Sermon: Where Love Began

PL 2 Where Love Began
Cynthia O’Brien
September 18, 2005
Proverbs 8:22-35, Hebrews 1:1-9

Proverbs 8

"The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old;
PR 8:23 I was appointed from eternity,
from the beginning, before the world began.
PR 8:24 When there were no oceans, I was given birth,
when there were no springs abounding with water;
PR 8:25 before the mountains were settled in place,
before the hills, I was given birth,
PR 8:26 before he made the earth or its fields
or any of the dust of the world.
PR 8:27 I was there when he set the heavens in place,
when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
PR 8:28 when he established the clouds above
and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
PR 8:29 when he gave the sea its boundary
so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
PR 8:30 Then I was the craftsman at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence,
PR 8:31 rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind.
PR 8:32 "Now then, my sons, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways.
PR 8:33 Listen to my instruction and be wise; do not ignore it.
PR 8:34 Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors,
waiting at my doorway.
PR 8:35 For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the LORD.

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HEB 1:1 In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. 4 So he became as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is superior to theirs.

“Where Love Began”

[Main point: The strongest, most intimate love that exists in the universe is the love within the Divine. It is the love between the Father and the Son, so strong that it generates the Holy Spirit. This is the origin of all intimacy. It is so strong that it generates the Spirit. ]


I read an essay that Cole Kazdin of New York wrote for Salon called “Sex in a Time of Terror.”[1] He described how about a week after 9/11, his friend Ruby had met a man in a bar and he walked her home.

They stood in an awkward moment in front of her building. She said, “I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but do you want to come up?” Pause. He hesitated, so she jumped in to reassure him: “No, no, no, not for terror sex – just to see my apartment.”

Terror sex? What was that? Who would even think of sex at this terrible time when thousands had been lost? But Ruby had been noticing a new phenomenon among her friends since that Tuesday. People were having sex like it was the end of the world.

Kazdin interviewed sociology professors at the University of Washington and Yale, who said that people craved sex because it was a way they could say, “I’m alive, I’m functioning.” All of a sudden you didn’t know whether this night would be your last.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. One grandmother described what it was like back in the 1940’s. “Boys were going away and you didn’t know if you were going to see them again.” She married quickly. All her friends did, too. She said, “We were war brides. We used to talk about how the world was going to end.”

In a time of tragedy and terror after 9/11, people needed that closeness. A married couple who had drifted apart physically and preferred their own space found themselves sleeping close to each other again. A single looked for someone he could be with. The natural drive that we have for intimacy was intensified.

Peter Salovey of Yale University, said, “It is wanting the security and closness that it represents.”

Where did we get this need for intimacy? Why do children want to be with Mama or Daddy all the time, and teenage girls have the phone glued to their ear, and young men think about sex an average of 65 times a day?

Go back in history, back to Biblical times, back into the Old Testament, back to Adam and Eve. But they are not the beginning of intimacy, because they were created in the image of God, so we go back before Adam and Eve, to the creation of the world. Before the creation of the world. When there was just God.

The intimacy that you and I crave can be traced all the way back to the existence of God before the creation of the world, and I’d like to explore that with you for a few minutes. It will take some thought, but see if this helps you understand how it is that God is love.

Remember last week we read in 1 John that “God is love.” I was challenged on this by one of my professors, Daniel Fuller, who is the son of the founder of Fuller Seminary. I took his class, "The Unity of the Bible" in which he attempts to explain the great themes and understand why God did what God did. I was his teaching assistant for the class, and later taught the same themes in San Diego, and I still struggle with it. But he also said that we needed to be able to explain these concepts to a junior higher, so I will try to present this clearly.

Dan Fuller said that you can’t say God is love if God didn’t have anyone to love before the creation of the world. Love requires an object. Singers and poets from Mary Martin to Reba Macintire have been singing, “Love isn’t love til you give it away.” To do that requires another person.

Since none of us were around before the creation of the world, and Genesis 1 starts with, In the beginning, God created, is there any hope of knowing what God was like before the creation of the world? It’s in the Bible, but you have to look for it.

In Proverbs 8, “wisdom” speaks of her joy in enabling God to plan the world:

PR 8:30 Then I was the craftsman at his side. I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in his presence,

But if God is to be pleasing to himself, God has to behold himself. According to American theologian Jonathan Edwards over 100 years ago, “If God beholds himself so as thence to have delight and joy in himself he must become his own Object.”

This is accomplished in the Son, Jesus Christ.

The Son is a completely separate person or center of consciousness. When John 1:18 says that “God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made God known,” there is no other way to understand it than to understand that Jesus from all eternity was both Gopd and also a separate person from God the Father. Further, John 1:1 mentions the Word, regarded as Jesus, as having existed always, alongside of God.

Other religions do not have a Trinity. Judaism and Islam say that God is only one center of consciousness. But God is love. That has no meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person before the world was made, he was not love, and in order to be love, he would be compelled to create a world to love.

When Michael was a kid, he asked a Sunday School teacher why God created everything. She said, “Because God was lonely.” That would be wrong, according to our understanding of Scripture. That would mean God was incomplete and needed us to be fulfilled.

Our catechism and confessions make it clear that God was not compelled to make the world.

Question 25. Did God need the world in order to be God?

No. God would still be God, eternally perfect and inexhaustibly rich, even if no creatures had ever been made. …

Question 26. Why then did God create the world?

God's decision to create the world was an act of grace. In this decision God chose to grant existence to the world simply in order to bless it. God created the world to reveal God's glory, to share the love and freedom at the heart of God's triune being, and to give us eternal life in fellowship with God.

God has a perfect fellowship with the Son, who has always existed alongside him, so you can affirm that God is love. Hebrews 1:3 says,

The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being,

Jonathan Edwards reasoned that since the Son, Jesus, “is the very image of the Father, the Father enjoys the glory of the deity by enjoying him.” From all eternity God the Father has enjoyed his son’s love and companionship.

Throughout the Gospels you hear God saying that he loves the Son, and Jesus saying that his Father loves him.

They both have the perfection of beauty, the omniscience to appreciate each other’s glory. They are omnipotent to adore each other. This generates a vital spirit. It is so strong that it is a separate center of consciousness, the Holy Spirit, proceeding from both the Father and the Son in such a way that a third person exists who has all the divine attributes of the Father and Son.

C.S. Lewis explained it well:

“The union between the father and the son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. I know that’s almost inconceivable, but look at it this way.

“You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trades union, people talk about the “spirit” of that family, or club, or union. They talk about its “spirit” because the individual members, when they’re together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they wouldn’t have if they were apart.

“It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course it isn’t a real person, it is only rather like a person. But that’s just one of the differences between God and us. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and the Son is a real Person, in fact it is the Third of the there persons who are God.”

This is not a new thought. You can find it in the Nicene Creed, which established Christian doctrine in the year 325, and which says that the Spirit proceeds from the father and the son, and who with the father and the son is worshiped and glorified.

So try to get your mind around it: When we say “God is love,” it’s not just about God loving us and caring for us. It would be pretty self centered to think it’s all about us. Rather, there is a love and delight within God’self, and that frees God to love us without needing us to assuage some cosmic loneliness.

So, we can trace our need for intimacy all the way back to the pre-existent trinity. We were created in the image of this loving God, male and female we were created in God’s image. So we crave closeness, companionship, and that’s why God gave us marriage and the family, to provide a place for us to have this deep love.


Opening statement of the Nicene Creed:
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;through him all things were made...


[1] Cole Kazdin, “Sex In a Time of Terror” in essays collected by Salon.com