3. Phrases such as “before creation” and “before the foundation of the world” are facons de parlers, or figures of speech. The reason is because God is eternal. He does not exist temporally prior to creation. Thus there is no moment or time before creation. God exists beyond, or without, creation. Time, space, and matter are in Him. We don’t see God in temporal terms. Instead, we see the coming of Christ as being the in-breaking of God into time. And that is the kingdom.
4. See, for example, Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20; Revelation 13:8.
5. Ps. 90:2.
6. Jude 25.
7. 2 Cor. 4:18 NIV.
8. John 17:24 NIV.
9. Gen. 1:3.
10. C. S. Lewis discussed this eternal love affair in Mere Christianity, 176ff. See Stanley Grenz’s Created for Community: Connecting Christian Belief with Christian Living, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998), 47–49; Leonardo Boff ’s Holy Trinity, Perfect Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); Milt Rodriguez’s The Community Life of God: Seeing the Godhead as the Model for All Relationships (Box Elder, SD: Rebuilders, 2009); and C. Baxter Kruger’s The Great Dance: The Christian Vision Revisited (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Pub., 2005).
11. Some examples are found in John 17:24; 14:31; 1 Corinthians 15:28.
12. 1 John 4:8, 16.
13. John 14:9; 10:30.
14. See Bill Freeman’s The Triune God in Experience: The Testimony of Church History (Scottsdale, AZ: Ministry Publications, 1994).
15. According to Karl Barth, “this pretime is the pure time of the Father and the Son in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” (The Doctrine of God, vol. 2, pt. 1 of his Church Dogmatics, eds. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, 4 vols. [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957], 622ff.). Barth saw the incarnation—God becoming human and joining humanity—as the purpose for the creation. God’s intent in eternity was to be with humans even if they hadn’t sinned.
16. Proverbs 8:22–31; John 1:1–3, 18; 15:26; 17:5; and John 17:24; 14:31 give us a peek into the fellowship in the Godhead. The theological term for this is perichoresis, which contains the ideas of interpenetration and interpermeation. The metaphor that has been commonly used for it is that of a dance.
17. Frank Viola’s Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2008) and Finding Organic Church: A Comprehensive Guide to Starting and Sustaining Authentic Christian Communities (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2009) explore how the church, God’s mission, and the Christian life all find their roots in the eternal Godhead.
18. Phil. 2:6–11.
19. Phil. 2:8. An entire book can be written on the kenosis (self–emptying) of Jesus mentioned in Philippians 2:6–8. When Jesus emptied Himself, His divinity didn’t pass out of existence. The incarnation didn’t cause Him to cease from being divine. As a man, Jesus never ceased from being divine, but He ceased to subjectively experience that divinity. He does not call upon it as His own. What Jesus did in the way of miraculous power was an operation of Him being a human anointed by the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:38). For this reason, the apostles (who weren’t divine beings) repeated the same works that Jesus performed, including knowing people’s thoughts, raising the dead, healing the sick, and discerning and casting out demons. Christ continued to receive as a human being power from His Father as He always had and always will as the second person of the triune God.
20. For details, see T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008). Also see Karl Barth’s treatment on the incarnation and how it connects with the Trinity in “The Incarnation of the Word,” Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, pt. 2 (New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2004), 1–202.
21. John 17:5 NIV.
22. Before creation, the Father continually poured His fullness into the Son. And the Son continually emptied Himself in order to receive that fullness. And the Spirit is the bond of love that joins Father and Son together in oneness.
23. We don’t put the event first and try to fit our doctrinal God into the event. We look at the incarnate Son, and that incarnate Son is both divine and human. And from the standpoint of the Son as the divine Son, as the person with a divine nature, there is no before or after for Him. If there were, He would not be eternal. He would be temporal. In the incarnation, the action of kenosis, of pouring out the divine glory, which happens in the Godhead eternally, is transposed into a relationship between the divine and human natures in the one person, Jesus. There’s a transposition that goes on so that what we see in that human person historically is that which is true in God eternally. The incarnation is a divine person assuming a human nature. There’s only one person in the incarnation, and that person is divine. And in the incarnation, that person has two natures. That divine person in that divine nature, which is His own proper nature, existed eternally. It was present during the time of Abraham.
24. The Father as the source of the Son’s life can be found in such texts as John 5:19–20, 26–27, 30; 6:46, 57; 7:16, 28–29; 8:28, 42; 13:3; 14:10; 16:27; 17:8. The Eastern church preferred to speak of the Father as the source of the triune God. The Father is the fountainhead of the trinitarian community. All things flow from Him. The Western church preferred to speak of the mutual equality and reciprocity of the members as they share the one divine nature. In his book Holy Trinity, Perfect Community, Leonardo Boff correctly points out that these two views are not in contradiction. Rather, the Eastern church begins with the Father as source while the Western church begins with the one divine nature of Father, Son, and Spirit. The Father is the Father only because He begot the Son. Without the begetting of the Son, there is no Father. The same is true with the procession of the Spirit. All the members are dependent on the existence of the others. The Father as source doesn’t imply that the Son is inferior. All the members of the triune God are dependent upon one another. For details, see Kevin Giles, The Trinity & Subordinationism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002) and Jesus and the Father (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006); Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, One Being, Three Persons (London: T. & T. Clark, 2001) and Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Faith (London: T&T Clark, 2000); Gilbert Bilezekian, Community 101 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997); Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) and God’s Life in Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006); Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994); Ted Peters, God Is Trinity (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1993); Baxter Kruger, The Great Dance (see n. 11, above); and Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God, 86ff (see intro., n. 71).
