In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. That means that in the beginning and before the beginning began, God was there. He wasn’t alone. God is love and love loves somebody or something. God the Father and God the Son loved each other. Rejoicing in the midst of that love was the Holy Spirit, who is also the embodiment of love just as much as the Father and the Son. The three of them are each God and the three of them are each their own person. Before the beginning, there was a love feast going on.

God created humans to invite them to the feast, to rejoice in God’s love and to be embraced in the fullness of His loving presence for eternity.

God thought about whom He would create to love. He formed His children in His mind before any of us formed in a womb. He wrote our names down in a book, His Book of Life. He knew us before He made us. Before the world was made, God named His children.

I can imagine that because what was coming was going to be so hard, that He had to write our names down. It had to be chosen before this whole thing was set in motion. God is love and God is merciful. He delights in forgiving and receiving the unlovely into His arms and showing them love. But He was going to have to let some choose to die without receiving the mercy He offered. It was going to be hard. He had to have it settled before it began so He would go through with it. He is love. And in order to share His love with His children and bring them into the everlasting love feast with Him, He had to do what was necessary to get them to Himself. It was going to be hard, impossibly hard, except that God can do the impossible.

Here’s the thing about love. You can’t be forced to love someone. It would not be true love if it were not chosen and given freely. God needed us to freely choose to love Him. It’s not that He needs our love. He is love and fully is satisfied in Himself. That’s not a bad thing because God is not one, but three. But God wanted to invite others into His amazing love. Love is meant to be shared. He gave us the ultimate example by creating us and being willing to go through all the pain of that because He wanted to share His love.

So God created the world. He just spoke and it was. God’s word is His power. He just has to say so and it is because He controls everything. Only God has that power of creation. He is Creator God. It’s who He is and there is only one God.

His plan was to create people, but first He had to create a place for them to live. He created the world and all that is in it with the purpose of it serving His children, whom He created last. He created man and woman in His image because we were His children. Children have the image of their parents. They can look and talk and act like their parents. We had one ultimate parent, God, Himself. We were created to look like Him in how we live and interact, and especially in how we love.

God also created angels to serve His children. God thought of everything, and He did everything perfectly. God looked at all His creation and declared it very good. God is perfect. He doesn’t make mistakes. If He could make a mistake, He wouldn’t be God. But He is God, so we can always trust everything He does because He is always perfect, always good, and always and only loving.

Part of loving us was creating us with a choice. We had the free choice of where to place our love. We know we have a free choice because, although God’s creation was perfect, they still chose poorly. They loved themselves.

Instead of loving and praising the perfect Creator who made them and everything else so utterly perfect, the angel we call the devil looked at his perfectly created self and thought he deserved the love and praise. He convinced Eve that she could be like God, pridefully loving herself, instead of looking to God with awe and wonder and worshiping His beauty and wisdom and all His perfection. Adam joined them in their sin, in their rebellion against a good and loving God.

We see right from the beginning why the world is broken and why we actually need a broken world. The world broke because people chose to love themselves instead of God. We see right from the beginning that having everything perfect is actually a recipe for disaster. We won’t choose Him. Things get worse and THEN people start to look to God! All the “bad” is a gift because it gets us to look to God to save us.

God’s desire is to get us into His family, into His love feast, but we had to choose that love. It’s really hard to get a human to love someone other than themselves! It’s hard to get a human to choose God and His perfect love instead of their own selfishness. We need all the brokenness in the world in order for God to steer our choice of Him. Not in His selfishness — no, love is selfless. God is only after our good, and our best good and only true goodness is found in God Himself. He just wants the best for us, and that’s Him!

And because He wants that for His children, those whose names He wrote down before we were even alive, before we had done right or wrong, He was willing to go through heartache after heartache, to the point of seeing others choose to reject Him and choose to live in eternity away from Him, in order for His children to choose to live in eternity with Him, to come to Him and receive His love and to rejoice in love forever in heaven and in God’s perfect creation that is to come.

