A Trinitarian Worldview - Part III: God Before Us or Without Us

One concept I have been pondering is the fact that God as a divine, eternal being, existed before Creation. Even before He created everything ex nihilo, out of nothing, He was.

Tertullian: “…before all things God was alone, being his own universe,
location, everything. He was alone, however, in the sense that there was
nothing external to himself.” Adversus Praxeas 5

Tied into the fact of God's self existence is His self-sufficiency. He did not need us, yet He created us. I think it is testament to His love and grace that He would choose to share Himself with us. I wonder if given the chance to create out of nothing, we would do the same? I hardly think so.

It occurred to me that in His eternal existence prior to creation, the proper view would have been one of pantheism. God is everything and everything is God; because God is the only thing. Maybe unitheism? But I digress.

The point I wanted to make was that thinking about the fact that accepting that God always was, and was before creation, is a call to faith in the divine:

• We really do not know how much we do not know about God
• We must believe that, as a gracious and loving God, He has revealed all we need to know of Him as we live our lives on this earth
• Whatever our conceptions about God, we probably color them with our human conceptions, and the divinely infinite can never be totally understood nor explained by the finite.

God was giving when He did not need to, a clear indication to me that we are to be giving of ourselves as well.

If you were to describe the reason(s) God created us, what would you say they are?