By Larry Craig

At some point, I want to write this all in a book to explain everything in greater detail, but this is a lifetime of study and reflection greatly condensed for busy modern minds.

God created human beings because He wanted to have a family. Yep, just like human beings do. That’s why He created life the way He did, where we have families, so He can teach us what love looks and feels like.

That is why the sex drive is so strong. He wanted everybody to know what it is like to be in and have a family. Families were generally large, because the experience of family is the one experience He wanted to implant above all others.

It takes both sexes to fully understand the personality of God. Human qualities run in pairs, and humans rarely achieve perfect balance. Every strength has a corresponding weakness. Mercy and justice is one example. We can’t balance it out as humans, but God can. The two sexes complement each other.

That doesn’t always work out, but either way, we get a second chance when we are parents, and we learn what it is to love a child more than we ever thought we could love.

All this love pictures the kind of love God has for human beings.

God has angels who spend their days worshipping and serving God, but they are not candidates for families. Human beings are created in the image of God. God wants more than just worship and service. He wants us to love and be loved by Him. Family relationships are not based on performance. We are not employees. Or servants. The joy of family is just being together.

The trick is that love always involves the possibility of not-love. Actually, there are two tricks. The other trick is for human beings to fully understand what they are getting themselves into.

Who is this God they are to love and be loved by?

The very first human beings, in a garden of delight, could not believe that God really had their best interests in mind, so they chose to have the knowledge of good and evil so they could be like God.

But that caused a problem.

They found that they could no longer enjoy God’s presence as they once did. Something died in them. And the Bible records the long road to recovery.

The first part of the Bible focuses on what God is like. Who is this God?

He is the Creator of everything. So He knows everything. I mean everything.

He is holy. We have no idea of what that means, but when people have encounters with God, it causes immediate fear and trembling with enormous feelings of unworthiness and sin.

He gave human beings His laws, both to teach them about Himself but also to teach them about life.

At the right time, Jesus came to finally restore that relationship to normal as much as we can and still be human.

The Lord God, the Almighty, the Holy One, the Creator of the end of the earth is our Father. I like the story of Jimmy Carter when he was president. He would have his big official government meetings guarded by his Secret Service staff, and his daughter, Amy (8), would just walk past all that and come sit on his lap during the meetings.

But there is a downside to all this.

Part of this being created in God’s image means that human beings cannot simply cease to exist. They will live forever.

However, human beings are not able to exist in the presence of God. It would be like flying into the sun. We would be burnt to a crisp. Yet we would still be alive, so to speak.

Jesus made it possible for human beings to be restored by being “born again” such that now they receive God’s Holy Spirit, and they are now able to live in God’s presence and see His face and not die.

Human beings who don’t receive this gift of new life are unable to exist in God’s presence, so when this life is over, they will have to be secluded to a place where God is not. Forever.

What Christians lack most today is the sense of God’s fatherhood and their being His children. We think of ourselves as adults; He thinks of us as children. We have lost the delight of just being with Him and He with us.

We are consumed with whether He is pleased with us or whether we are walking on a thin straight line. Jesus died to pay for all of that. All of that. That doesn’t mean He doesn’t care about how we live, but He can’t fill our lives with Himself until He fills our lives with His love, and He can’t do that when we live in fear, which is what happens when we focus on ourselves and not on Him.