God’s Actuality is Love’s Possibility.

In ethics everything is uncertain. Everything, after all, can be moral, but nothing is moral with certainty.*

Beyond God, to have absolute certainty is a matter of impossibility. We read about the world’s creation and learn that it was good, yet we suffer. This world's measurable pain, suffering, and wants could break any man’s faith. With every step we take, we find the consequences of our actions to be arbitrary. Every one of our acts can be good, but none of our activities are good with certainty. The account of the fall in Genesis is misunderstood in its intent. We contemplate this account of God’s good creation and credit ourselves with bringing evil to it. We look at hunger in the world and blame the sin of greed. We tell ourselves that the death toll in inner cities expresses our sinful nature. We take credit and say that we ruined God’s good creation– how smug we are!

For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

How absurd, if not blasphemous, to believe that God’s good plan could be derailed by a pair of humans and a serpent! To believe so is to think that God would continue to sustain such unperceived evil by his word as if he approved of it. (Hebrews 1:3) We take account of the flood in Genesis as assurance that God is willing to put up with our vileness. So, here we are. Despite our beliefs, the book of Genesis never intended to narrate our capacity to overthrow God’s plan. In fact, that was never a possibility; the events of the tower of babel prove this point (Gen 11:1-9). We should ask ourselves what the account of creation intends to establish? One alternative is that God’s creative action expresses the awareness he has of his greatness.
It is said, “a good God should not have created evil,” but this is a simple and silly problem. If we understand the story of humanity, and the resulting evils in our world, as developing within the scope of God’s will, we begin to see creation’s intent. Not that God willed evil, not at all.  That God created humans knowing we would fall is comprehensible only when we acknowledge that through these occurrences he intended to share himself forever. It should not surprise us that God is aware of his greatness. Allowing his creation to fall is nothing short of his excuse–if we can call it that–to offer himself to undeserving beings. God necessarily expresses himself as love through his creative activity. As it turns out, God’s self-contentment is the source of his grace. For him, there is no more extraordinary gift than the gift of himself! It is preposterous to think we could get in the way of that. There is no possibility for God. God’s plan has never veered from its course.

Redemption is the continued expression of God’s love imitated by human action.

That we think it possible that we affect God’s will at all is evidence of our humanism. Our limited capacities make it difficult to imagine God’s perspective. But, we must make do with the revelation of his word. What are the consequences of this view? Are we now absolved of our wrongdoing because God carried out his creative activity aware of this outcome? Hardly. And quite the contrary. Here is the point of this here reflection: the actuality of God’s love is the possibility of human love.
God's actions are expressions of his nature. He doesn’t look at a situation and decide what to do because his eternality means that situations do not exist. This point is difficult to express because human experience and language are temporal. Situations are temporal; God is not. But the point here is that God loves, but we must choose to love; when that situation passes, we must choose it again. With every new moment, love is only a possibility for us. Our actions wither away with every passing moment. Temporality is problematic for another reason; it entices us to remain in the places where we are most loved. Our attachment to being the object of love is indicative that we are not ourselves love. We desire love but consistently overlook the creator's example. We are in constant need of a reminder that love acts and is not a state of being for us. God has given us the beautiful possibility of remaining in his love and then sharing it.

Love thy neighbor. That is, as the Jew and Christian assure us, the embodiment of all commandments. With this commandment, the soul is declared of age, departs the paternal home of divine love, and sets forth into the world.*

On every account, Christians are commanded to love, not wait. Therefore, if we understand the possibility to love, the second coming of Christ does not become an event to wait for but one to bring about. Only a fool would dare say, “Christ, I have faithfully awaited your return,” because to him we should say,

“Fool! We were given the capacity to love, and you decide to sit and seclude yourself in it.”

God’s actuality means love’s possibility for us.

*Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption (p.205, 214). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.