To say that God is love implies sacrifice. To love is to be vulnerable. To love is to accept limits that respect the other.
Love is about relationship. The Cayce readings insist that God desired companionship and created souls in God’s own image for that special expression of loving relationship.
Companionship requires that souls have a choice in the matter. Without choice relationship is coercive and souls are not be able to respond to God with genuine love.
The gift of will allows souls to choose for themselves whether to be in relationship with God – or not. That makes God vulnerable to rejection.
Even God cannot foresee the outcome of soul activity until the choice has been made by the individual. God’s love requires the surrender of omniscience – all knowing – for the sake of relationship.
By implementing the power-sharing strategy of giving souls freedom to make decisions, God has imposed limits on God. Without power-sharing, there cannot be true cooperation.
There is an inherent risk in creativity. One does not necessarily know the outcome of a creative act. Apparently, the Creator is willing to assume that risk. That is a measure of God’s love – the willingness to sacrifice to be in relationship.
Typically when thinking of sacrifice and God, the emphasis is on how humans sacrifice to God. Crops, animals, and even humans have been used as a sacrifice to God or Gods in worship or appeasement.
Although the idea of God sacrificing, or even suffering for the benefit of humanity, is less prominent in most religions and mythologies, it does play a significant role in both Judaism and Christianity.
For the ancient Hebrews, relationship with God was in the form of a covenant. When the people broke the covenant (which was not uncommon), they suffered. But some theologians insist that the broken relationship went both ways – that a loving God was affected by human choices and actions.
In the Christian tradition, God’s willingness to sacrifice as an expression of divine love is symbolized in the life and death of Jesus. Depending upon on your theological interpretation, this story can be regarded as God becoming human or sending his only-begotten son as a loving sacrifice to bring souls back into relationship. Nevertheless, the concept of God as loving creator who accepts limitation and suffering to be in relationship with the created, is unfamiliar to many.
In a previous lesson, we have already considered the idea that God’s manifestation in the earth is dependent upon human cooperation. Humans manifest the divine through spiritual activity that expresses God’s love. As you treat others, you treat God. This partnership of God and individual human beings in relationship, is God’s love incarnate.
Just as God desired and needed companionship, leading to the creation of souls, numerous Cayce readings discuss God’s need for individual souls to express love while on earth. A concept of the God that needs human cooperation to fulfill God’s purpose, stretches the mind for many with more traditional perspectives of the divine. God may be all powerful, but that is not the issue when it comes to relationship.
Love is voluntary and cannot be forced. God’s love is freely given and can only be received in like manner. By voluntarily becoming a channel for God’s love, each soul allows the power of God to be expressed in the world. By putting God’s love into action in daily life, the soul reclaims its right to companionship with the divine.