Genesis 1:1. In the beginning, God…
Genesis 1:1 starts at the beginning, but what was happening before the beginning.
Before the beginning?
That’s right, before the beginning. Before the beginning there was God. And before the beginning God was loving. This means that before God created anything, before he made the world and the human beings who lived in the world, God was alive and God was loving.
Listen to what Jesus says in the book of John:
John 17:24. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
Jesus says that God loved him before the world began. Now look at John 17:5.
And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
Here,Jesus asks God the Father to restore him to the glory he shared with the Father before the world existed.
And here’s John 1:18.
No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.
This verse describes Jesus being “at the Father’s side,” like in a great big hug. Before the beginning, Jesus was with the Father, loving and being loved. God was loving even before he was creating, and when he was creating, he was loving.
And he was not just loving himself, he was also loving us.
God didn’t create us and then love us. He didn’t get to know us better and then fall in love with us. He didn’t wait to see how things would turn out and then he opened his heart to us. God loved us BEFORE he created us. In fact, he created us because he loved us.
You might say, “But God didn’t know how bad we would all turn out to be. Maybe if God knew that we were going to sin he wouldn’t have loved us. And if he wouldn’t have loved us, then he wouldn’t have made us.”
If you think this way, then sorry but you’re wrong.
The Bible says that God not only loved us before he made us but that he also planned to send Jesus to die on the cross for us BEFORE he made us. God loved us even though he knew that we would fail to love him back. He loved us knowing that we would sin. God knew that you would be bad sometimes (very bad sometimes), yet he created us anyway. Why? Because God’s great love needed to overflow to others too.
And guess what? We are still loved by God. Every day God loves us just like he did on the day he made us, no more and no less. God’s love for us is always the same.
Questions: Have you ever felt like God couldn’t love you because you are too bad? How does Jesus coming to us to live for us and die on the cross for us prove that God loves us?
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