In sharp contrast with every other religion, Christianity stands for the fact that in Jesus Christ God has communicated to us his Word and has imparted to us his Spirit, so that we may rally know him as he is in himself although not apart from his saving activity in history, for what he is toward us and for us in history he is in himself, and what he is in himself he is toward us and for us in history. The Word of God and the Spirit of God are not just ephemeral modes of God’s presence to us in history; nor are they transient media external to himself through which God has revealed to us something about himself; they belong to what God ever is in his communion with us. They are the objective ontological personal forms of his self giving and self-imparting in the dynamic outgoing of the holy Love which God himself is. It thus belongs to the essential faith of the Church that through his Word and his Spirit who are of one and the same being with himself God has really communicated himself to us in his own eternal and indivisible Reality as God the Father Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. That is why we believe that what God is toward us in Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, he is in himself, antecedently and eternally in himself; and that what he imparts to us through the Spirit who sheds the love of God into our hearts, he is in himself, antecedently and eternally in himself. It is thus that through Jesus Christ God has given himself to us and through the Holy Spirit takes us up into communion with himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the one God of all grace whom we know as the God of our salvation.
Think of the immense revolution this means for our understanding of God. It means that God is not some remote, unknowable Deity, a prisoner in his aloofness or shut up in his solitariness, but on the contrary the God who is free to go outside of himself, to share in the life of his creatures and enable them to share in his own eternal Life.
The Christian Doctrine of God One Being in Three Persons Thomas F. Torrance
Colossians 1:15-17 (ESV) The Preeminence of Christ 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by[a] him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Footnotes: Colossians 1:16 That is, by means of; or in
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