Before time and space exploded into existence, the Triune God danced and sang and enjoyed an eternal fellowship of love. A key part of this dance was and is the perfect, overflowing love between the Father and the Son. The eternal Son of God–Jesus Christ–reflects the Father, and glorifies the Father through that reflection. He is the Beloved Son with whom God was “well-pleased” long before Jesus arrived on the earth and heard those eternal words break into time and space (Matt. 3:17). God had always been well-pleased with the Son and this drove the dance and song of eternity.

The Scriptures tell us that God “chose us in him before the creation of the world.” God chose us in Christ, the beloved and adored Son, before the world was made.

Have you ever thought of what that means?

Here’s one way to look at it, although any full description of eternity will always fall short when we use human language:

God was looking at the Son throughout all eternity, adoring the infinite and beautiful Image before Him. While in that gaze, God began to see different facets of the Son; different elements and layers of beauty. God looked at Jesus and saw the infinite depths of His character and being, and within those depths He saw billions of other reflections. These facets and reflections were us. God saw us “in Christ” and desired to create the universe through Jesus in order to joyfully bring these different facets and expressions into being. That’s how and why we got here…

To help explain this further, let’s talk about light:

When pure white light hits a prism (whether it’s a glass prism or the watery prism of thousands of little raindrops hanging in the air), a rainbow forms. When this rainbow comes out, it’s not that something new was added to the light to make it turn colorful. Instead, the different wavelengths of energy within the pure white light get slowed down within the water or the glass. The different slowed down versions of energy are what makes white light turn into the different colors of the rainbow. So red is just a one piece of energy within light that gets slowed down into a certain wavelength. Same for green and purple and the rest.

Christ is the Light (John 8:12). He is the pure white light of heaven. God wanted to glorify this Light and bring out all of His different “color” and variety, which is why He created us. So He made a prism called time and space and allowed the light of Christ to “slow down” into different wavelengths in order to make a rainbow of color called humanity. We are the rainbow of God! We are the Light of God expressed in different facets. Together, all of humanity makes up the glory of Jesus.

This has tremendous implications for how we understand all the people around us, and all the differences of personality and culture and literal skin color. We are all different facets of the same glorious Son as beings who are made in His image (Gen. 1:26-27). This changes how we see the world, and even how we deal with any darkness see in it.

There is so much more to take from this revelation, but we’ll leave it there for now… We are the rainbow of the Son. We glorify the perfect Christ just by our existence!