means more than that God
knows every fact there is to be known. God is Knowledge, Wisdom,
Understanding, and Truth. God, having created the universe himself,
knows it from the inside. God, having created every person himself,
knows each person in the deepest way. God, being perfect in goodness,
perfect in power, and perfect in wisdom, is Righteousness, Justice, and
Truth itself. He is wholly transcendent and wholly perfect. God being
as Truth and Righteousness is often illustrated as Radiance and Light.
In the words of 1 John 1:5, “God is light and in him there is no
darkness at all.” In the words of Psalm 119:105: “Your word is a lamp
to my feet / and a light to my path.”
5. God is love. This is said specifically in 1 John 4:8, but can be seen
throughout the entire Bible. Inside God’s own Trinitarian life, he is
love, and in his relating to all of creation, including humanity, God
displays intense, unchanging love:

“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was
revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that
we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he
loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved,
since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has
ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is
perfected in us. (1 John 4:8-12)

God relational, and he creates, sustains, and saves us because of his

unchanging love for us. God did not create humanity and the universe out of
a need or lack within himself. There is no such thing. He is Perfect and
whole. Rather, out of a superabundance of love, God willed that we might
exist and experience a glorious, harmonious reality motivated by and marked
by love.

We can never fully describe God, and knowing God relationally is much
more feasible than knowing him intellectually. At the same time, we are
curious about what place God holds in the universe, what he is like, and what
he is not like. Even though some of this is beyond our comprehension, God
has graciously revealed so much about himself to us.

To know God is to know Light, Life, and Love itself in all its fullness and
glory. It is to be adopted into God’s family and to know the love and care that
God has for you and the whole family of God’s people. It is to know the
Creator of the universe and to be able to be wrapped up into the life of the
Trinity through prayer.

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?

Well, here it goes. This one’s a doozy. It’s the proverbial “big question.” It’s
one of those questions where the stakes are high (your life) and the scope is
vast (everything). Where can we even begin? 

When asking a question about Christianity, the best rule of thumb is to start

with Jesus, so that’s what we’ll do. Now, when Jesus talked about the kind of
life that is truly worth wanting, the kind of world truly worth hoping for, the
sort of existence that we could truly describe a flourishing, he tended to talk
about “the kingdom of God.” He didn’t mean a particular territory that is
God’s in the same way that the United Kingdom could be said to be Elizabeth
II’s. Instead, “kingdom of God” names creaturely (meaning part of the
creation or created world)—and most especially human—life as God
intends it to be.  

So that’s a serious candidate for a Christian answer to the question of the

meaning of life: “the kingdom of God.” But this isn’t a totally satisfying
answer. It’s still pretty abstract. What does it actually look like? How does it
cash out?  

To help get at least a little more specific, we can break down the “life” in the
“meaning of life” question into three aspects, each of which has its own sub-
question. First, most human beings are in some sense agents, actors in the
world. Our lives don’t just happen to us. We lead them. (That’s not to say we
have unlimited freedom to shape our lives however we wish. It’s just to say
that we are in some important sense responsible for at least some of our
actions and traits.) A meaningful life will most likely be one that is, among
other things, led well. The question of what makes life
meaningful should include the question, “What does it mean to lead our lives
well?” 

Second, our lives are fundamentally—in fact, overwhelmingly—formed by

the circumstances we encounter and that befall us. We are never pure doers;
we are always “done to.” Our lives are shaped, often misshaped, by what
happens to us and the character of the places and times we find ourselves
in. So it is relevant to ask, “What does it mean for our lives to go well?” (1)  

Third, sitting somewhere between our agency (our ability to lead our

lives) and our circumstances (things that happen to us) but not reducible to
either are affects (feelings and emotions) that attend our experiences. So we
can ask, “What does a good or meaningful life feel like?” 

Three aspects of life and three corresponding questions to help us get a better
grip on the question of the meaning of life: 

1. Agency – what does it mean to lead our lives well? 

2. Circumstance – what does it mean for lives to go well? 
3. Affect – how does flourishing feel?  

Now, how does all that interact with what we were saying about the kingdom
of God?  

Jesus taught about the kingdom of God quite a lot, and that teaching usually
took the form of short stories or sketches called “parables.” We could learn a
lot about a Christian response to the question of the meaning of life by
digging into those parables, but for
a compact description that nevertheless touches on all three aspects (agency,
circumstance, and affect), it’s better to turn to a letter that the Apostle Paul,
one of the first people to spread the good news about Jesus around the Roman
Empire and the first major Christian “thinker,” wrote to Christians in Rome.  

