Who Is God? Trinity the Identity of God

Wrong views about God occur when men veer out of scripture for their understanding of God.  We know God by His revelation of Himself.  In and through God's creation, we witness the works of God, which show His attributes.  However, God's works are not His identity.  They are what He does.  He creates, so He is Creator, but His identity is not Creator.  Before God created, He was God.  He was God without creating.  He could create, was powerful enough to create, but was fully God, not missing anything, as God, without creating.

If Creator is God's identity, then He needs a creation to be who He is, but He was who He was before the foundations of the world.  In His identity, God is self-existent.  He doesn't need anything to be Who He is.  You could even say that is the essence of His holiness.  He exists without anything else.  To know the true identity of God, we read who He was before His creation, and we read that in the Bible.  Many passages talk about God before creation.

What I'm writing here relates to the history of the doctrine of God.  Arius started with God's work, His creation, and identified God as the Uncaused or the Unoriginate.  With that as God's identity, He rejected Jesus as God, because he surmised Jesus was caused.  God couldn't be caused, so Jesus couldn't be God, in the meanderings of Arius.  Jesus was the Son and the Son proceeds from the Father, so the Son couldn't be Son.  A lot of people continue to be fooled in this way today.

Athanasius centered on identity in His correction of Arius.  He said that Arius should not identify God by His works, but through the revelation of God through Jesus Christ.  The focus is on the Son in the identification of God, because the Son is the supreme identification of God through scripture.

The identity of God is Trinity.  He is Triune in His identity, which is why He is identified as Father and Son the most in scripture, but also as Holy Spirit -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Father is God's identity according to Jesus Himself, speaking of the Father as loving Him before the foundation of the world.  God was Father and Jesus was Son before creation.  You can follow this through scripture, but especially consider John 17:24 and 1 John 4:8-9.

Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world. 

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.  In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.

As Father, God is Father.  For God always to be Father, He also always had to have a Son.   It sounds like I'm repeating myself, but Father means something.  It isn't a vessel into which we pour whatever we want it to mean.  Our understanding of Father comes from our understanding of Him.  Father is outgoing, moving out from Himself. sending, giving, giving life, and begetting.  A word that should come to mind with God being Father is Love.  1 John 4:8 doesn't say that He loves.  It says He is Love.  It is His identity and this is tied into the meaning of Father and in the identity of Trinity.

God is love is accompanied by God sending His Son into the world, so love is also associated with the Son.  God was already loving the Son and then He manifested His love toward us through His Son, giving life to us through the Son.  The Father gave His glory to the Son, loving Him before the foundation of the world.  God did not become love.  He is Love.  God wasn't alone.  He was always loving before the foundation of the world.

I haven't mentioned the Holy Spirit.  From the very beginning the Holy Spirit was sent by the Father as a separate Person, energizing space and matter.  The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.  The Father delights in His Son and He sent the Spirit to the Son at His baptism.  The Holy Spirit regenerates the lifeless.  He renews.  The promise of the Father is fulfilled by the coming of the Holy Spirit.  The love of the Father is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.  I'm barely touching on the Third Person of the Trinity.  The nature of God, however, is this cascading from Father to Son to Holy Spirit.

At the bottom is the Trinity.  You don't have Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and at the bottom is God.  God is Trinity.  You can't go further back or deeper than Trinity, because that is Who God is.  We pray to the Father through the Son in the power of the Spirit.  Each unique member of the Trinity is operating in prayer, taking a different role.

Very often men will talk about the greatest attribute of God.  It's a big discussion point.  What I have read the most is that God's holiness is His greatest attribute and the most common argument is the angels proclaiming that attribute in the heavenly holy of holies.  God is holy.   God says, be ye holy as I am holy.  I don't know how fruitful it is to determine God's greatest attribute when scripture doesn't tell us.  An interesting question, however, might be the following:  was God holy before the creation of the world?  He wasn't Creator until He created, creation being again one of His works.  Could He be holy before He had something from which to separate?  This would consider whether God's identity is Holy.  If God couldn't be holy until He could separate from something, then should we say His identity is Holy?

Holiness is separateness.  What was God separate from before He created something and then what He created sinned and become sinful?  At the beginning, God's creation was holy, because He was holy.  Everything about His creation was holy, because it was created by God.  God couldn't and wouldn't create something unholy.

It doesn't sound right to say that God wasn't holy before the foundation of the world, but He wasn't Creator before the foundation of the world. He was Triune though.  He was Trinity.  When we pray, Jesus instructed us to pray to our Father, not our Creator.  We can praise Him by exalting His attributes, but His identity is Trinity.