He Must Love Himself

The latest post ended with a question, and a short answer, on which now I shall elaborate. God loves Himself more than anything in the entire world. We are going to look at a few verses, then make some rational statements about them.

Genesis 3:6-7 says, "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

I’m pretty sure that we all understand that the statement, “All have sinned” is true. But I don’t we truly understand the implications of that unless we grasp the concept of, “And fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).” We will never understand this unless we can say that the glory of God is something that is to be obtained and valued.

When we sinned and continue to sin, we are dying, because of the fact that Jesus is life, and when we separate ourselves from Him, we are separating ourselves from the very air we breathe. Without God, we walk in darkness, which is death.

John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” God knew that we were in sin, and He knew that there was only one way to get us out. Some people will say that God could have just stayed up in Heaven and spoken into being the freedom of man from the bondage of sin. However, because of man’s failure to obey, a man had to rise up to make things right. So a man had to come to redeem the people from their sins.

The trick behind this is that man is inherently evil, so the idea of a perfect man could never be obtained, until God stepped down from His throne, and became a man, born into the nature of Man, but not receiving the curse of the descendant, because His birth was special. No male and female came together for Jesus to be born, but He was born of a virgin. God knew the only way man could be saved is if He came to them as man to set them free, and He did so.

From here, we see that God is the key to perfection, in which case we could say that God is good. Since He is the most valuable thing, according to the standards of life, He should be the most desirable thing to anyone who desires life, since He is life. Then, if He is life, then He must fall into a category of desiring life above all things, which is He. So the fact that God values Himself above all creatures only makes sense. In fact, if He did indeed love man more than Himself, then he would desire something besides the life that He alone contains and gives out.

This may seem really confusing, and I’m not really sure how well I have explained this, but just know that God will do anything to give Himself the most glory, because of His great desire to have life. His perfect relationship with the Trinity causes a stir of affections that has Him fall in love with Himself. In the end, all that matters is that God receives the most glory possible.

What is our part? We are to make sure that God gets the most glory possible through obedience and submission. – Forsake All