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chapter 1

The Kingdom: God’s Gift to Us

God is love.

Perhaps you first heard that from your parents, or from a religious education teacher. We talk about this reality over and over again in the Church. God is love. We sing songs about it, create banners, read about it in the Bible, and celebrate it at Mass. We surround ourselves with this message.

God is love.

There is a danger, however, in living so closely to something so profound. We can start taking it for granted, growing blind to its beauty and deaf to the radical power of its message. There is an old adage: Familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps those of us in the Church have not grown contemptuous of this message so much as indifferent. We have reduced one of the key truths about God and our place in the universe to a three-word internet meme, and we scroll through our news-feeds looking for other things to fill up our uncertainty and emptiness, or to make us forget our problems. The truth that God is love no longer captures our attention, or speaks to us of who we are.

God is love.

Perhaps you’ve never really heard that phrase before. Maybe you didn’t grow up in the Church, or you came from a family that never talked about such things. Maybe you’ve lived your life actively separating yourself from religion and religious groups. Looking at the world today—with global poverty, terrorism, senseless violence, the persecution and attempted genocide of religious and ethnic groups, the prevalence of war and other armed conflicts—it would be very difficult to arrive at the conclusion that there is a God and that this God would be loving, let alone love itself.

But just imagine.

Imagine that there is an all-powerful Someone who loves perfectly—and this Someone created the universe, and you and me, for a reason. What would have to change about how we looked at ourselves? About how we looked at other people? The world around us?

It would change everything!

And it is here that our story begins, with the radical truth that we are not accidents or instances of random collections of molecules. There is a plan and a purpose to who we are.

In the Beginning

Our God who is love wants to communicate with his creation, and he does so in various ways. One of the ways God communicates with us is through the universe and the world we inhabit. Think of a brilliant sunset over the ocean, or the stars in the night sky. Recall a majestic mountain towering over the landscape, snowcapped and rough-shouldered, and the shimmering complexity of a spider’s web, dew-dappled and dazzling in the morning light. Our world is filled with beauty, with experiences that take us outside of ourselves and help us to know that there is something beyond our narrowly defined selves.

God also works through the natural processes of the universe to reveal himself. As science and technology deepen and grow their ability to explore, measure, and quantify, scientists are discovering, in the midst of the seeming chaos and complexity that exist at subatomic levels, a precision to the makeup of the universe, particularly at the molecular level. Just a slightly different molecule, or the same molecule in a slightly different position, and the earth would be a lifeless rock hurtling through space. This precision, some scientists say, points to the reality of a designer, a Creator, or an “intelligence” through which the universe came to be. Theologians call the revelation of God through the world and the physical properties of the universe “natural” revelation. Through the use of our natural human faculties, we can come to the reasonable conclusion that there is a Creator. If we only had natural revelation to go on, however, we would miss out on the utterly revolutionary meaning behind our whole existence.

Thankfully, God isn’t limited to natural revelation. God’s desire to communicate with us is so strong that he breaks into our natural world and provides supernatural revelation, literally revelation that comes from “above” the natural world. One of the ways we receive this revelation is through the Bible, and it is from the pages of Scripture that we launch into the Great Story.

So much of a story depends on its beginning. Beginnings set the tone, conveying a context or background upon which the narrative will unfold. In the opening lines of Genesis, the very beginning of the Old Testament (and of the entire Bible), we hear:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth—and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters—

Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” Evening came, and morning followed—the first day. (Genesis 1:1–5)

Before anything existed, God was. Then God speaks, and where there was nothing, the world as we experience it comes into being. These opening lines of Genesis detail a process whereby God shapes the universe, creating all creatures and placing them upon the earth. The final creation, God’s masterpiece, is humanity, represented by Adam and Eve. God declares their creation “very good” and places them in a perfect place, the Garden of Eden (see Genesis 1:31—2:25).

What could possibly motivate a perfect Being, Someone who lacks for nothing, to create other things?

Created by Love

It is precisely this question that leads to an understanding of what it truly means for us if this God is love. It’s true that God is perfect. Therefore, God’s creation of the universe was not motivated by a lack of something within God. It’s not like God was bored and listless, therefore he decided to create some things as a way to relieve that boredom. Rather, the opposite is true. God didn’t lack anything. He was actually overflowing—overflowing with love, because love is who he is, and love is self-giving. It pours itself out. And so it was out of an abundance of love that God created the universe, humanity, and, specifically, you and me. The very reason for our existence is to experience love—God’s love for us, and our love for God and one another.

Why?

Simply because God is love, and love is to be shared and given away. Love always seeks after the beloved.

Pope Benedict XVI reflected on the beginning of the Great Story in an address at the 12th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in October 2008, and he brought to light a reality that shifts everything:

All is created from the Word and all is called to serve the Word. This means that all of creation, in the end, is conceived of to create the place of encounter between God and His creature—a place where the history of love between God and His creature can develop.

The history of salvation is not a small event on a poor planet, in the immensity of the universe. It is not a minimal thing which happens on a lost planet. It is the motive for everything, the motive of creation. Everything is created so that this story can exist—the encounter between God and his creature.

