Who is the God of the Bible?

God is Love

Why are we Christians? We are Christians simply because of Christ. We have recognized in His human nature the perfect embodiment of God, which was expressed through His actions, and reported by His closest friends while He was among us. In the maturity of His character was the highest manifestation of the dignity of human personhood with each of us having the same potential. His character, expressed in His actions, also reveals who He is as a God. The highest revelation of God through the history of communication between Him and us was when He revealed Himself in human flesh. It is the culmination of God's revelation, where He tried to tell us one important thing, namely about His exceeding love for the dignity of our human nature, which was created in His image. Through God's revealed love we get to know a God who is ready to sacrifice himself and suffer for us.

Why does He love us, with a love which we cannot even fathom? This is because God's nature is Love. How so? Because God is not a solitary individual but is the essence of loving community manifested through the Holy Trinity. God seen as Trinity is God who is the ultimate in community, mutuality and sharing. God is not a metaphysical abstract principle but is rather three relationally interconnected persons in its place. God manifests diverse persons united in a communion of love and freedom. In other words, God is the perfection of love and communion. Therefore, God is Love. The reason that we, who are followers of Christ, emphasize love as the core of God's Being is 1 John 4:8: "He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love." John emphasized that only in the act of love we can understand the nature of God, since His nature is Love. Talk about love makes sense only in the personal relations, and only in participating in those inter-personal relations filled with love, we can understand something of God's nature. Those inter-personal relations are dynamic in the virtue of the activity involved in these relations, i.e. love is something we do. In understanding these inter-personal relations, we will also understand who is our Creator. Yes indeed, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the centerpiece of Christian theism. No religion has such conception of a monotheistic God, which is revealed as LOVE.

God as a Creator was capable in its Creative Power to create a special being with whom He wished to have a fellowship in Love. God can create such beings as He wills, and has chosen to make some creatures with the capacity for free choice. Being socially triune, God has made a world with freedom, in which loving relationships can flourish. We may think of humanity as the created image of God's social nature, enacting on the finite level the relational movements that occur eternally in God. As triune, God would be self-sufficient without creating any world, but as triune, God also delights in a world in which He can interact with creatures for whom His love can overflow. God does not need a world in the sense of having a deficiency in His nature but wants one that delights His heart and pleases Him. God wanted a world where personal relations and loving communion could occur. It would be a world not wholly determined but one peopled with creaturely free agents. God seeks fellowship with us, out of grace and overflowing love. Sovereign and free, God chooses to be involved with us. In the incarnation God stoops down, shares our lives and involves Himself in our joys and sorrows. God chooses to express His deity not in the mode of aloofness, independency and total control but in creating free beings on the finite level and entering lovingly into their lives. How did God create us in His image?

God has created a world that in a creaturely way reflects the goodness that characterizes God's own experience as triune. At great cost, God is leading the world forward to the place where it will reflect more perfectly the goodness that God Himself enjoys. God does all this without having to do it, without being compelled by anything outside of Himself. God's bliss cannot be increased, but it can express itself in the world. Beyond metaphysical necessity, God creates a nondivine world with real significance and accepts the risk of entering into a relationship with it. The aim was to create an echo in the nondivine world of the communion that God experience in His divine being, a reflection on the creaturely level of the loving movement within God. The decision gave God the possibility of reflecting on Himself in the created other and of enjoying the delight of real interaction. It should be plain why the creation is so dear to God's heart. "And God saw every thing that He had made, and behold, it was very good (Gen. 1:31)."