God Chose Love

A common issue that comes up when discussing the existence of God is the prevalence of pain, injustice, and (generally) evil in the world. “If God exists, then why does He allow people to hate each other, and why are their wars and disease amongst us?” is the common refrain. This is a valid, reasonable question, and all those who believe in an omnipotent, loving God should be able to provide a clear answer. Here, I will try to provide a biblical, if brief, answer to this question (for a more detailed answer, I would encourage you to read The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis).

When God created mankind, He had a choice: should He create a kind of creature that would do as He commanded automatically, or should He create one that could choose whether or not to obey Him? Asked differently, did He want a robotic being, which does what it is programmed to do, or did He want a being that could have a real relationship with Him? According to the Bible, God chose the latter. He wanted to make people that were capable of relating to Him in a real and loving way, rather than in an automatic, robotic manner. Simply put, God chose love.

Love is a central theme in the Bible, as it is the core tenet upon which God rests His kingdom. God declares that He is love (1 John 4:8). When Jesus was asked which were the greatest commandments that God wants man to obey, He replied: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Matt. 22:37-39). He further declared that all of the commandments Old Testament hang on these two core principles. The main reason that Jesus came to earth was to display God’s love for mankind: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16). Clearly, love is essential to God.

Thus, when He made human beings as a special part of His creation (Gen. 1:26), He wanted them to be capable of loving Him. Love and obedience are intricately connected in God’s Word – the simplest test of whether someone loves God is to find out whether they obey Him (John 14:15; 1 John 5:3). It was this test that God set before Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The instruction was a simple one, yet they disobeyed it.

Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, as are obedience and disobedience. No one can be forced to love: they must choose to do so voluntarily. Similarly, true obedience can only exist if there is a real option to disobey. God could not, therefore, have created Eden without making at least one thing forbidden. If there were no forbidden fruit, then Adam and Eve’s ‘obedience’ would not have been real. God created people with a free will so that they could choose to love and obey Him, but this meant that there had to be an option to hate and disobey Him. The path of disobedience is the one that we have chosen, and this is the reason that there is pain, injustice, and evil in the world today.

“But if God knew that mankind would disobey Him and that this would lead to pain and suffering, then why didn’t He put us in a world where disobedience would be impossible, and we could all live happily ever after?” This is another valid, reasonable question. Yet the answer is the same: God chose love. In such a world, love would be impossible, and human beings would thus be incapable of loving.

Let me ask you to use your imagination a bit. Imagine your life without love. Consider that your family and friends, your nearest and dearest, meant nothing more to you than a means to an end. Consider a life where every relationship you have has the simple purpose of aiding your own survival and reproduction. You appreciate your parents only because they gave you life and they have your genes. Similarly, your siblings and cousins are valuable to you insofar as they share some of your genetics. Friends that can provide you with wealth and health are useful; those that cannot assist you in these ways are unimportant. Furthermore, the person you “fall in love with” is really just a potential provider of the other chromosomes necessary for reproduction.

This is the world that would exist had God not chosen love, or if God did not exist, or if an impersonal force ‘created’ the world. The impersonal force that many people believe in today (to take the place of God) is evolution. If evolution were the single driving force that ‘created’ the world, then love would simply not exist.

Love provides no evolutionary advantage to those who have it. An arranged marriage or a marriage of convenience can provide the couple with as many children as a marriage based on true love can. Indeed, marriages without love make it easy for the people involved to be unfaithful to each other, which provide even further opportunities for reproduction. In contrast, a couple who are incapable of, or have decided not to have children, yet truly love each other, may remain faithful for their entire lives. In terms of evolution, the latter couple are pathetically unsuccessful. Thus, evolution would have destroyed love (if it existed in the first place) within the first few generations of its operating on primitive hominids.

In an attempt to explain away the existence of love, some evolutionists suggest that love is an illusion. The chemical workings in our brains activated by some gene in our DNA allow us to have this ‘loving feeling’. Evolution, in its great ‘wisdom’ (it being an impersonal force) has allowed the ‘love gene’ to persist for the survival of mankind. The simple example I provide above destroys this argument. A couple that is ‘deluded’ into believing that they are in love has no evolutionary advantage over a couple that lives with no such delusion.

Finally, if you can imagine a world without love, then you can imagine one without God. As I said earlier, the God of the Bible declares that He is love. I have heard the saying that: “I won’t mind going to hell, because at least all my friends will be there with me”. The definition of hell is a place from which God has withdrawn His presence. You may indeed find former friends there, but you will not love them. Love cannot exist where God will not enter. In contrast, heaven is an eternal celebration of the love of God for all mankind. Perfect love of God will go hand-in-hand with perfect love for each other as those in heaven spend eternity in His presence.

Just as Adam and Eve had a choice, so do each of their offspring. I ask you today, will you choose love?