God's love life: you, me, & the trinity
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God is love. And love exists within the matrix of relationship. Love exists within and between persons. Love is relational energy. Relationship is the sinew that connects persons in order for love to move between them, for love is only love when it is moving between and within persons. While there may be relationships without love, there will never be love without relationship. In and of himself, God could not be "love" without some form of relational experience and expression being intrinsic and elemental to who God is. If God were a singular monad, he would have to create someone or something else in order to engage in and express love, and even then he could only be described as "loving," but not "love." To say that "God is love" is to say that within his very being is the ongoing active exchange of honour. Love is, as it were, the DNA of the Divine.
It is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that best captures this biblical concept. When people challenge me on the contradictory or just plain silliness of the 1+1+1=1 mathematics of the Trinity, I like to remind them of a better math: 1x1x1=1. What I'm getting at is that to say "God is love" is to say that somehow God (who is one) is Persons-In-Relationship.
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So when God decided to expand and extend his love through relationships by creating us, the Bible records that God spoke to himself in the plural: "Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness'" (Genesis 1:26). God is love, and therefore God is persons-in-relationship.
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All people, male and female, were made by God, in the image of God, to be like God, in relationship with God and one another. As persons in loving relationship, we are to extend this reality throughout the world. Through us, God amplifies divine love into all creation. This is our origin, our purpose, and the context for everything that follows. This is who we are and why we're here.
Notice that after God speaks to himself in the plural ("Let us make humankind in our image"), the text reverts back to referring to God in the singular ("So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them"). This is bad grammar but mind-blowing theology. That's the Trinity: God is the "us" who is also the "he." This is the God (singular) who is Love (persons-in-relationship). We were created by Relationship for relationship. This is the essence of all ethics: we are made to offer others the love we receive from God.