What is God if not Love?

Revised 8 March 2023

Before you can express love, you have to think about it. Love is created in your mind. God is the divine Mind and as such God is the source of eternal love and the creator of all.

This article attempts to explain the nature of God, creation, evolution and the meaning of life in the light of all the scientific knowledge known to man in the Twenty First Century. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12:"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known".

My hope is that this article will give you a clearer vision of God and allow you to reconcile your faith with modern scientific knowledge. It may even set you free from the constraints of orthodox by Christianity and reveal Christ's real message of love, hope. Love is simply what life is all about.

When God created the universe, He also created the process of evolution from which mankind, the flora and the fauna would evolve. The truth revealed by Jesus's teachings is that God's child is a spiritual being reflecting His divine Thoughts and not a physical child.

The Biblical record of the creation of the universe and of mankind is described in Genesis as follows:

Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Genesis 1:27 “And God created man in His own image and likeness.”

Genesis 1:31 “And God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good.”

Genesis 2:7 "the lord god formed man from the dust".

When first you read the first two chapters of Genesis there appears to be two versions of the creation of mankind. The first version of creation in Genesis Chapter One says that man was made in the image and likeness of God. The second, in Chapter Two, states that some days after God "created" man in His image another entity, called the lord god, formed a version of man-made from the dust of the earth and then he made a woman from man's rib.

The version of creation in Chapter Two appears to be a very naive explanation of the creation of the physical world. On the other hand, the description contained in Chapter One seems somewhat esoteric. The understanding of the evolution of mankind was beyond comprehension at the time the Bible was written. The real meaning contained within the verses of Chapter One about God's child has been "hidden from the foundation of time" (Matt 13:35) and was revealed to us by the teaching, the ascension, and the resurrection of Christ Jesus.

So, which of these two descriptions refers to the real man, the real child of God? Christ is the child of God and has always existed in the divine Mind (Heaven, if you like). We too are the children of God. Jesus's message to us is that the real man, the real child of God, is the spiritual child that has always existed even before "the beginning " of mankind's time frame. Jesus appeared in an earthly form to reveal this truth to us and to redeem us from sin, disease and (spiritual) death. He showed us how to attain the "Spirit of adoption, whereby we may cry, Abba, Father" (Rom 8:15).

At the time of the formation of the universe the physical man did not exist. We know that to be the fact from today's science and, as we will see, this is not inconsistent with the record of creation in Genesis. But first, what is the hidden meaning about the real child of God contained in Genesis 1. The description designated "a creation" of the child of God in Genesis 1:27 as being in His "own image and likeness" is a description of the existence of the spiritual man. Why is this so? Because God is not a corporeal being. God is the divine Mind, the repository of intelligence, truth, life and love. Therefore, God's child made in God's image can't be a corporeal being either; it must be a spiritual being reflecting God's attributes. This fact, that God's child is a spiritual being, is confirmed by the much later events recorded in the New Testament namely the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. (In this article I will sometimes use the male pronoun "He'" when talking about God to make for easier reading: however, I know that God is neither male nor female because an idea is neither male nor female.)

Before the universe existed there was only God and His ideas. God, the supreme Intelligence, is eternal, has no time scale and is outside the universe. In "the beginning", according to mankind's concept of time, God chose to create the physical universe in one "big bang" of creative Thought. The statement in Genesis that God created the physical world is corroborated by Paul: "For by him were all things created, that are in the heaven, and that are in the earth, visible or invisible" (Colossians 1:16). Thus began the evolution of the world as we know it today from a set of basic chemical building blocks in accordance with a set of random physical laws created by God in the beginning. From then on God was not directly involved in this physical process of evolution.