Think on that for just a moment. You and I are human beings, not created as pure spirits. The angels are pure spirits. Neither are we purely material beings. The animals are purely material beings. You and I are different. We are embodied spirits, a union of soul and body. Therefore, we require a place, a physical creation in which to live and move, otherwise we would be unable to respond to love.

God knows this—he designed us this way! So, in his act of creation, he gives us everything—all of creation. From the densest neutron star to the smallest subatomic particle, everything exists so that we can be in relationship with God and one another. Perhaps sometimes you are tempted to think that you don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, that your life is simply an isolated drop of water in an ocean made up of trillions of drops of water, and that God has more important things to deal with than you.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

God created everything with you in mind. Let’s put it a different way: Everything that exists in the universe does so to serve our relationship with God and with others. That means you and I (and by extension all of humanity) are the only part of creation that God made for our own sake. We don’t exist for any other purpose. He made us simply to be loved and to love him in return.

You matter.

Remember that, in the process of our creation, God called us out of nothingness into existence. The Lord didn’t just create us to forget us. God didn’t wind us up at the moment of our conception only to set us off and forget about us, like toys that are quickly ignored once the luster of Christmas morning fades. No, in fact, God sustains us in every moment of our lives. The apostle Paul, writing to the Church at Colossae, reminds them of the greatness of the one they follow as Lord: “He is before all things, / and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

If God forgot about you—even for a nanosecond—it wouldn’t simply be like you suddenly disappeared and your friends would say to each other, “Hey, where did Jeff go?” If God forgot about you, your very existence would cease; it would be as if you never existed at all. Truly, then, God is as close to you as each heartbeat, and God sustains you because of the depth of his love for you.

That’s how much you matter to God.

Created for Love

This is the context, the beginning, of the Great Story—that the Creator brought everything into being and created us so that we could be united in a relationship of total and complete love, held in perfect arms and nurtured to become the very best that we were created to be. This is not the story of an absent, distant God. This God is near, and he has thrown in his lot with us. For God spoke into the dynamic, potent swirl that was creation and said, “Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

Then we read that God “blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). The Hebrew word for spirit, ruah, means numerous things, including spirit. God gifted humanity with his life-giving Spirit, animating us and offering us a communion of life with the one who made us. For this reason nothing else in creation bears God’s image and likeness like you and me. Of all the things that exist in the world, nothing matches the dignity of the human person fashioned in God’s image. And if we are made in God’s image, then we must understand that we were fashioned to love and to be in relationship.

We know through God’s supernatural revelation of himself that God is a Trinity—three persons in one being. God’s being is so immense that it cannot be contained in one person. Therefore, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternal relationship. The Father loves the Son and offers everything to him—including the depths of his own being. The Son, out of love and fidelity to the Father, offers everything back to him—even his own life. In this mutual self-giving, this Divine Exchange (which has always happened and will always happen), the Holy Spirit is eternally present—the very love between the Father and the Son personified. This is perhaps the deepest mystery of our faith, yet we can speak confidently and say that God is a communion of persons in eternal relationship.

This is why at the heart of who we are is a hunger—a hunger to love and to be loved, to know and to be known. This hunger is a holy one, placed there by God. If you and I are truly made in his image, then it is true to say that we were made to be in relationship, in communion, with God and with one another. It is in our nature because it is God’s nature.

Fulfilled Through Love

The truth is that our hearts were made for the infinite love of God. God has shaped our deepest desires for eternal things. Nothing here on earth can truly satisfy us at the deepest level. When we don’t know this, when even this very first part of the Great Story remains hidden from us, we stumble through life searching in every direction to satisfy this hunger which drives us on. Sometimes we try to fill ourselves up on good things—family, dignified work, serving others. Sometimes we try to fill ourselves up on things that are not so good for us—the pursuit of money, power, sex, alcohol, drugs, or fame. The reality is that whatever we try to do in order to satisfy this hunger, we will always remain fundamentally dissatisfied and “hungry” unless we come to know the One who placed these desires within us.

I recall a time in my life when I was working in the corporate world. I had labored very hard over a number of years to become a vice-president in my company. This desire captured my thoughts and imagination for a long time. It shaped the conversations I had and, in some cases, the relationships I made and maintained. Through hard work and dedication (and, honestly, some luck), I achieved that desire. The very thing that I had worked for over the course of years came through. Naturally, I was ecstatic when this happened. I remember having about three weeks of real satisfaction before I started to feel just the tiniest bit of uneasiness. This uneasiness grew quickly, and it wasn’t that long before I was asking myself the questions: Is this it? What’s next? Soon, I found myself unsettled and fixating on becoming a senior vice-president.

The point of this little remembrance isn’t that striving for things is bad, or somehow ungodly. Rather, the point is I was not satisfied, even after achieving a major milestone in my life. Soon, I was driven to find something else to fill the hunger that emerged. The reality is that only one thing can truly satisfy the human heart: knowing and loving the One who created it. That’s why St. Augustine, a disciple of Christ and bishop of the fourth and fifth centuries, famously wrote: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.”