25. Paul Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 40.
26. Gen. 1:3.
27. 1 John 4:8, 16.
28. John 17:5.
29. Ibid.
30. Heb. 1:3 NASB .
31. Heb. 9:23.
32. John 8:56 NIV; 8:58.
33. Isa. 6:1.
34. John 12:41 NIV.
35. Along this line, Justin Martyr regarded Jesus as the Angel of Great Counsel in Isaiah (9:6); as a Man in Ezekiel (40:3); as the Son of Man in Daniel (7:13); as wisdom in Solomon (Prov. 8:22ff.); as a star in the books of Moses (Gen. 49; Num. 24:17); as the Branch in Zechariah (6:12); and as a child, the suffering One, Jacob, Israel, a Rod, the Flower, the Cornerstone, and the Son of God throughout Isaiah (9:6; 42; 43; 52–53; 8:14; 28:16; 11:1) (Dialogue with Trypho, 126). According to Justin, it was Christ as the preexistent Logos who shut Noah in the ark (Gen. 7:16), who came down to see the tower of Babel (Gen. 11:5), who spoke to Abraham (Gen. 18), who wrestled with Jacob (Gen. 32), and who spoke to Moses from the burning bush (Ex. 3) (Dialogue, 61–62, 126ff.). In like manner, some of the early church fathers saw references to Jesus in the Pentateuch. They argued that the divine name Elohiym in Genesis 1:26 points to the plurality of persons in the Godhead, since Elohiym is a compound plural word and
comports with God’s complex unity. They also saw Christ in various “theophanies” in the Old Testament, such as in the Angel of the Lord. For further discussion, see The Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by H. P. Liddon (London: Pickering & Inglis, 1864), 29–37.
36. Ex. 16:10; 40:38.
37. 1 Cor. 10:3–4. In a very real sense, Jesus was present in the First Testament. So Paul could say that Christ was the Rock that followed Israel around, which does not mean that Jesus became a geological formation. But it does mean that all of God’s work is a work that is understandable only in Christ. Jesus is the Logos, the sheer intelligibility of God. Therefore, wherever God reveals Himself, He reveals Himself in Logos. There is no revelation outside of the Logos. The Logos is God’s revelation of Himself. So whatever reveals God in the First Testament is inherently a place in which the Logos, the divine person who was incarnate in Christ, is present and at work.
38. See F. F. Bruce, Jesus: Past, Present and Future: The Work of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998), chap. 8, “Before the Incarnation.”
39. Ex. 33:20 NASB. For the full story, see Ex. 33:12–23.
40. 2 Cor. 4:6.
41. John 1:18.
42. Ex. 40:34.
43. See John 1:14.
44. God revealed His “goodness” to Moses, “full of grace and truth” (see Ex. 34:5–6; John 1:14), but Moses could see only part of God’s glory. In Jesus, however, God is fully unveiled (John 1:18). Therefore, the law came through Moses, but “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17).
45. Luke 2:9.
46. John 1:1; authors’ paraphrase.
47. Luke 9:32. See also Matthew 17:2; Luke 9:29; 2 Peter 1:18.
48. Luke 9:34 NIV.
49. Eph. 3:8–11 NASB .
50. Luke 9:35.
51. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul wrote about the glory of various things, including the sun, the moon, etc. When an object is at its highest visible expression, it is glorified.
52. Just as the Son receives from the Father the gloriousness of the divine life, so we through Christ become participants of that same divine life, and therefore, we share His glory (2 Peter 1:4; John 17:22). Glory is the full and outward expression of an inner excellence. I’ve defined glory to be the highest expression of a life. A flower is glorified when it is in full bloom. The inner excellence of the flower is the seed. In eternity, there was no visible, physical expression. But in the eyes of the Godhead, there was an expression as they beheld one another.
53. See Romans 3:25 YLT.
54. 1 Kings 8:6–7; Ex. 25:18–19; cf. Heb. 7–10.
55. Rev. 21:9–11.
56. Rev. 21:22–23 NIV.
57. Rom. 3:23; 8:18–21.
58. Frank’s book From Eternity to Here: Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2009) is an unfolding of the eternal purpose. See also DeVern Fromke’s Ultimate Intention (Mount Vernon, MO: Sure Foundation, 1963) and T. Austin-Sparks’s The Stewardship of the Mystery (Shippensburg, PA: MercyPlace Ministries, 2002).
59. C. Baxter Kruger expounds on this idea in The Great Dance, 24ff. John R. W. Stott puts it crisply in his God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 36.
60. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, rev. and amplified ed., 176.
