God Doesn't Need You, But He Delights In You

God doesn't, and never did, need us.

To quote A.W. Tozer from The Knowledge of the Holy:

"To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being. Need is a creature-word and cannot be spoken of the Creator. God has a voluntary relation to everything He has made, but He has no necessary relation to anything outside of Himself. His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply, nor from any completeness they can bring to Him who is complete in Himself....

"The river grows larger by its tributaries, but where is the tributary that can enlarge the One out of whom came everything and to whose infinite fullness all creation owes its being?....

"The problem of why God created the universe still troubles thinking men; but if we cannot know why, we can at least know that He did not bring His worlds into being to meet some unfulfilled need in Himself, as a man might build a house to shelter him against the winter cold or plant a field of corn to provide him with necessary food. The word necessary is wholly foreign to God." (A.W. Tozer, from the Chapter, "The Self-Sufficiency of God")

And yet He has chosen to love us, and we are His "delight".

Amazing.

The Book of Job puts those two almost antithetical truths in perspective when God asks, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?....When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (Job 38:4ff)

We can only use non-God things to think of and explain God, so it will always be incomplete. But God's creation of us and delight in us reminds me of a Master Italian Baker who really enjoys his craft, singing opera loudly over the creation of some rich pastry that he didn't need to make, and then thoroughly enjoying it, bite by bite.

Don't forget that He delights in you, even when you don't seem so delightful. Delight in Him.

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