Think back on your own life, on the times when you’ve been restless, dissatisfied, hungry for something deeper than the things in your life were able to give you. Perhaps you are experiencing that hunger now. Or perhaps you feel like everything in life is good right now, and there is only an occasional twinge or stab of hunger, when night has settled and the moon has almost completed its course, and the house is silent and heavy with a promise of sleep that never seems to come.

You were made for the One who created you.

That’s the beginning of the Great Story. Your life has a purpose, a shape, and a destiny that ends and begins with the love of the Creator who intentionally brought you into existence in this time and this place. He wants so much for you to be in communion with him that he built the possibility of that intimacy within your very being. We hear of God’s desire to be in relationship with us in the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah. The Lord is speaking to the young Jeremiah, and God affirms his love for him and his desire for Jeremiah to serve him: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (1:5).

What the Lord says to Jeremiah is true for each and every one of us. We may be tempted to gloss over the stunning revelation that God has offered us. “Big deal,” we might say. “So what if God knows us? He’s God and knows everything.” The problem is that we lack an appreciation for the biblical concept of knowledge. We are not talking about surface knowledge—the knowledge that we might have of an acquaintance or neighbor. In fact, we are not even talking about the knowledge we might have of a close friend. The biblical word translated as “knowledge” from the Greek indicates heart knowledge: in-depth, intimate connection. That’s why biblical writers sometimes used it as a euphemism, or “stand-in,” for relations between husband and wife—the marital act. As an example, in the Gospel of Luke the angel Gabriel has just appeared to Mary and declared that she will bear a son, and this boy will be the messiah, the long-awaited savior. In some translations of the Bible, she replies, “How can this be, since I do not know a man” (1:34, emphasis added).

Here is the depth of God’s love for us. He knows us deeply, intimately, and he knew us before we were “formed in the womb”—in other words, before we were even conceived. Before we existed the Lord held us in his heart, knowing everything about us. And while this image is somewhat metaphorical, the radical truth is that the Father waited through the long stretch of eternity for your conception, and for mine. The Father must have danced with joy and delight when we came into being, for at last we could experience the love he held for us. Now at last we could respond and live out that encounter.

From that moment, the Father’s arms have been open wide. He knows your name and who you are, and he has been calling you to a relationship that will ignite the deepest parts of who you are and fill you with peace, fulfillment, joy, wholeness, and a perfect love beyond all imagining. The power of this story lies, in part, in its immediacy. This life-changing relationship is not just a promise for a time when our earthly life is over. No, the Lord wants us to experience this peace, joy, fulfillment, wholeness, and healing now, in this life.

The Bible is filled with the proclamation of the possibility of this relationship. The books of the Bible, especially the New Testament, have a language and a description for the experience of this relationship. In Scripture, it is called the kingdom of God. You and I were created for this kingdom. It has been prepared for you and is waiting for you—this kingdom which begins on earth and lasts for all eternity.

It is your birthright.

Are you willing to follow the arc of the story and claim it?

Further Reflection

Take some time (at least fifteen minutes a day) to reflect on any of the following Scriptures over the course of the next few days and weeks. If you have never really opened the Bible and spent time prayerfully reading, don’t stress about it. Simply copy and paste these references into your search engine, print them out, and read them.

• Jeremiah 29:11–15

• Matthew 11:28–30

• Luke 12:22–34

• Psalm 139

• John 15:9–17

• Romans 8:31–39

You might find it helpful to pray for a few minutes before reading these Scriptures and ask the Lord specifically for the grace to receive exactly the message he is trying to communicate to you at this time in your life. Then, read the specific passage slowly and prayerfully several times. Take note of any words or phrases that jump out at you.

When you are finished reading the passage, ask the Lord to shed more light on the word(s) or passage that jumped out at you. Ask God to reveal to you what, specifically, that word or phrase might have to do with your life right now.

Small Group Questions

1. If God truly is love, then the various ways that we experience authentic love are encounters with God. What are some of the ways that you have experienced love in your life? Which ones have had the most profound effect on you?

2. How would you characterize your relationship with God (in other words, if a friend asked you to describe what it’s like to be in a relationship with God, how would you respond)?

3. How would you describe the love that a parent has for a child? Do you find it difficult to believe that this is the kind of love that God has for you? Why or why not?

4. Consider the truth that God, as Trinity, is eternal relationship, and that since you were made in God’s image, you were created with a hunger to love and to be loved. What are some of the ways that you have sought to fill that hunger in your life?

5. Is it difficult for you to receive the love that God has for you? Why or why not? What are some of the obstacles that you have in your life to receiving that love? What are some things in your life that make it easier for you to receive that love?

6. Name one thing that you hope to get out of reading this book and reflecting on it in a small group.

7. If you have had the opportunity to reflect on the Scripture passages in the Further Reflection section, which passages did you prayerfully read, and what struck you or moved you when you read those passages?