Does God Need Us?

I recently overheard someone say that God needs us. I didn’t hear enough to get the context of it and why he believes this, but it’s not the first time I’ve read or heard this, and I’m sure it won’t be the last, either.

Another way of asking this question is: Why did God create everything, including us? When I’ve heard or read that God needs us, the reasoning has often been something like this: God must have been lonely and therefore sad before He started creating; He created everything, including human beings, so that He could have fellowship. This line of thinking has usually come from believers. I’ve also come across darker reasoning, from non-Christians: God needed to be worshiped, and before He started His work of creating, there was nothing and no one to give Him that worship; He is some kind of megalomaniac, like the Greek “gods” Zeus and Poseidon.

I think that these kinds of thinking are in large part related to the desire of us human beings to understand God better; since our emotions are an important part of who we are, we try to imagine what God’s emotions are like. For example, I have a good friend who once asked me how God feels about people in hell. My answer was that I don’t know, but that people in hell are experiencing the just consequences of their not believing in and trusting God while they still had the chance.

There is a theological term, aseity, which refers to God’s self-sufficiency; this means, among other things, that God does not need anything or anyone. He is autonomous and is not dependent on anything for His own existence. At the same time, however, God has always had fellowship, and that is the mystery of the Trinity: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. We see this already in the first chapter of the Bible, where we read in Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’” Notice “us” and “our” in this verse, which refers to the three Persons that God is. He has always had fellowship, which I think should help people who have concerns about God’s supposed “loneliness” before he began creating.

So, why did God create us? Isaiah 43:6-7 answers this question very directly: “I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’ Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth—everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” God created everything, including us, for His glory. 1 Corinthians 10:31 tells us, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” Indeed, that is our ultimate purpose: to glorify God. We are able to do this because of Him, as Philippians 2:13 says: “For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.”

Revelation 4:11 expresses this in a similar way: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.” The King James Version expresses the last part even better: “and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” God created everything for His pleasure; in other words, it pleased Him to create the world and everything in it, including us.

Of all the Bible verses I came across in studying the question of whether God needs us, I think that Acts 17:24-25 answers it most directly: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.” Notice that important phrase in relation to this question: “as if he needed anything.” In other words, God does not need anything, including us!

The Biblical truth that God does not need us may be cause for sadness for some who are reading this, but Matthew Barrett in a Tabletalk magazine article from 2019 expresses why we should be very thankful that God doesn’t need us: “It is precisely because God is free from creation that He is able to save lost sinners like you and me. If God were a needy God, He would need our help just as much as we need His. What good news it is, then, that the gospel depends on a God who does not depend on us.” God is able to save us precisely because of His complete self-sufficiency; He does not need us, but we desperately need Him. If you have not put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, my prayer is that you will do so today.