The God Who GivesExemplo

Creation and the Triune God’s Love 

God’s generosity flows out of his love, and thus we must ask a few key questions about his love. Did God need to create in order to experience love? Does God only become loving after he creates, when there is something to love? Actually, no. 

Scripture affirms that “God is love” (1 John 4:9, 16). Love is a perfection of God’s being, which means it is not something temporary or accidental to him. All of his being is of love. To speak of God apart from his love is to speak of someone other than God. 

How, then, is it possible that God loves before he creates? Simply put, the God who creates is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God existing in three persons. Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting on John’s declaration that “God is love,” says it well: “Here we find ourselves before the most dazzling revelation of the source of love, the mystery of the Trinity: in God, one and triune, there is an everlasting exchange of love between the persons of the Father and the Son, and this love is not an energy or a sentiment, but it is a person; it is the Holy Spirit.”

Here Pope Benedict reflects a long Christian tradition that sometimes spoke of the Father as the Lover, the Son as the Beloved, and the Spirit as the Love between them. Although analogies between God’s love and our love inevitably break down, one thing in Scripture is clear: the eternal God is love. Divine and eternal love is then unfolded and directed toward creation from the Father through the Son in the Spirit. God does not need to create in order to experience love, because the triune God exists in love within himself. He creates as an outworking of that eternal love. C. S. Lewis summarizes the point well: “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.” God creates out of the overflow of his eternal triune love, and we were made to enjoy and respond to this very love.