So it was in order to realize His goodness in virtue that God needed to create something that, again from the meager resource of our language, we may term ‘resistance,’ an arena in which or a foil against which He could make manifest His own perfection.

(The same need for expression drives creation, no matter which facet of God’s diamond-like perfection is brought into view.  God is wisdom, but for omniscience, there is no problem to solve.  God is power, but for omnipotence, there is nothing to overcome.  God is love, but in the shared heart of the divine trinity, there is no scope for sacrifice, love’s proving.  We begin with ‘goodness,’ because it is the Ur-concept of them all.

Put plainly, God is eternally the perfect potential, eternally needful of actualization.  His own revealed name – Yahweh – contains within itself the wonder of this eternal Becoming.)

So, then: for resistance, God needed external relation.  The interior Tri-Unity relation of perfectly coordinated Personality provided no such possibility.  To find a field for actualization, the perfect required an environment.  But where, for the All-in-All, could an environment be found.  God alone existed. 

There could be only one solution: God must produce an environment from within Himself.  Something, besides God, must live, that is, have initiative and will.

And that ‘something’ must be both object and subject. 

Object, because it must provide resistance to call forth His power; it must provide a problem to exercise and prove His wisdom; and it must provide a need to require His sacrifice.

And yet subject, because it must manifest those same qualities through its own will – itself a distribution of God’s nature, God’s image – and thereby serve to actualize His perfect goodness, and so, now crowning His glory, become one again with Him, an eternal addition to the Tri-Unity, the flower of its Tree, a Body for Himself.

This is the whole object of creation.  Surrounded with a society of virtuous persons, born of Him, approved by probation and adopted as part of His eternal household, He shall ever increase the family that was, in itself, too self-sufficient to be proved.