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 Does God Really Love People? - Part 2

            So why do we doubt God's love for us?  He created us in His own image. That makes us children of God.  What could be distorting our picture of God?  Here’s a possible answer from Herb Montogomery’s book, Finding the Father.

Why do we spend countless hours and endless effort seeking to create reasons God loves us? We fall into the deception that God's love is based on something in us, either our behavior or what we believe. Could it be that God is good to us, not because we are good, but because He is good? Could it be that God is nice to us, not because we are nice, but because He is nice? Maybe God loves us because He is love, and that's just what love does. Love loves.

Since love is other-centered (requiring the presence of more than one for its existence), and love has always been (for God is love), it is only logical that more than one being has always existed between whom love has ebbed and flowed. Jesus gives us insight into the identity of these Beings. Matthew records that Jesus commissioned us to baptize "in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 28:19). Also, Paul speaks of "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit" (2 Cor. 13:14). They are three and yet simultaneously one.

Here is what I believe to have been the primary motive in God’s creation of the universe. Creation was not because God was lonely, in need of worship, or desirous of servants to do the things with which They did not want to dirty their hands. There was not a single iota of selfish impulse or self-centered motive involved in God's desire to bring other beings into existence. Rather, God was moved by a purely unselfish motive simply to share the love that They had been experiencing throughout the boundless ages of eternity. How do we know this? Pay careful attention to the following statement by Moses: "Then God said, let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule. . .' God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them"  (Gen. 1:26, 27).

             God created us to complete His love—to expand His love?  Knowing this certainly casts light of a whole different color on our picture of God, does it not?  But there are those stories in the Old Testament of the Bible about “God’s wrath.”  Maybe the next question that begs answering at this point is: “Does God Get Angry”? 

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