Creation/Gratuitous Love

If we are called to imitate God’s love, we must first understand and experience it for ourselves. That starts all the way in the beginning, with the very act of creation One of the most striking things about the creation accounts in Genesis, as opposed to the mythologies of the ancient Mediterranean world, is how unnecessary God’s act of creation was. Greek and Babylonian mythology claimed that humanity was created to serve the gods, but the Biblical narrative makes it clear that God needs no such thing. Rather, humanity is created to partner with God, to be the pinnacle of physical creation, and to steward that creation with the same care by which God seeks to care for us. But creation was made for us as much as we were made for it, and God could have not made either, if He so chose. Nothing forced Him to do so.
 
Therefore, one of the first things we must realize is that God does not need us. His love for us is therefore not a conditional love, contingent on us fulfilling our role as servants in order to receive a servant’s reward. Even from the beginning, even before Christ came into the world to make us Sons and Daughters of the Father, God loves us and all creation with a free, unforced, bountiful love. There is nothing in God of the human neediness and insecurities that drive our own relationships. God starts by offering all that is good to us and saying, “Enjoy the blessings put before you.” As we will see next week, it is only because we seek to choose our own ideas of what is good that problems arise.
 
Challenge: Do we see the blessings that God has placed before us? What gifts of God have we taken for granted?