familia Dei provides a very helpful paradigm for understanding the gospel in the life of the Trinity. God the Father adopts, God the Son marries, God the Spirit gives rebirth.
I do not think that I am stretching the analogy beyond its intent. Consider an excerpt from an essay on Jonathan Edwards’ Trinitarian gospel scheme:
Galatians 3:13-14, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us…so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.” The Son’s incarnation, death, and subsequent propitiation purchased the Spirit’s indwelling of believers. Furthermore, since the Spirit subsists in the Trinity as the “Deity in act”[1], there occurs some effect in the heart of the believer from the Spirit’s indwelling. Jonathan Edwards argued that “when men are regenerated…God pours forth of his Spirit upon them, and they…are made partakers with the Father and Son of their good”[2]. Or, in the words of the apostle Peter, “you may become partakers of the divine nature”[3]. The same concept is put to particularly Trinitarian language by Jesus in John 17:21, “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us”. It seems to be that the thing purchased in the whole gospel scheme is the Spirit’s indwelling of believers, which thereby unites the body of believers to the Son in the intra-Trinitarian joy, knowledge, and glory. The Father provided the Son, the Son propitiated the Father’s wrath, and the Spirit was purchased to unite us to the Son; “Thus all our good things are of God, and through God, and in God”[4].
May our gospel reflect the God who is behind it.
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