Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes
from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is
love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one
and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love:
not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning
sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also
ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but
if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.(I John 4:7-12)
The subject of God’s love came up
yesterday. In a discussion of why God created angels and man, he said that love
desires to share itself with others.[1] Some people think that God created man because God had no opportunity
to love without man but God had the angels, and before the angels or man, He had
the other members of the trinity. The love that the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit have for one another is sufficient. God does not need us to love Him in
order to feel loved.
The problem is, it’s easy to love
someone or something that is perfect. It’s easy to love someone or something
that is like us, or that is us. Now, here we need to correctly divide two different
senses of knowing. One may know something intellectually. You know touching a
hot stove element is a bad idea even if you have never touched one. But if you
have touched one, you really know it’s a bad idea. The latter is experiential
knowledge. You can know that you can paint a portrait but knowing that you can
isn’t the same as doing it.
So God created something that was
not Himself. Some may complain that He could have created something even better
than He was. That’s a logical contradiction, but think of it this way – if He
did create something that had even more of the attributes that He already loved
in Himself, what challenges would there be in loving that entity? What He created
in the angels were beings that were spiritual but limited: not omniscient, not
omnipresent, not omnipotent. When He created man, He took the idea farther,
giving man greater weaknesses (like a physical body) but giving him also the
freedom to reject God.
He created man with the plan in
mind to give up Himself in demonstration of His love because anything less
would not be a love worthy of Him. It would not be a perfect love. The greatest
love is love for something unlovely, and incapable of loving back, not given so
that you can pat yourself on the back and receive honor from others, but
because it an expression of who you are. And while we naturally think in terms
of God’s love for us, as spiritual beings trapped in a physical body. But God
doesn’t stop there. As far as we know, animals are living physical things that
lack the spiritual aspect. Plants take a step down from animals, and rocks lack
even life. He created those, too, and there are glimpses of His love for them
in Scripture (such as giving the land a sabbath rest.)
God is love, and He demonstrates
it in every level of His creation.
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