Created by Love for Love

Why is God so divinely determined for us to live a life of love?

Recently, I started asking the Lord that question. When I did, the Holy Spirit was quick to answer me. He started out by reminding me that love is the one word that fully encompasses God’s nature. The Bible says, “God is love” (I John 4:8). It affirms again and again that He is completely filled with compassion.

In Psalms 78:38, for instance, the Bible says that even when the Israelites sinned and rebelled against God, “He, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity, and destroyed them not: yea, many a time turned he his anger away, and did not stir up all his wrath.” And in Psalms 86:15 it says that He is “a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.”

Psalms 111:4 says, “He hath made his wonderful works to be remembered: the Lord is gracious and full of compassion.” And in Lamentations 3:21-23 we read: “This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”

Those are especially powerful statements when we realize compassion means “to have so much mercy and tenderness for someone else that it actually causes pain.” It is the deepest desire to show love and goodness. Compassion is what moves God to do everything He does.

Compassion is what compelled God to create the earth. It’s what inspired Him to prepare the Garden of Eden as a home for the family He was about to create. It is also what moved God to reproduce Himself and make man in His own image. He didn’t just want someone to love, He wanted a family through whom His love could be multiplied—that would bless and fill the earth with His own compassion. That’s why, immediately after He created Adam and Eve, “God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28).

God’s plan was not just for man to be blessed, but for mankind to be a blessing to everyone and everything he came in contact with. He planned for them to subdue and rule this planet with His compassion until the whole place became a Garden of Eden.

That was Compassion’s plan.

by Kenneth Copeland