Day 9: Jesus is Perfectly Complete and Self-fulfilled

I do not call you servants anymore, because a servant doesn’t know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father. JOHN 15:15

I KNOW I TOOK a big literary risk to weave entries about the incarnate nature of Jesus Christ at the beginning of this pretty devotional instead of waiting until I’d hopefully whetted your reading appetite with lighter, more humorous fare. It was not unlike taking a first date home to meet your parents and then awkwardly wedging together on the sagging living room sofa to peruse family photo albums! I can all but hear a few of you sighing inwardly quite loudly. So we’re going to take a dance break to shake off any reading cobwebs that may have accumulated. Well, almost anyway.

In the eighth century, church father and theologian John of Damascus began using the Greek word perichoresis, which means “going around, rotation,” to describe the ongoing union within the Godhead. And one of the root words of choreography is choreia, which is a very close cousin of choresis, so it’s not too much of an etymological stretch to describe the Trinity as an ongoing, circular dance! Pretty cool, huh?

Okay, my gut says that despite that nifty Dancing with the Supernatural Stars illustration, a few of you are still scratching your heads, musing: “Alright, I get why the Trinity was important back in the day when the church really needed clear terms for who Jesus was, but now that we’ve figured that out, why in the world should it matter to us today?” Which brings me to another one of my super-smart imaginary boyfriends, St. Augustine, who put it this way: “Only the Christian God is a perfect community unto Himself.”

In other words, God didn’t create us because He was lonely nor is Jesus inclined toward us because He doesn’t have any other friends! There’s a lovely dissonance between being needed and being wanted, y’all. Because being needed puts the onus squarely on us—on our continued performance, ability, and usefulness. But being wanted puts the onus on God, on His sovereign choice to redeem us through the death and resurrection of Jesus and then adopt us into His forever family when we put our hope and belief in what He sacrificed and accomplished on our behalf.

No doubt you’ve heard—or seen splashed across social media—phraseology that goes something like this: There is a God-shaped hole in the heart of every human that can only be satisfied by God Himself. (That catchy spiritual concept, by the way, is based on an ancient publication entitled Pensées by a French mathematician, philosopher, and theologian named Blaise Pascal.) And while I deeply resonate with and agree with Pascal’s premise, I think it’s important for us to clarify that the reverse isn’t true. Our Creator Redeemer doesn’t have a human-shaped hole in His heart. He doesn’t need mankind to be fulfilled or satisfied. Which may sound callous at first, but if you’ll ponder the truism of God’s self-fulfillment for a moment or two, I think you’ll begin to see the miraculous implication of Jesus’s incarnation. The Son of God is transcendent—a perfectly preexisting, omniscient, and self-fulfilled person of the Godhead, perfectly “above” and “other” from all that He has created. Yet He chose to be immanent (to be knowable or graspable to us). He chose to not just come near, but enter, His creation. He chose to be close to us and commune with us for His good pleasure! He didn’t have to. He didn’t need to. He wanted to.

On the days it feels like you need to work hard enough to make Jesus happy, remember: He was happy in His Trinitarian existence well before He ever created the world. He had all the community and fulfillment a person could dream of. And yet He decided to create a world, and more than that, to enter that world by putting on flesh to save that world—to save you—all because it delighted Him to do so.

If that doesn’t make your heart sing, you might need an EKG, honey.

• READ GENESIS 1:26–27, 2 Corinthians 13:13, and Galatians 4:4–6. What common denominator do you find in all three passages?
• HOW WOULD YOU explain the significance of Jesus choosing to be with us to someone who thinks they have to “earn” His affection with good behavior?
• HOW WOULD YOU explain to a friend that it’s really good news for us that, as the second person of the Trinity, Jesus is totally satisfied and happy within the Godhead?