The Christian doctrine of the Trinity says that God is three persons Father, Son, and Spirit in one being. Because there is only one being, there is only one God, and yet there are three divine persons. A person is something having a first-person perspective, free will, and intellect. When understood this way, the Trinity is hardly a contradictory concept. Mysterious, yes. My favorite analogy for the Trinity is that it’s like the Three-Headed Giant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except immaterial. The mystery comes in the case of God by how the three persons are united without sharing a physical body.

To understand what biblical meekness is (Matt. 5.5), just look at Jim McKay (Gregory Peck) in the 1958 movie The Big Country.

I’m wary of phrases like “Christ-centered”. Perhaps they are sometimes used in a clear and unobjectionable sense. My concern is that the Christian faith should not be Christ-centered but God-centered—Father, Son, and Spirit. Obviously, God in his entirety is the proper object of our worship and ultimate concern, and two verses come to mind that I think drive this point home:

“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16.7, ESV).

“So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’ ” (John 5.19, ESV).

Each of us is or was in a vortex of sin leading to a final rejection of God, the natural consequence and just punishment of which is everlasting personal separation from him, which is hell. It is not the sins we commit in the vortex—like adultery, theft, and murder—which merit hell; rather, it is the final rejection to which they lead. This rejection is a free and culpable choice on the part of all who make it, and it would be wrong (not to mention impossible!) for God to force them into a proper relationship with him.