Here is picture #1 in a 7 picture series about the Gospel of the Glory of Christ. My hope is that these pictures can help to remind you of the “old, old story” and that they might be a resource to you as you communicate the person and work of Christ to others.
This first one is based on many passages, but John 1:1-5 is at the heart of it. The beginning of the story is the Triune God. The Father (the eternal source and wellspring of deity), His Beloved Son (who is the eternal “going forth” of all that the Father is, the eternal Image, Word, and Radiance of the Father’s fullness), and the Holy Spirit (who is the personal bond of union, the hypostatic love, the fullness of God breathed out in ecstatic affirmation, eternally and reciprocally flowing between Father and Son). This One True God—who is the perfection of joy and fellowship within Himself—is the starting point of all that follows.
Boundless in His joy, boundless in His peace, boundless in His dynamism, God lacks nothing and so creates out of the fullness and freedom of love (and love—as we will see—must be defined as an outpouring of the self in order to communicate God to the other. It is from THIS free motive that the Triune God creates reality).
Because creation springs from the infinite freedom of Triune love, what God creates cannot add or subtract from Him in anyway, which means that all of His subsequent interactions with His creation will—like creation itself—flow wholly from the unbounded freedom of His love. This is where the story begins…