So, were God's spiritual children created in the beginning along with the physical universe? God is omniscient therefore He can have no new ideas since he knows all in the first place. It follows that God's children, who are His ideas, must also have always existed. Like God, they can have no beginning or end. Thus, the spiritual realm and God's children were not created "in the beginning" or at any other time since God and His ideas have always existed. The only creation was that of the physical universe. Our spiritual being exists, communicates and interacts with other ideas in the divine Mind. This is God's church, His living temple. By definition God and His ideas are eternal; they have no beginning or end. His ideas cannot be destroyed or lost.

God is the divine Mind, the repository of Love, Life and Truth. God is the supreme Intelligence. Although God is not a person, He is far from being impersonal since He "numbers every hair on our head" (Matt 6:8) and knows everything we have need of before we ask for it because our spiritual being, while not being God, is an indivisible part of God. On a human scale when we love someone, we first have to think about them. This gives us a warm glow and may even bring tears to our eyes. Then we may express that love through our words and actions. But it is the thought of love which is the source of love. God's Love is pure thought, pure Love. What is God if not Love? We are never absent from God's thoughts. God lovingly acts to heal us when we have faith and ask Him for help in the name of Christ Jesus.

Our soul reflects a subset of God's ideas. So, God knows all about our spiritual being since He knows all His ideas. God's love is our love. It is indivisible. You can't get more personal than that! God and His ideas are neither male nor female, black nor white, old nor young, one religious belief or another. God's child is an idea or body of thoughts in His likeness, reflecting His attributes, His thoughts. We commonly call this spiritual being our soul and like God, it is neither masculine nor feminine.

The second chapter of Genesis describes what appears to be the creation of another being also called "man". This description of the creation of this man was by the "lord god" (a Jewish tribal God) who formed him from the dust of the earth, and then made a woman from one of his ribs. According to the Bible, the creation of man occurred several days after God had finished the universe. Therefore, the earth must have already been in existence for there to be dust from which the lord god could have formed mankind. This time lapse is consistent with modern science's theory of evolution. The description in Genesis 2 was the early man's way of explaining his origin in terms of the framework of the physical senses and the human concept of time. Likewise early man had no way of explaining the existence of the spiritual child of God other than to say it too was created. The concept of evolution of mankind from microorganisms was incomprehensible to man at the time. The "lord god", who supposedly created mankind, was itself an imagining of man. Hence it has human traits and is unlike the one true God. The creation record in Genesis is a kind of self-justification of and by mankind. The important thing is that God did create the physical means for the eventual evolution of mankind when He created the universe in the beginning.

At some stage in the evolution of a sentient human being, as part of God's plan for the probation and progression of His spiritual child, He imputed to mankind the capacity for its consciousness to reflect the soul of His spiritual child. In the world of computers this would be called a "mirror site". The spiritual soul resides, as it always has and always will do, in the divine Mind; "for in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). This is yet another affirmation that God's children are spiritual beings existing in the divine Mind. When the physical body dies the reflection in the human consciousness fades, but the soul remains undimmed and unchanged in the divine Mind.

In the Garden of Eden, mankind rejected his spiritual birthright and claimed to be a god in his own right. He no longer acknowledged that the divine Mind controlled his life. His ego came between him and God blocking out the reflection of his soul. From then on mankind depended on its own devices and was subject to the whim of matter.

It was not until the coming of Jesus Christ that the truth about the existence of the spiritual man and the true nature of God was revealed to us again. His message threw a new light on the description of creation contained in the earlier book of Genesis. “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). This is a life changing statement which puts to one side the description of creation in Genesis and the harsh Judaic laws contained in the Old Testament. It establishes a new dispensation of Love and Truth. It is the foundation of Christianity. "For the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth" (1 John 2:28). We are now governed by the two Christian commandments to know and to love God with all our heart and all our mind, and to love our fellow man. All our thoughts, words and actions should be governed by love in the full knowledge that our real being, and that of our brothers and sisters, is spiritual. Love takes precedence over the laws of Moses and the Prophets and indeed over all subsequent interpretations of the Bible by the church elders.