But at this point in our story there is still a big problem. God is good and loving and perfect. Part of that “perfect” is that God is just and righteous. Let me tell you about those words that describe our great and mighty and awesome God.

God being just and righteous means that God always does what is right. If there was a judge who let a murderer go free because the murderer said he was sorry, and every day he killed someone else, and the judge just kept forgiving him, the judge would not be good nor loving and certainly not doing what would be right.

There’s one more word I want to teach you about God. God is holy. It has to do with His perfection. God is unlike any other. He is set apart, we say. He can’t be tainted. He is perfect and will remain perfect. God can’t be joined with sin, with anything not good and loving. He can’t be part of it. It would ruin His perfection. If He weren’t perfect, He wouldn’t be God. If God’s not God, then we’re all in trouble. We need God to be perfect. We need Him to be loving and good. But we also need Him to do what is right.

God is bringing His children home to Himself. Those children will live forever with Him. Only what is holy and good can live with Him. Sin, all that’s wrong, all that’s not good and loving and perfect, separates us from God. God is life. Apart from God is death. We choose God or we choose sin. We’re choosing life or death.

But every human has sinned. We’ve all been selfish. We’ve all loved ourselves instead of being like the One we were created to imitate, Who only and always selflessly loves others. We all deserve to be separated from God, because none of us has always done what is good and right in order to be able to be holy along with God and be with Him.

But God created His children to be with Him.

God had a plan. A price had to be paid for our sin in order for God to do what was right and not let the sin go unaccounted for. But God is love and Love is selfless. God Himself paid our penalty for us by giving up His life for us, even dying for us.

He did that by taking on the form of man. Jesus gave up heaven and all that good and perfect and came to earth. He grew in a womb and was born. He had to grow and learn and get a job. He lived as a refugee for years and grew up in a working-class family.

But, though Jesus had an earthly mother, He had a divine Father, God Himself. Jesus was God and so was able to live a perfect life with no sin. Because He was perfect, He could die in our place. If He had sinned, He would have to die for His own sin. But because He was human and because He was perfect, without sin, He could be our substitute and die in our place. The God of the universe died on a cross, taking all our infinite amount of sin, the sin of everyone of all time, onto Himself.

He did it so we could be with our Father God. We can have our relationship with God restored because now our sin could be forgiven and our guilt wiped away because our sin crimes have been paid for by Jesus’ death on the cross.

Because Jesus had no sin and didn’t have to die Himself, once our sin was taken care of by His death, He came back to life. Jesus is in heaven now with God the Father. They sit on thrones and rule the universe.

Jesus is going to come back. He is going to set up a perfect Kingdom and rule. We are going to get a new earth and new heaven, and His children, who have made the choice to love Him, will continue to live in that choice of His perfect love for all eternity.

God delights to show mercy and forgive. The Bible tells us to change our minds. We call that repenting. We make the choice to receive God’s love and to return that love to God and others instead of selfishly living for ourselves and the poor choices we think we desire.

When we choose God, we choose to put ourselves to death and to take on Christ’s life of love. We put to death our other loves, our love of ourselves, our love of sin, and our love of the things of this world. We receive God’s love into our hearts, which comes by the Holy Spirit filling us. He gives us God’s desires in our hearts. He gives us hearts that overflow with love for God and others, hearts that are generous, not selfish, hearts that are patient and kind and self-controlled.

While we are on earth, the devil and those working for him will keep trying to get us to choose love of self over love of God. We don’t listen to the lies. We remember the truth that God teaches us in the Bible, that God is love and that He loves us and that we can live in that love.

Sin steals, kills, and destroys. God’s way of love and truth gives life and peace and so much joy!

To come into God’s life, make your choice. Be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit. Learn the Bible by reading it and asking God questions. I have written all sorts of lessons on the allinonehomeschool.com site to help you as well.

To be baptized and receive the Holy Spirit, you take it on faith that you are dying to yourself and being buried in the water and washed clean of your sin and guilt and raising up to new life in Christ. In the Bible it says, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Believe it. That’s how you are saved, by faith. By faith we receive the ultimate gift, God Himself and life with Him always.