God Created us to love us….. I am sure I have heard that statement before. It seems like a reasonable answer to a question of who we are… or why we are… or maybe even what we are.

That God created us to love us is written in the very familiar verse John 3:16. It says “for God so loved the world, that he gave is one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life”.

I believe that God created us to love us and that He really asks very little in return. Only that we accept his love, love Him and love one another.

Pretty simple, right? Did you ever look at it this way? God knew that sin would come into the world via the bad choices made by Adam. He also knew that you and I will make the same bad choices all of our lives. I believe he also knows how difficult it is for us to love one another. Throughout history, and perhaps today particularly, it is pretty obvious we don’t really know how to do that.

Over this celebration of Christ’s Resurrection I have been thinking of the “why are we” question. Could it be this? God created us so that Jesus could save us! Think about it this way. If God created us and God knows us, then as I mentioned already, He knows how difficult it is for us to really love. So loving Him might be superficial and loving others impossible.

If all this is to be true, we need to know that Jesus and God are one. We need to know that nothing and no one was created without Jesus. And last, how can we know how to really love if we are not taught to love!

Well, Jesus says in John 10:30 “I and the Father are one.” John 17:5 He says “An now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began”. John says in 1 1:5 that Jesus was with God in the very beginning and that ‘all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being”.

So If God his father foreknew us and our problem with sin, that means that Jesus also foreknew us and He knew His Father’s plan to have Him atone for our sin. If that is true, and it is, then Jesus also knew of our problems with love! The solution; Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, for us, remains the greatest example of love for His Father and for us. Because of Christ we are able to love the Father and our love is acceptable to Him. We are also able to know what love of one another looks like. We, through the Father’s love for us, are able to do what we could not do except for Jesus’ work on the cross..

So God created us so that He could love us. Christ provided the way to allow us to love God acceptably. And in doing so, He provided us with the greatest example of love so that we could learn to love each other.

Did God also create us so Jesus could save us? Perhaps not, but I believe Jesus certainly foreknew that we were not going to be able to love God without His sacrifice and, without his example, we would never understand what it means to love one another.