So the response to this mysterious ‘need’ for expression, which arises within the absoluteness of God, is creation.  We cannot explain how God created.  We can only say why the Absolute entered into external relation, the Perfect into imperfection.   And we can say that God both externalized Himself and animated that externality.  Using the language we have available: He put out a thought – and it lived. That which was made…in Him was life.

This new thing – life – when first begotten, was almost nothing, only a bud or a germ of Himself.  Yet inherent in it was the possibility of evolving into His image and entering at last into its birthright: reunion.

Through this germinal ‘child’ of His, God willed to realize, to actualize His own nature.  Through it, He would venture into history; with it, He would prove the blade of His power and wisdom; by it, received in time back into the realm of its ancestry, He would express forever the height, depth, and boundless possibilities of His love, rejoice forever in the goodness of His own freedom.

And so God is glorified in His saints.  Yet it is the deeper truth that, in them, He has glorified Himself.  The drama of life – from its emergence as the mere breath of God, through its painful evolution from plane to plane, until its achievement of eternal reunion with its Father – it is the story of the Prodigal Son.