In the course of that letter Paul writes, “The kingdom of God is not food and
drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans
14:17). Each of the key terms in this sentence is an apt shorthand for
characteristic Christian ways of addressing each aspect of life and its
meaning: 

1. Righteousness (being morally upright before God) answers the question

of a life led well. It is a broad term that sums up all right action and
character through reference to God’s character as well as God’s ways
of relating to creatures, especially in making and keeping
promises. The fundamental characteristic of righteousness from a
Christian perspective is love. Jesus says that the whole law of God
follows from the commands to love God wholeheartedly and love your
neighbor (which is to say, anyone your life can touch) as yourself
(Matthew 22:34–40). Paul says that love is “the fulfilling of the law”
(Romans 13:10).  
2. Peace designates what it means for lives to go well. More than mere
absence of violence, peace entails a whole
array of flourishing relationships, from intimate to all-encompassing—
between people and God, between individual people, between groups,
between humans and the rest of creation.  
3. Joy names the characteristic emotion of flourishing life and a
dimension of such positive emotions as contentment and gratitude. Joy
in this sense is not simply an exceptionally happy feeling. It is the
emotional attunement between a person and some feature of the world
(or even the world as a whole) experienced as a blessing. (2)  

It is significant that Paul qualifies righteousness, peace, and joy with “in the
Holy Spirit.” God (the Spirit is God) does not relate to the kingdom of God as
a distant lawgiver but a life giving “environment” in which all creatures live
and which, like air we breathe, lives in us.  Such presence of God dwelling in
and among us is an essential feature of God’s kingdom.  

So, what is the meaning of life? The kingdom of God, understood as

righteousness, peace, and joy whose source is the Spirit, the Giver of Life.  

Wait a minute, though—that’s all well and good as far as it goes. But does it
really go that far? Can we seriously talk about peace in a world that isn’t even
close to justice? How can joy be the meaning of life when there’s so much
cause for sorrow—or when depression and anxiety sap every hope of seeing
the world as a blessing? And righteousness seems either to be much more
than we could pull off, or else to suggest a shallow arrogance about our own
goodness. Do we really want to exclude suffering, struggle, pain, fragility,
and failure from the meaning of life?  

In short, no. Christians have generally hoped for a fulfillment of life’s

meaning that is yet to come, perhaps after death or at “the end of world.” But
this isn’t the much-derided “pie in the sky by and by.” At least, it doesn’t
have to be.  

The fullness of the kingdom of God is “not yet,” but its reality still bears on
us here and now. Indeed, in Jesus it has already entered the world. There are
reflections and anticipations of its fullness even now. But they are transposed
and take on a different tone in the world as we know it and live in it, with all
its pain and injustice and brokenness. This kind of disjuncture between life as
it ought to be and life as it is, underscores in red a key feature of meaningful
life we were describing.  Living the life of the kingdom isn’t just enjoying the
life of the kingdom, but striving for such a life — for ourselves, for our near
and distant neighbors, for the entire world.  We can have meaningful lives
in a Christian sense only in the unity of enjoying and striving. That’s true
under the condition wholeness, the world’s and our own. And that’s
especially true under the condition of brokeness, our own and the world’s.  

In this context—our context—the love of a life led in righteousness is (not

always, but all too often) a love that suffers. It is the love that makes one
willing “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). It is love that
extends even to enemies (Matthew 5:44).  
Likewise, peace is only ever partial, relative, and unstable. And it is often not
in our hands to have and enjoy peace. It is, however, in our hands to
be peacemakers.  

Joy, for its part, cannot be the only way that a good, meaningful life feels
because the goodness of the world is marred. Even when we do not have
immediate cause for sorrow ourselves, it would be callous and unloving
simply to rejoice even as our neighbors weep. Flourishing lives are thus those
that both “rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn”
(Romans 12:15). What’s more, joy in a world such as ours becomes,
often enough, an act of resistance against a death-dealing world. (3) 

The meaning of life, on this kind of Christian account of things, is not at

bottom the meaning of a tragedy. But it does not depend on a naïve denial of
how things actually are. Meaning, here and now, dwells precisely in the
tension of anticipating a yet-greater meaning to come.  

* * *  

In May of 1373, an Englishwoman named Julian experienced a series of

visions that she believed came from God. For fifteen years, she waited and
wondered and puzzled over what they meant. And then she received an
answer: 

'Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what
he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did
he show it to you? For love. Hold fast to this and you will know and
understand more of the same; but you will never understand or know from it
anything else for all eternity.' 

“This,” she wrote, “is how I was taught that our Lord's meaning was love.
And I saw quite certainly in this and in everything that God loved us before
he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall. And all his
works were done in this love; and in this love he has made everything for our
profit; and in this love our life is everlasting.” (4)  

We have discussed the kingdom of God as “righteousness, peace, and joy in

the Holy Spirit.” But not all the terms have an equal footing. Julian’s answer
is a prime example of the priority that love holds in many Christian answers
to the question of the meaning of life. It also points to the fundamental reality
that God’s love precedes all that is not God. God’s love comes first. One
early Christian leader wrote to a community under his care, “In this is love,
not that we loved God but that he loved us” (1 John 4:10). God loved us
before creating us, as Julian says. God loved us and so rescued us from Sin
and its consequences. God loves us and so draws us into love: “We love
because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).  

But the God who first loved us is love (1 John 4:8). God’s love is God’s life.
It should be no surprise then that life as a communion of love is God’s aim
for creatures. 

The fact that God loves us first dramatically shapes the answer to the
question of the meaning of life.  

There are certainly tasks that fall to us. There are certainly responsibilities.
But the meaning of life is not a product or an accomplishment. It doesn’t lie
behind life or beyond it. It is not really something other than life at all. The
life that flows from and corresponds to the God of love is its own meaning. It
is, ultimately, the life of delighted love in a world of love that enjoys the
fullness of peace, and precisely because it is love and peace, it is also a life of
surpassing joy. But it is also life on the way to that delighted love: A life of
love’s arduous work in a world of gone awry, the world of mourning,
discord, and unrighteousness. 

***