61. Eph. 3:2–6, 8–11; 1:9; Eph. 5:25–32.
62. Eph. 3:8 NASB, footnote a.
63. Eph. 1:4.
64. Eph. 2:19–22.
65. Heb. 4:3 NASB.
66. Col. 1:17 NIV.
67. F. F. Bruce translates Colossians 1:16 to say “all things were created in Him.” The same Greek term can mean either “in” or “through,” but Bruce argues for “in” (F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984], 61).
68. Stanley Grenz, Created for Community, 56–57 (see n. 11 above).
69. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 166–71.
70. Grenz, Created for Community, 57.
71. Rev. 1:8; 2:8; 21:6, 13.
72. John 7:34.
73. Rev. 1:4, 8. The name of God, I AM, is susceptible to multiple interpretations in terms of tense. Therefore, it can be translated “I am that I will be,” “I am what I was,” “I will be what I am.” All those are possible ways of translating. You put all those things together and see them as different slices of the same reality. What they are saying is that God is, in all times and at all places, simply who God is. God will be always what He was, and is, and will be. His being takes in all the different verb tenses and concentrates them into one eternal act, the act of the divine being. Therein lies the identity of Jesus Christ.
74. Ex. 6:7; Isa. 43:10. We are aware that until John 8:58, Jesus is using wordplay that His hearers within the narrative wouldn’t necessarily catch. “I AM” is an acceptable way to say, “I am He,” as in John 9:9. But Jesus is taking the meaning somewhere else.
75. John 8:24.
76. John 8:28.
77. John 8:58.
78. John 13:19. See Raymond Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1994), appendix 4, “Features of John’s Christology,” 205–10.
79. Isa. 11:10; Jer. 23:5; 33:15; Zech. 3:8; 6:12; Isa. 11:1; 4:2.
80. Rev. 22:16.
81. Rom. 8:30.
82. The divine life in our mortal bodies is simply a partial participation in the reality of resurrection life. This is one of Paul’s arguments in Romans 8. The resurrection in that sense has already begun. But more than that, as Paul put it in Romans 8:30, He has already “glorified” us.
83. Rom. 8:28–30.
84. Rev. 13:8; see also 1 Peter 1:19–20.The slaying of the Lamb of God that took place at one time in one place was a revelation of an eternal reality within God Himself. The sacrifice of the Son to the Father, the self-emptying of the Son for the Father, is an eternal reality. And this was true at the foundation of the world and has been true since the foundation of the world. It has now been revealed for our sakes in the actual historical event. It’s been brought down to a human level. A divine reality has been joined to history and to the human experience. Calvary brought an eternal reality to the highest human point. Because God doesn’t live in time, Jesus’ historical event—His dying for the sins of the world—from the viewpoint of God had already happened before He created. That’s the reason why God could pass over sins when the animal sacrifices were made, because the historical gap between the animal sacrifices and the cross did not exist at a divine level. At a divine level, the sacrifices in their own way not just picture but partially participate in the reality that they picture.
85. Karl Barth taught that Christ is the basis for and the fulfillment of the covenant made within the Godhead before creation. Consequently, the “eternal covenant” mentioned in Hebrews may have in view the first covenant that forms the basis for all subsequent covenants: the covenant between the Father and the Son. Implicit in their relationship with one another was a promise to one another—a commitment. The eternal covenant is another way of talking about God’s life. The covenants in history—the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, etc.—are what we mortals experience in our relationship with God as historical expressions of the covenant that lies at the heart of the trinitarian life—the eternal covenant.
86. Acts 4:27–28; 2:23; Eph. 3:9–11; 1 Peter 1:20; Rom. 8:29–30; 11:2.
87. Eph. 1:4–9; 2 Tim. 1:9; 1 Peter 1:2; 2 Thess. 2:13.
88. Rev. 17:8; Luke 10:20. The Book of Life is obviously metaphorical, as a book couldn’t exist before the visible creation. It’s rather a way of talking about the mind of God.
89. Gen. 1:3.
90. Titus 1:2; Matt. 25:34; 1 Cor. 2:7–9; Eph. 1:11.
91. Matt. 13:35; 1 Cor. 2:7.
92. Eph. 1:4; Jer. 1:5; Rom. 8:29; 11:2; 1 Peter 1:2; 2 Tim. 1:9. Regarding the question of election and predestination, we agree with Karl Barth, who said that Christ is the elect man, and we are
elect in Him. We are corporately elect in the Son. So whatever ends up in the Son, ends up in the sphere of God’s election. We, along with Barth, are unconcerned with the old classic arguments on this question. The two prevailing paradigms of election versus free will that have raged throughout church history have solid uses as well as deficiencies. One of the deficiencies is that both paradigms put the question on a purely individualistic horizon. The other deficiency is that neither grasps the fact that God is outside of time, and time is within Him. So He is at the end at the same moment that He is at the beginning. In short, our election is incomprehensible apart from a lot of other eternal realities. Thus we rather view election and predestination christologically. See also Ben Witherington’s The Letters to Philemon, the Colossians, and the Ephesians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Captivity Epistles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 234, where he says of Ephesians 1:3–4, “The concept of election and destining here is corporate. If one is in Christ, one is elect and destined.”
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