When Should God Have Created? The Paradox of Eternal Love and Time
By Jean-Philippe Gabriel — frameworklove.com | June 15, 2025
If God is eternal, and if—as Scripture insists—God is love, then love’s own ontology raises a staggering question: whenshould God have created?
If love, in its most basic form, demands creation, autonomy, and succession, then the logic would suggest that an eternal God, eternally love, would also be eternally creating. But if that is the case, why does our creation appear to have a beginning? Why is there a “moment” in which existence emerges, instead of an infinite past of beings already created?
This is not a theological curiosity—it is a philosophical pressure point. Because if love’s demands are built into God’s nature, they are not optional. They are structural. They are eternal. And so the paradox becomes sharp: if God’s nature is eternally love, and love eternally creates, then in what sense could there be a “first” act of creation at all?
The Problem of Temporal Language
Part of the difficulty is that time-bound creatures like us cannot imagine “before” creation without invoking time itself. We cannot help but picture a blank expanse—an eternity “before” the universe—followed by a decision. But for an eternal God, there is no before or after, no ticking clock that must be waited out.
From God’s perspective, the act of creation could be as eternally present as His own being. The “moment” of creation may not be a point in time at all, but the continual reality of love’s expression. From our side, however, we see only the edge of this act: the moment we call the beginning.
The Ontology of Love and the Demand for Creation
If creation, autonomy, and succession are necessary components of love, then love cannot be fully itself without others to love—others who are free, and who can pass on what they have received. This would suggest that in some form, creation is as old as God.
This leads to three possibilities:
Endless Succession: Creation has always been happening, in some form, in an eternal chain of beings and worlds.
Infinite Containment: Creation exists eternally in God’s mind, but is expressed in time as discrete worlds or histories, each with its own “beginning.”
Singular Emergence: Our creation truly is the first, meaning that for an eternity past God existed as love without creation—a state we can name, but perhaps cannot logically comprehend.
The Logical Pressure
The first option—endless succession—avoids the problem of “when” by suggesting there was never a “start.” But it raises another problem: if beings have always existed, what distinguishes God as Creator from creation itself? The second option—infinite containment—solves that by making God the eternal source, but leaves us with the puzzle of why one creation “emerges” into actual existence and not another.
The third option—singular emergence—is perhaps the most troubling, because it means God, being love, would have existed eternally without fulfilling what love demands. That would imply either that love’s ontology was incomplete until creation, or that our definition of love is missing something essential.
The Paradox Deepens
Any of these answers lead us to staggering implications. If creation is eternal, then our universe is not the only—or even the primary—stage of love’s story. If creation is contained in God’s mind until it is expressed, then there may be reasons—structural, moral, or aesthetic—for why this creation came “when” it did. And if this creation is truly the first, then there was an eternity in which love existed without others to love—a reality that bends the very logic we have been using to understand it.
The paradox remains: love’s nature seems to demand creation, but God’s eternity resists the very question of “when.” From God’s side, there may be no gap to bridge. From ours, the gap feels infinite.
Why We Cannot Solve It
We cannot resolve this tension without stepping outside time, and that is precisely the point—we cannot. Our categories for “before” and “after” fail us here. But this failure may be instructive. It reminds us that love, though it can be reasoned about, is not reducible to human reason. If God is love, then the relationship between love and creation may be eternally true and eternally beyond our full comprehension.
And perhaps that is the takeaway: this question is not an opening to despair at our limits, but an invitation to awe. The paradox tells us that love is not simply a choice God made one day—it is the structure of God’s being. Whatever “moment” creation began, whether in an infinite past or in our finite time, it flowed from a source where love and creation are inseparable, forever and always.