The short answer is yes. But it's complicated…
What is The Trinity?
Yes, Jesus is God, but we also see him praying to God. He claims to be God, and he claims that he was sent by God. This is quite confusing and the rest of scripture does not provide a simple answer.
The Christian church has always understood God to be three and one. This conceptual framework of God is called “the Trinity” and it emerged very early on in the development of the church in attempts to make sense of passages of scripture like Matthew 28:19, 2 Corinthians 13:14, John 1:1, Philippians 2:6–11, and Acts 5:3–4. The Trinity can be seen throughout scripture, but these passages really force us to grapple with it.
The Trinity is a famously difficult idea to hold because it breaks our logic. The Trinity consists of three persons who make up the Godhead: The Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Spirit. Each member of the trinity is utterly distinct and unique from the other, but each member is also fully God. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. But the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father. Yet there are not three Gods, but one God. Confused yet?
The Trinity is tough. In fact, it's impossible to conceptualize. It is universally held that any metaphor we can come up with will lack in some capacity to describe the essence of the trinity. But this isn't too shocking, we should expect our language and logic to fail when we are trying to describe the God who created language and logic. While there is no one way to box in the Trinity, the christian bible offers us several helpful metaphors and images by which we can begin to conceptualize God.
Jesus: the Son of God & The Word of God
The Son (Jesus), is described in John 1 as “The word of the Father”. This is an important image and descriptor that gives us some insight into the essence of the Trinity. Think about your own words, they are, in a sense, you. Your words are a product of your thoughts and are a direct representation of what's happening in your mind, they represent who you are. But they don't just represent you, they are you. But also, your words are separate from you. Once you say them, they can go out and have unintended consequences. Your words can act on their own, affecting the world in ways that you cannot. We are imperfect, and our words often fall short of our intentions. We often say things that we wish we hadn't, our words affect things in ways we didn't expect, and they do not properly represent who we are and what we want. This is a huge problem for most people and this is why communication is the number one issue in almost every organization.
God is not like this. When the Father speaks, he speaks perfectly, out of his own perfect character. Therefore his words perfectly reflect him and their effects are fully aligned with the Father’s intentions. If God’s words PERFECTLY reflect him, then they are one with him, yet separate from him. This is the Son: One with the Father in every way, sharing all things in common, yet utterly distinct from him. It is important to emphasize that the Son has always existed with the Father, he is the eternal word of God, the perfect and full expression of the Father.
So, we have the Father and the Son, but where does the Spirit come in? Well, the Spirit is most often described in scripture as “the Spirit of Love”. The Spirit descended upon Jesus after his baptism and poured out the love of the Father upon him. Jesus says that his followers will be filled with the Spirit and Paul says that God’s Spirit pours the love of the Father into their hearts. The Spirit is understood to be the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father.
Does God Love Himself?
So, we get a beautiful picture of the Son as the Father’s eternal, perfect, and full self-reflection and the Spirit as the Father’s love for the son. The Father is constantly pouring out the spirit (love) to the Son and the Son is constantly pouring it back to the Father in an eternal dance of love. The Father, Son, and Spirit are perfectly unified yet perfectly distinct within the Godhead. So the Trinity can be understood as God eternally loving and worshiping himself. Does this sound conceited? I would argue that God’s supreme love for himself is the single most important concept in all reality. Let me explain.
First let's answer the question: Is it unrighteous for God to love and worship himself? Well, if we were to run into a person who were worshiping themself and demanding everyone else do the same, we would be quite put off and maybe even call them a prick. Why is this? Because there are things that are more important than that person that deserve love and attention, like a beautiful sunrise or a new born baby. So, a person who is demanding love and praise from others is insisting that they are the most interesting and valuable object in the room. Righteousness is defined as giving glory to that which is most worthy. So as long as there is anything more worthy than you, it would be unrighteous for you to glorify yourself. However, nothing is more glorious than the creator God. Therefore, not only is it righteous for God to glorify himself, it would be unrighteous for him to give supreme glory and love to anything less than him, because he is the thing most deserving of love and glory.
Are Humans Made in the Image of God?
So, our aversion to this kind of self glorification is a human problem. We must be careful not to put our limited humanity onto God. But it is actually deeply good for us that God is obsessed with himself. The bible tells us that we are made in the image of God, designed to resemble him. Just like we erect monuments of famous individuals to honor them, God created us all as monuments of his glory. It was out of an overflow of God’s love for himself that he created us and it is by his love for himself that he values us so deeply. God’s perfect self love overflows into us as those made in his image. In fact, due to our nature as image bearers of God, our good and God’s glory are utterly connected, they are two sides of the same coin. This means that since God is dedicated to his glory, he is dedicated to us and our good.
