458. These points clarify where the connection between loving God and loving our neighbor comes from and what it is like: God's love for people flows into us; when we receive that love and cooperate with it, it becomes love for our neighbor.

Briefly put, the connection accords with the following saying of the Lord's:

On that day you will recognize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I am in you. (John 14:20)

And this saying:

The people who love me are those who have my commandments and do them. I will love these people, manifest myself to them, and make a home with them. (John 14:21-23)

All the Lord's commandments relate to loving our neighbor. In summary form, they involve not doing evil to our neighbors, and instead doing them good. According to the Lord's words just quoted, people like this love God and God loves them.

Because love for God and love for our neighbor are connected in this way, John says:

Those who keep the commandments of Jesus Christ live in him, and he lives in them. If any say, "I love God in every way" but hate their brothers and sisters, they are liars. If they do not love their brothers and sisters, whom they see, how can they love God whom they do not see? This commandment we have from him: that people who love God also love their brothers and sisters. (1 John 3:24; 4:20-21)

44. Divine love and wisdom are substance and form in themselves, thus the one and only absolute. We have just established above that Divine love and wisdom are substance and form; and we have already said as well that the Divine being and expression are being and expression in itself. ¹ We cannot say that they are being and expression from itself, because this involves a beginning - and a beginning moreover from something in it which is being and expression in itself. Yet being and expression itself in itself exists from eternity. Being and expression itself in itself is also something not created, and everything that is created can exist only from something that is not created. Furthermore, whatever is created is also finite, and something finite can come into being only from something that is infinite.

Imibhalo yaphansi: