Another implication in all of this is that God’s justice is simply the “knee-jerk” reaction of Himself to His “non-being” (albeit on a derived and dependent scale in the case of his creatures – both angels and men – since, when left to ourselves without His intervening Redemptive Love, all we can ever BE are sinful creatures). He cannot but hate with the totality of HIS HOLY BEING that which is the opposite of Himself (which would be His Hell, if such were possible for Him). Thus HE is “the Lake of Fire” to those who are lost. We tend to loose sight of this and to think that He is absent from Hell (Hell itself, being a place especially created by God) and that Hell is separation from Him. But, not at all! Not anymore than HIS HOLY HATRED was absent at the cross (which IS…or rather, and thankfully, WAS, what would have been Our Hell justly deserved). What is completely absent in hell is the totality of all that He is, namely, LOVE. Instead, He is HOLY HATRED to those who are lost…the Lake of Fire…. And we must remember that it is the Loving Jesus Who Himself is the everlasting Executioner of the damned, even while He is at one and the same time the Everlasting Lover of His elect.
Love on the human plane, among ourselves as His renewed image bearers in Christ, is proof of the Trinity: God’s love is not only PERSONAL (which it really is); it IS INTERPERSONAL, and is defined exclusively by God in terms of His own Being. And so we who are remade by and through Christ in the Triune God’s image, ipso facto, mirror this image of both personal and interpersonal love as well…but on a creaturely plane. Though His Self-existence in this intertrinitarian feast of Love is Absolute and necessitates no bringing into being creatures like Himself who can thus mirror His love to one another and back to Him, it was His eternal plan, purpose and counsel to do so in order that, at the consummation of all things, His redeemed and adopted sons and daughters might be brought to that point where they get as big a bang out of Him as He gets out of Himself and find themselves remade into His exact likeness and knowing Him, in Christ, as fully as He can be known by creatures made in His exact likeness. So, it has always been His purpose to do so. His plan, in other words, is an eternal plan. Because it is HIS plan, it is as essential to Him as his own Eternal Existence is, it’s of the essence of Who He ss as much as His being and His attributes are. His Eternal Plan is as necessary as His own Being is, and for the same reason: HE IS THAT HE IS. So to inquire what it would be like for God without the creation (and man in particular, who, in and through Christ, is made His in exact likeness)… To ask, in other words, “Would (or for that matter, could) God’s intertrinitarian Love be real and satisfying to Him who by nature is Love (and as such, IS THE ALL-GENEROUS ONE)”, is akin to asking what He’d be like if He were evil or what it would be like if He did not exist at all. Just as He cannot NOT BE, He cannot exist as THE EVIL ONE (because it is a contradiction of WHO HE IS and as such, would negate His existence, which not even He Himself can do because HE IS. And because HE IS THAT HE IS (His self-disclosure to Moses as the burning bush: I AM THAT I AM), HE IS THAT HE IS AS HE IS. He cannot be other than He IS, His eternal plan included.