CHAPTER 2. In The Beginning…
Philosophers and scholars have long pondered the question of exactly what love is, but they have done this without first asking the simplest question of…
Where does love come from…?
There is no other species on the planet that flows in love like humanity does.
Human love is the same in every culture and has not changed in thousands of years and this is because love did not evolve but rather it was inherited.
Humanity received Love when we were created in the likeness of God our Father.
We still don’t have a full understanding of exactly what God is but we can learn a lot about God’s nature by looking at the past 4000 years of history as recorded in the Bible.
The lenses we will be looking through will be “Gods love” because as you will discover that Gods love is at the heart and the start of everything. Gods love is the WHY behind the WHAT. Gods love is also the WHY behind you and me and shapes everything we do.
Bible teaching for too long has focused on the WHAT we do, without due consideration given to the WHY we should do it and in so doing, has missed half of the message.
We are taught… “If you do WHAT they did, you can have WHAT they had…”Unfortunately this doesn’t work when it comes to Gods love because God wants Relationships not Religion’s.
God is love… and so are you because you are one of Gods children created in His image.
As we progress you will be shown how love works and you will see how similar your love is, to God the Fathers love…
For now you will have to accept it on faith before getting all the facts…
Gen 1:26-27: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…
When God created the heavens and the earth it was all done according to Gods flavour. That is, God created objects that were to Gods liking, with humanity included. But it was only of man that God said that we were to be created in Gods likeness.
So what’s different in humanity that separates us from the rest of Gods creations…?
Evolutionists have long argued that we descended from ape ancestors and there certainly are a lot of similarities between the two species…. If anything, in evolution the apes have out done humanity when it comes to agility and raw physicality.
But God didn’t say “let’s make apes in our likeness…”
Apes do show emotions but nowhere near the level of emotions and self reflective reasoning that humans do…No species comes even close to the level of self contemplation that is commonly found in humanity.
And yet with all of that computing power at our fingertips we still have no comprehension when it comes to love and how love effects every area of our lives…Love is generally seen as a sacred Mystery too complicated for anyone to understand.
We make movies about it, watch soap opera’s filled with it that go for years, we sing songs about it and the worlds media uses it to sell us stuff… all the while totally oblivious to HOW exactly love is effecting our lives.
Without Gods love we may as well be, just another animal…
Jesus gave us only three commandments and each had the word LOVE in them…Further more, one of the commandments was taken from Deuteronomy 6:4… what is not known by many is there is more to the passage.
Jesus was just giving the headline knowing the listeners would know the rest…
Deu 6:5-9: “And you shall LOVE Jehovah your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might….
(This is where religion stopped but the scripture went on….)
AND these Words which I am commanding you today shall be on your HEART.
And you shall TEACH them (Gods love) to your sons,
and shall speak of them (Gods love) as you sit in your house,
and as you walk in the way,
and as you are lying down,
and as you are rising up.
And you shall bind them (Gods love) for a sign on your hand;
and they (Gods love) shall be for frontlets between your eyes.
(The centre of your thoughts)
And you shall write them (Gods love) on the doorposts of your house,
and on your gates.”
Do you think God was trying to tell us something…?
The world is in the mess that it is today because we have not taught Gods love as were commanded to…
God did not and does not want us to forget His love because it is the part of us that was made in his likeness. It’s the part that makes everything else work.
Jesus taught us to pray starting with “Our Father…”
Mt 6:9: “So, then, you should pray this way: Our Father who is in Heaven, Hallowed be Your name.”
God IS our Father and we are his children who carry the likeness of Him.
John wrote in the start of his gospel… “ In the Beginning was the word…”
That word was LOVE. It is the only word that actually makes sense.
Without Gods love nothing would exist…
Without love there is no reason to exist.
We were given Gods love so we could be creators of love in our own right, caring for and adding to the glory of creation.
We were given Gods love so we could share our love with God as a family.
There are 7 facets of Gods love that we will go into detail later but each of us carry the same 7 facets in varying degrees…
A lot of our personalities come from these facets depending on which ones are stronger and which ones are weaker…
For example MERCY is the first facet of Gods self declared nature and all of us have varying degrees of Mercy…
Even a mass murderer has a degree of mercy, even if it is very small… They may consider it a mercy by killing their victims… but this is NOT Gods mercy…It is a twisted version of mercy based on self gratification…
Another facet of Gods love and so our love, is JUSTICE.
God declared that “the guilty will not go unpunished…”
It is important we know the fullness of Gods love because we are ALL going to be held accountable to it.
Now that I have shown that we inherited love from our Heavenly Father let’s now put it to the test and see if our love is the same as God the Fathers Love.