Someone to Love

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by:  Staci Stallings

If God is love as we have discovered, then it only makes sense that God must have someone or something to love.  After all, it’s impossible to love in a vacuum.

So the question becomes:  If God is and always was and always will be, Who did God love before Creation?

Creation was not the beginning of God.  So prior to Creation, there had to be Someone for God to love, right?

To answer this question, we have to remember that God Himself is actually three Persons — the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit.

The love between the three Persons is how it is possible to say “God IS love.”

Another way to say this is… God is all about relationship.  Not top-down control, but being together, working together, growing together… RELATIONSHIP.

And this is not a new thing.  God has always been about relationship.  God exists in relationship.  God desires relationship.

In fact, there is a term for this.  Perichoresis.  Perichoresis comes from two Greek words, peri, which means “around” and chorea, which means “dance.”  It is the idea or understanding that God in three Persons is an ever-moving Being Who exists in a multidimensional relationship.

My daughter shows this by taking both hands and moving them side-to-side rapidly with the fingers facing each other as if around a “world.”

That is the love of God.  Moving.  Existing in relationship.  Dancing.

And we know that God’s original intent was for humans to exist in this relationship with Him.  In the Garden of Eden, God created them man and woman, and He would come and walk with them in the Garden.

The original idea was that God made us so He would have someone else to love, to gather into the circle of His ever-moving, ever-growing love of relationship with and in the three Persons.

And then, something happened.

You know the story.  The man and the woman were in the Garden, and everything was harmonious and wonderful.  Then Satan showed up and asked, “Did God really say…?”

Satan, the father of all lies, showed up with the ultimate lie, “God doesn’t really have your best interest at heart.  He’s just telling you  not to eat of that tree (He’s lying to you) because He knows if you do, you will be like Him.  If you eat of that tree, you will be a god too.”

And they fell for the lie.

Get it?  They fell for the lie!  They fell, and they created the fallen mind.

The “fallen mind” is that dynamic of our spirits where we separate from God, where we choose to not be in the relationship He set up.

Now here’s a question for you (one I don’t know the answer to, but one I’ve been debating myself on).

Did God know Adam and Eve would fall before they did?

Clearly, God knew that forcing someone (us) to love Him would not be love.  That’s why He gave Adam and Even the choice.  Choice.  Free will.  YOU choose.

You see, forced love is not love.  Love is only love if it is a free choice.

God knew that and provided for the choice.

But did He know, going in, that Adam and Eve would fall?

Part of me thinks He was hoping (omniscience  not withstanding) that they wouldn’t.  Part of me thinks He knew THEM well enough to know they could not be perfect forever, and so they would in fact fall.

It’s an interesting question, one that I will leave you with this week along with the foundation that God IS love and that God exists in and through relationships.

We will pick up there next time!