It's 3:48 AM. I've been out of bed for about 45 minutes, sipping Wild Turkey and decaf coffee, listening to George Winston's "December" and reading Fred Sanders' "The Deep Things of God." Good alone time. Below are a few lines from Sanders' book, Chapter 2 - "Within the Happy Land of the Trinity."
". . .the Trinity is not ultimately for anything, any more than God is the purpose for anything. Just as you wouldn't ask what purpose God serves or what function he fulfills, it makes no sense to ask what the point of the Trinity is or what purpose the Trinity serves. The Trinity isn't for anything beyond itself, because the Trinity is God. . .God's way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simultaneously from all eternity, perfectly complete in a triune fellowship of love. If we don't take this as our starting point, everything we say about the practical relevance of the Trinity could lead us to one colossal misunderstanding: thinking of God the Trinity as a means to some other end, as if God were the Trinity in order to make himself useful. But God the Trinity is the end, the goal, the telos, the omega. In himself and without any reference to a created world or the plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The boundless life that God lives in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is perfect. It is complete, inexhaustibly full, and infinitely blessed." (pages 61-62)
"When evangelicals lose their sense of proportion, they begin to talk as if they no longer care about the character of God unless they get something from it. The best defense against this has always been the doctrine of the eternal Trinity itself. Pondering the eternal, essential Trinity is the most concrete and biblical way of acknowledging the distinction between who God is and what he does." (pages 69-70)
