An apologetic.
God is love.
This is not just something he does, or one trait about him. This is his nature, his most essential identity. It is who He is.
But love is a transitive verb. There must be an object. That is, one cannot love without loving something, or more precisely, someone. I say someone because love is not liking a thing or a person, but rather willing, or choosing, the good of the other, and giving ourself to that person. We cannot do this for a thing. Or at least we ought not. When we love, very simply, we choose and do the best thing for the other person, and donate ourselves to them according to this rule.
But God does not need anyone else. He is and has always been sufficient in Himself. He did not need to create. How, then, could he love, and be Love? Within God's self, there had to be an other. From all eternity, God was a community - a communion of persons that loved perfectly. That is to say, the Father loves the Son perfectly, who receives this love and loves perfectly in return. Their love is so real that it is another person, we call the Holy Spirit.
Further, and significantly, the love is so perfect that it bonds and unites perfectly. What are three persons actually become a perfect unity.
So God is one, and three.
(There are three because in three there is no selfishness. I love my beloved, forgetting myself, but even my beloved's good gives me total pleasure. So together, we forget ourselves and look to another.)
That the Trinity is both 3 and 1 is not incidental. Both are essential to the Trinity being a perfect communion of love.
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