15. Love and the Power of Choice

Love and the Power of Choice

Love is preference. This is obvious. The one I love I prefer to myself, and so I defer to him in every way that can advance his proper interests and make him happy. Then when I act on my preference for him and thus commit myself to it, I have made a choice. And that choice is inescapably between the alternatives of selfish love on one side, and sacrificial love on the other, love being the impelling power either way. The power of choice is thus the capacity to love, for the making of a choice is love in action. Thus we seem to see why God gave man the capacity for choice, for only thus could we respond to His love with an answering love of our own.

God’s joy, however, in receiving our love in response to His, is not with Him an end in itself, but a means to the end of reaching the full expression, and thus the complete uncovering before all, of what His heart of love contains for us. That is, He created us with the capacity to love Him, not primarily that He might enjoy our love, but that, in our having the capacity to receive His love and respond to it, His love, in unmeasured sacrificial giving, might reach its fulness of expression. For it is more blessed to give than to receive.

God could not have created moral beings that He might selfishly receive glory from them, but rather that He might show it forth toward them. He shows His glory by seeking and promoting, through His sacrificial self-giving, the welfare and thus the happiness of His whole moral creation. He is not looking so much for anything we can give Him, as for our utter willingness to let Him give to us. He thus shows forth the glory of His heart of love before His universe, and it is in this way that we glorify Him, both now and through all eternity.

Everything God does toward man is therefore purposive, just as purpose is written on all else in the universe. The goal of God’s purpose toward us is our possession of a character like His own. And as we accept and respond to His sacrificial love, we open His way to display His character, thus to show to us and all the universe that such a character is the sole desirable moral and spiritual value for all moral beings, and that it holds within it the only possible condition of perfect moral welfare.