“I shall take no young bull out of your house,
Nor male goats out of your folds.
For every beast of the forest is Mine,
The cattle on a thousand hills.
I know every bird of the mountains,
And everything that moves in the field is Mine.
If I were hungry, I would not tell you;
For the world is Mine, and all it contains” (Psa. 50:9-12).
It comes up for multiple purposes. “Why did God make Man?” “How do we know there is ‘free will’?” And others. But I would suppose that the answer that most of us would hold is this one: “God wants us to love Him, something that can only be done with free will.” How many times have I heard that?
Before God created -- anything -- God was perfect in and of Himself. The Father loved the Son, the Son the Spirit, the Spirit the Father, all loving perfectly. He had no need whatsoever. Someplace along the line, humans have decided that God needed something beyond the absolutely perfect love He already possessed. No, not “needed”. The more thoughtful among us wouldn’t say “needed”. “Wanted”, perhaps. So God had perfection, but wanted something -- less.
Among other passages, this one in Psalms appears to disagree ... with a vengeance. God says He wants nothing from His creation. God says He already owns everything. Further, and this is stunning in light of the common belief that God desires our love, God says, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you.”
God doesn’t need anything from us. He doesn’t desire anything from us. Job asks this startling question: “Is there any pleasure to the Almighty if you are righteous, or profit if you make your ways perfect?” (Job 22:3). He is perfectly self-contained. I suspect it is our own over-inflated egos that cause us to think otherwise.
Over-inflated egos. Hmmm, maybe that’s a topic I ought to discuss.
2 comments:
We are a sheep who need a Shepard. Did you know that if a sheep falls, he cannot get up until the Shepard comes and picks him up? How simply hilarious it is that we, fallen, sinful people, are compared to sheep who need a Shepard?!
Certainly the only ones that need anything is us. We need Christ, He does not need us.
We are indeed sheep. And sheep are stupid. Yep ... that's us.
I'm amazed at times at how much of our thinking (we humans) is tied up in this concept of how valuable we are. People are outraged, for instance, that God might save some and not others. The only possible reason would be that God owes us something, when He doesn't. Or we constantly bemoan the sufferings we endure, as if God owes us comfortable lives. The simple notion that God desires our love and created a universe to get it is ludicrous.
But we are sheep, and we are stupid enough to believe that the Great I AM, the All-Sufficient One, needs something from us.
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