As we sat on a dock with a group of students late one night, the conversation turned to the question of why God made the world. We listened as the students went around and around on this one. Did God need the world? Was God lonely? Was there some preexisting force that God had to tame and direct toward creation? None of these answers were satisfying, until at last one student suggested that God made the world because God is love.Weigh these words and see if they ring true. "The whole earth is full of the love of God." "God created this world because He is love." Talk about these things with trusted friends and people with whom you are in community.
A reverent silence came over the group, and for a few minutes we all lay out on the dock looking at the stars, hearing loons call across the lake and feeling the air chill as we entered deeper into the night. Then someone quoted from Psalm 33: "For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord" (vv.4-5). The earth is full of the steadfast love of God! Even in the face of our ecological hate, our contemptuous rape of this creation of delight, the creation in its very being radiates the love of God.*
*Walsh, Brian J. and Keesmaat, Sylvia C., Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), p. 196.