“Don’t talk of love, SHOW me!” ~Eliza Doolittle
God did not just talk of Love. He created the universe and the human race in order to SHOW it. The perfect love in the perfection of the Godhead could not display the depths of compassion, mercy and grace that His Love contains. In order for these aspects of God’s nature to be displayed, there had to be an imperfect recipient: someone who needed His compassionate, merciful, abounding Love.
Morning Star Journal quotes as orthodox rabbi saying that God created us so He could be good to us, so we can realize His greatness (know it by experience) and so we would merit to be vehicles for His Presence. God created us so that He could be good to us! He did not just tell us He loves us, He came to us in a mighty demonstration of that Love at the Cross. God showed His love to us by sending His Son. 1 John 4.9
God’s actions toward us are impossibly good! While we were yet sinners, God demonstrated His Love to us. Romans 5.8 In making Jews and Gentiles one in Christ, God’s wisdom was made known. Eph 3.10 God’s mercy to Paul displayed Jesus’ unlimited patience. 1 Timothy 1.16 His actions in making us alive and raising us up with Christ show the riches of His grace and clearly express His kindness. Ephesians 2.7 But we only realize the greatness of His nature when we experience the Love demonstrated, when we understand the depth of our need and receive the outpouring of His love personally.
Love is experiential. It is demonstrated in relationship—real and personal interaction. All of history is a drama displaying the greatness and goodness of God. We ‘play opposite’ Him. We fit the part by our need of exactly this kind of God! When we take our place in the drama, humbly acknowledging it’s necessity and reality, we not only experience the wonder and joy of being fully loved in our neediness, but we are also changed by that Love.
Love experienced is transforming. It touches us in our core and by continued exposure to that Love our very being is changed to be like His glorious Being. As we become like Him, we begin to act like Him, displaying His nature of loving compassion.
As we do, we add another part to the great Drama of History through which God proclaims, “THIS is the kind of God I AM!” As a ‘picture’ of God on the earth, God’s image, our surrender to His Love allows Him to perfect that image and make Himself more clearly visible.
God not only created an image of Himself, He steps into that image, and unites Himself to His image which is the guarantee that His Love will permeate and change us into His likeness. Through continual humble acceptance of our need and dependence on His transforming Love, we ‘merit to be vehicles for His presence.’ That is our calling: carriers of His character whose display of His nature brings praise to Him. We are created ‘for the praise of His glorious grace’ Ephesians 1.12-14 The kindness and goodness that God displayed to men and women throughout history is meant to be seen by all the watching universe through us, His children.
That display will bring Him the praise He so richly deserves! God created us to have a people of His own with whom He can be in loving relationship and through whom He can express His nature. Like Him, we are to be in loving relationship with those around us. We are to speak the truth of love and also demonstrate it as God did. John urged, ”let us not love with words…but with actions”. 1 John 3.18 We will be like Him in this world when we love one another. When our lives and words genuinely display His nature, others will come to realize the greatness of His Love. That is our privilege and our responsibility.
And that is why there is a battle. Satan came in the Garden to attack the image of God, the man He had created as a spiritual being capable of expressing His nature. Satan acted in hatred to reduce man to soulish living, capable of expressing his nature. At rebirth, our spirits are restored to love relationship with God, freshly implanted with the seed, the DNA, of His nature. We are then given the permanent presence of the Spirit of God to breath life and shed light on that seed, enabling it to grow into the full expression of the nature of God on earth.
Together, the Body of Christ, living out of the spirit-nature that is increasingly like God, will awesomely demonstrate His greatness! This can only happen as we, with childlike simplicity, in humble dependence, agree with God’s purpose: to be objects of love, receivers of grace, vehicles to make Him known…so that we can be a public display of the greatness of His love, grace and mercy to the praise of His glory!
