September 4

And we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love; whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him. — 1 John 4:16 BSB

Love naturally expresses itself. That’s its very nature. It delights in giving, especially giving of itself, and all it desires is a response. To love and be loved, to express and experience that deep affection in words and deeds—that’s love’s joy, its true heaven. But to love and not be loved in return—that’s love’s misery, love’s hell. God is love, and this is an essential part of His being. As He exists in a Trinity of distinct Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—there is an eternal, boundless love between them. Scripture affirms this repeatedly: “The Father loves the Son;” “And have loved them as you have loved me;” “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Just as the Father loves the Son, so does the Son love the Father: “But that the world may know that I love the Father,” Jesus said. And the Holy Spirit, too, loves the Father and the Son, being the “Spirit of love” (Romans 15:30), who “sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts.”

So, man wasn’t needed for the holy and ever-blessed Trinity to experience love. The mutual love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was entirely sufficient for the infinite joy and glory of God. But love, by its nature, overflowed beyond this divine fellowship toward humanity—not just toward humanity as a whole, but toward each individual believer. God loves each person in His elect with the same infinite love with which He loves His Son. “I have loved you with an everlasting love,” God says to each of His people, as much as He says it to the entire Church.

This love is directed not only toward the human nature Jesus would later take on, but also toward the countless souls who would make up His mystical body, the Church. When God said, “Let us make man in our image,” He was creating humanity not just in the moral image of God, but also in the likeness of the body that the Son of God would later assume.