Over the ages mankind has maintained the view that the physical man is the only real existence of man. Thereby discounting the existence of the spiritual world because it can't be experienced by the senses or explained in terms of physical science. In recent years modern physical science has discovered the existence of antimatter which, it maintains, is the mirror image of the particles which make up the reality of the physical world. It is only a matter of time until mankind recognises the spiritual realm exists as the direct opposite of the physical one. When our frame of reference is the physical world, we can see nothing but chaos. When we stand apart and view life from the spiritual reference frame, we see that there is order and harmony. This is the spiritual 'theory of relativity'.

Modern science claims that neither the lord god nor God created the material world but that it was created by a physical "big bang". Both the lord god's description and the "big bang" theory are human explanations and are of small importance when viewed in the light of the Truth revealed to us by Jesus Christ.

Modern evolution theory says that man evolved from micro-organisms and was not created by lord god in seven days as recorded in the Bible. The physical man did develop from micro-organisms which were created by God in the beginning. But, as the resurrection of Jesus demonstrates, the continuing evolution of the material man is of no real importance when compared to the eternal life of the spiritual man. Jesus demonstrated that the spiritual man lives on after the death of the material body and that the spiritual man can come and go from that body while it exists. So, in the time scale of eternity, the real man is the spiritual one.

It is the evolution of the spiritual man which is important to God, not the shape and composition of whatever physical manifestation or condition that man might have at any point in time (whether an organism, ape, neanderthal or homosapiens in the human evolution sequence). So, what is this spiritual evolution? It is the development of a true understanding of God and man's relationship to Him. The "putting off conversations of the old man and …. be renewed in the Spirit of the new" as Paul says. This is why we are here to "Seek the kingdom of God". Through prayer we must seek to understand God and as this understanding evolves the scales covering our sight, which have been hiding the truth as to our real being, will fall away. We will see that we are in fact the spiritual child of God reflecting His perfection. We always have been, and we always will be. We just lost sight of this fact in the Garden of Eden.

The capacity for spiritual growth existed in embryonic form in primitive man just as it does in the newborn child of today. This evolution or growth of the spiritual man goes on as we strive to understand God and our relationship to Him through the teachings and demonstrations of Jesus. The ultimate aim of our spiritual growth is to have that mind in us "which was also in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 2:5). When we achieve this state, we will not need our body.

“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). This knowledge of God is the only thing that matters in this life and in eternity. There is only one God, and we must seek to understand Him through the teachings and demonstrations of Jesus. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus demonstrated that the spiritual man that God created in His image is the only real and eternal idea of God. The spiritual being that is Jesus was able to come and go from his physical body.

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

The true child of God is part of the divine Mind made up as it is from God's ideas; made in His image and likeness. It is not a physical man. God's child is a spiritual idea. This is the Truth that sets us free of mortal mind and which leads to eternal life.

"So, how do we free ourselves from the chaos of this world; how do we work towards attaining that mind which was in Christ Jesus? Well, the problems of the world didn't come from God. Divine Love only bestows good things on its children. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the father of light with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17).

The term "light" signifies ideas, gifts of ideas. No imperfection, pain, discord, sin, sickness or death comes down from God. All these things arise from mortal man's chaotic evolution and his denial of God. They arise from the laws of the physical world and mankind is susceptible to them as a result of the attempted usurpation of the power of God as described in the Garden of Eden allegory. They are reinforced by the conspiracy of many mortal minds all claiming to be god-like. They can only be controlled by returning control of our lives to God.

In the Garden of Eden, mankind created a supreme being in its own image and likeness to fill the gap left by its rejection of the one true God. It then proceeded to attribute and/or blame everything on this man-made god. The one true God is blameless.

“For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many). But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we by him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him” (1 Cor. 8:5 & 6).

