No Necessity to Create

It seems to me that one more thing that is important to say about God as creator is that God was under no necessity to create. That is to say, God was motivated solely by God's own being which is creativity itself. And God is the only being who is self-sufficient.

The Apostle Paul said in his speech on Mars Hill, "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." (Acts 17:24-25)

If this is true, then God does not need us in any absolute sense. God needs us only because God chooses to need us, chooses to use us.

C. S. Lewis put it this way in his book, The Four Loves,

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing--or should we say "seeing"?--there are no tenses in God--the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body drops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.

God did not create out of necessity. God created because God is love. God does not need us, but we do need God. As Augustine said in his Confessions, our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. Or as Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensées,

What does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself. God alone is man's true good...

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Will Vaus

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