What was God doing before creating all that is? For thousands, or millions, or billions of years (however long eternity past is) God had to be doing something, but what was it?
God was loving. More specifically, God was loving himself.
If this seems odd to you (that God would be loving himself for all of eternity past), may I suggest that it’s because you aren’t thinking of God as Trinity? Most of the time when the doctrine of the Trinity is brought up, it brings with it confusion and uncertainty. A lot figure the idea of God being three-in-one or one-in-three is just too strange to make any real sense. As a result, the truth of the Trinity (and I’m here assuming the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is true) ends up creating problems instead of giving answers. Even with that often lived-out experience, let’s give this Trinity-thing a chance when it comes to God loving himself before anything else existed.
Two places in the New Testament—1 John 4:8, 16—we’re told, “God is love.” This is all good and well but in order for anyone to love they need to have something to love. We wouldn’t really call it love if someone were to say they “loved” themselves. We’re often told by the world that we should be loving ourselves but true love is really only experienced between more than one person.
A husband loves his wife.
A mother loves her son.
A grandson loves his grandmother.
It would seem odd to say that real love is a husband loving himself. We would probably call that selfish, or conceited, or self-centered, or some other adjective describing the way in which someone could be turned in on themselves.
You see—or at least I hope you see—the problem arising here from what I’ve said. At the beginning of this post I said God had spent all of eternity past loving himself because he is love and now I just said that kind of behavior is egotistical.
What gives?
The Trinity, that’s what.
When we forget to think about God as triune, we run into problems but when we remember to think about him as one and yet complex in his unity, lights start to turn on in rooms we didn’t even know were there. It’s my contention that God was loving himself before he created anyone else to love because he is love and his act of loving himself was not a self-centered thing to do because he is triune. For all eternity past there existed the Father, the Son (or the Word, if you prefer), and the Holy Spirit. And, for all eternity past, the Father was loving the Son and the Son was loving the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. It may even be suggested that the Holy Spirit is the manifestation of that love between the Father and the Son.
Do you see? “God is love” is not some esoteric statement from John because he was trying to seem more enlightened than everyone else. John drank deeply from the truth of the Trinity and it leaked out of him when he wrote. “God is love” because he’s triune. “God is love” is a deeply theological statement about who God is and only the triune God is love.