What a moving statement this is of what is wrong with the world today and what, as Christians, we need to affirm in response to the chaos around us. We must deny the multiplicity of false gods, of individual human egos, and acknowledge only the one true God, the one divine Ego. We, the spiritual children of God, are the creation of God and He is the reason for our existence. By the example and teachings of Jesus Christ, we are made perfect and are able to regain our rightful place in God's kingdom. Through Christ we can redeem our eternal life which was hidden from us after the Garden of Eden. We should not imagine that the Garden of Eden allegory only applies to an event in the past. It applies equally to each one of us today. We are continually having our "Garden of Eden" moment when we put our sense of self-ego ahead of our love of God.

How did mortal man get to where he is today? Mortal man has evolved from unthinking micro-organisms which were programmed to react in certain limited ways. As those micro-organisms evolved and became more complex, they required a more complex control system to maintain their functions. Eventually, what we call early mankind evolved. At that stage God imbued man's consciousness with the capacity to reflect his soul, the spiritual child in His image and likeness. Mankind was given the goal of becoming "the temple of living God". Mankind's brain evolved even further until it came to a point when mankind thought that it was the supreme being thereby attempting to usurp the power of its creator, God. At this stage the human ego drew a veil over the reflection of the true child of God in its consciousness.

Mankind does not acknowledge that there is something other than its brain which makes it stand apart from animals and trees. Even the flora has inbuilt programs and the fauna a simpler brain which allows them to function and feel, albeit in a less complex manner. But they do not have the spiritual attributes which allows them to comprehend and relate to God. Only the spiritual man has that.

What we have done over the centuries is to allow a brain, which was only meant to control and run our bodies as complex organisms, to become a god in its own right. We have come to believe that our brain is the supreme intelligence. we think that we are the creators of life when in reality all we are capable of creating are artifacts. We continue to perpetuate this conspiracy of mortal mind which seeks to make us believe that God is powerless. The result of this is chaos, disease and what we call death dominates our life because we think that this human existence is all there is and that therefore the end of it must be death. Behind all the chaos of the world there is divine order. All we have to do is step outside human concepts and accept that we have a spiritual life.; that we are the spiritual children of God.

When we turn back to our creator and accept the governance of the divine Mind and override the mortal mind, the human body functions as it should. We realise that life does not end at the death of our human body but that those spiritual attributes of God which are reflected in His child (Mind; Life; Truth; Love; Soul; Spirit; Substance and Intelligence) live on unchanged in the divine Mind. Divine Mind is the creator, the repository and the expression of all pure, good, and substantive eternal thoughts. Life is the communication of these thoughts amongst the ideas of God through the one divine Mind. Truth is the understanding of God or divine Mind. Love is the all-encompassing caring thought which puts others' needs first. Spirit is the willingness and the energy to share these thoughts. Soul is the body of godly thoughts.

". How does this healing take place? God is the supreme Intelligence and He can reprogram our human mind to produce more T-cells to fight cancer, reprogram stem cells to restore organs or to produces other changes in order to restore the body to harmony and health. We gain the spirit of adoption whereby we might cry; Abba, Father". How does this healing take place? God is the supreme Intelligence and He can reprogram our human mind to produce more T-cells to fight cancer, reprogram stem cells to restore organs or to produces other changes in order to restore the body to harmony and health. (We we pray for a healing God will intervene in our lives to give us the time and the motivation to get to know Him better. Praying to understand God is how we attain eternal life: how we "gain the spirit of adoption whereby we might cry; Abba, Father".

The spiritual ideas of God are in fact eternal, the only constants in the universe. We possess these ideas in unique combinations and it is this ‘body’ of thoughts and not our physical body which will enable those who have gone before us to recognise us (and we them) since we are all just a reflection of the same thoughts, God's thoughts. This is life eternal. A collection of spiritual thoughts existing without beginning or end in the infinite divine Mind. Your spiritual being is unique and dearly beloved by God. What more could you ask of God!

I hope you have found this article stimulating. It is a work in progress. I am understanding more and more of the "Grand Design". As Eistein once observed, you have to step outside the normal paradigms before you can see the grand design behind the apparent chaos. I would welcome your thoughts on the ideas raised in it.