“God’s self-exaltation is not the act of a needy ego, but an act of infinite love, drawing us into the only reality that can fully and eternally satisfy our souls—Himself.”
— John Piper, Desiring God
To step back for a second, this means that all of creation is a product of God’s love for himself, the Father’s love for the Son. All of reality is a product of love and we are invited to participate in that cosmic love. This was a unique idea in the time of ancient Israel. In fact, this narrative of creation was in direct opposition to all of its neighboring cultures which all believed that creation was an accidental and meaningless byproduct of a war between primordial Gods of chaos. Even modern, secular science contributes to this narrative suggesting “life and order are random and meaningless flukes in the eternal, chaotic flux of quantum energy fields.” The narrative set forth in scripture could not be more different: Creation is an intentional and deeply meaningful product of the love of the Father for the Son.
So, God’s love for himself is deeply important. Not only is it not conceited, but rather perfectly righteous for God to love himself, his love for himself is the cosmic engine which drove the creation of the world and us.
Why Did God Create Humans?
Out of his great love for himself, God created us and loved us. He placed the first humans in a garden with unlimited abundance and goodness. He loved himself so much that he created us to resemble him and he loved us so much that he made us to be his children. He designed us to be perfectly dependent on him, giving glory and receiving glory for all eternity. We were created to participate with the Trinity in their eternal dance of love.
The tragedy of the Bible is that the first humans rebelled against their Father, they decided that they did not want his love and they rejected him. The first humans, who were designed to glorify God, stopped glorifying God and sought to glorify themselves. Their function as a member in the eternally churning engine of God’s self glorification came to a screeching halt. In their break from their design, they incurred damage. A heart that stops beating, even for a few moments, can cause permanent and serious damage to the body. An engine that runs without oil gets torn up and mangled. In the same way, the human soul, which was designed to give and receive glory to God, was fractured and mangled. We, who were designed to receive life in connection with God, fell from our exalted position, sharing in the glory of the Trinity and now we are dying in disconnection from God. The Bible calls this “exile”. We are all lost and hurt in a far off land, homesick and in need. We are rebellious children who are scared and hungry for the love of God.
Why Does God Allow Suffering?
We were designed to receive unlimited resources from God, but resources are scarce here in exile, so we have learned to take care of ourselves and our people at the expense of others. We were designed to experience fulfillment of all our needs in God, but we are lonely, sorrowful, and anxious in exile. We were designed to receive constant life and sustenance from God, but we are all slowly dying apart from him in exile. The utter shock and pain of the fall from heaven to earth was unbearably traumatic. We are all now cut off from our greatest need. Since there is no hope of restoration, we all live in denial, we make the best with what we have. Entering back into a relationship with God is not an option, getting back to heaven is impossible, so we do our best to find comfort here in exile, apart from him. In fact, the longing for our heavenly home is so painful that we curse it and try to forget it. We deny that deep homesickness and we say “that's life”. The situation is so dire and the pain of exile is so great that our best option is to forget and numb ourselves to the pain.
Is Jesus God?
Though this is where we find ourselves today, it is far from the end of the story. God could not bear to see us in this broken state. The same love that drove God to create us in the first place is the same love that drove him to restore us. From the very moments following our fall from our position in the Trinity, God promised that he would personally ensure our safe return. There have always been groups of humans who tried to get back to heaven, but the entire narrative of the Hebrew Bible exists to prove that it's impossible for us to get back to heaven. Time and time again, the humans try to reach for God and find that the chasm is infinite. There was another group of people, however, who recognized this and determined that their only hope was for God to save mankind. These people lived in constant tension, hoping in God’s promised restoration but intimately aware of the horror of living in exile. These people were not especially righteous or good, they simply trusted God.
After thousands of years of exile, God’s promise was fulfilled in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We could not get to heaven, but God himself came down, on a divine rescue mission. Jesus came to set us free from the exile we live in. He died the death that we are all faced with and he, the source of all life, beat death and rose from the grave. He ascended into heaven to his rightful position in the Trinity. Jesus promises that anyone who trusts him, believing that he is the fulfillment of God’s promised deliverance, will be united with him and share in his resurrection. Jesus came down to free us from the pain of exile and bring us back up into the trinity. We could not get there on our own, but God came down to raise us up, just like he promised. Just like we could not earn our way back to heaven, we cannot earn this gift, we can only receive it. For anyone that will receive this gift, it is theirs. But in order to receive it, you must first hold out your hands, and if you are to hold out your hands, you must first believe that God’s offer of eternal life is real.
God loves you dearly and longs for your safe return to your position in the Trinity. He has provided the way back in Jesus. He cannot force you to return, because that would be unloving. You must choose to return. It is free, no strings attached, the fulfillment of all your needs. This is the greatest news ever told.