One attribute of God that really appeals to people, particularly Americans who like to think they share this attribute, is his independence. There are lots of ways we describe this: God is self-sufficient, God is self-existent, God is self-sustaining, God is the author of creation and didn’t need any help in creating (or, for that matter, need someone to create him)—God is the first cause, the unmoved mover.
Okay. If all these things are true, and this is an important attribute of God, then why does he command us to love him and pray to him? Why does he care about what we do? Why does he take our input? Or does he? Because more than a few Christians teach we don’t give God input; all we give him are our reactions to his divine plan, which he’s sorted out already.
The idea of a rigid, unmoving God.
If you’ve read your Old Testament, you definitely don’t get a picture of God as an independent, uninvolved being. Quite the contrary. In Genesis alone, we read of him creating the earth, then walking and interacting with the humans—both before and after they sinned and were booted out of Eden. He sorted out Cain, he decided to flood the earth and had Noah build a giant box to survive in, he picked Abraham and his family for a special relationship, he flattened Sodom. In Exodus God personally intervened in international affairs, ruining Egypt and turning their slave labor force into his a new nation that answered directly to him. Although frequently they made him so angry that he threatened to wipe them out and start over with Moses, and Moses had to talk him down each time.
And in Christ, he became human and interacted with us that way. God is far from a distant, uninvolved, uninterested, self-contained being. He constantly interferes with history and getting mixed up in our business.
So where’d this idea of a distant, independent God come from? Greek philosophy.
Specifically, Aristotle. The Greek idea of gods was that the beings they worshiped and called “gods” were only gods in the sense that they were mightier than humans. But they didn’t create the universe; they only took it over from the previous beings who had. And these other beings… well, Aristotle rightly disregarded them as myth. Whatever being had created the universe couldn’t be like that, and so Aristotle speculated about what sort of being that would be. He got a lot right. He also got some bits wrong.
To Aristotle’s mind, the gods were interactive and involved, but the creator behind them all… well, none of the myths discussed him, so therefore he must not be involved. Probably because he was a being of pure reason and intellect, who wasn’t driven by such foolishness as emotion, who wouldn’t cave to the pressures of those humans who couldn’t see the big picture. In other words, an ivory-tower, logical God… which would be just the sort of god than an ivory-tower logic professor like Aristotle would invent.
Aristotle was a brilliant guy, and his ideas have influenced other thinkers since. Including Christian thinkers, like St. Thomas Aquinas, who as an Aristotle fan wanted to harmonize Aristotle’s thinking with Christian thinking, and found various scriptures to back up the idea of an independent, non-interactive God. The early Enlightenment philosophers, as well, preferred Aristotle’s ideas about God to the Christian ideas; a lot of early Deism and Unitarianism is based on preferring the passionless, orderly, but distant Creator, to the God of the scriptures and Father of Jesus.
And thus we get to present-day cessationists, and other Christians who believe that God is far away instead of right here; or Christians who teach that God is so transcendent that we can’t possibly relate to him, or Christians who say that God doesn’t need anything, including us: He will save the world on his own, following his own plan, and all we need do is go along with the program and stay out of his way.
What does God need?
It’s been pointed out by many folks that God doesn’t need us. Hence the idea that God is self-sufficient: He doesn’t need humans, he doesn’t need angels, he doesn’t need his creatures; he can do everything himself. You would think, since God is love, that he would need somebody or something to love, but even that is taken care of: God loves himself. The Father loves the Son, (Jn 5.20) so there ya go: Humans are superfluous. God doesn’t need us.
“Human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs,” Paul pointed out. “He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need.” (Ac 17.25) That’s the verse these folks quote.
Interestingly enough, Paul said this in Athens, to the Greeks—describing just the sort of God they believed in, in order to introduce them to the sort of God he believed in. Of course, that’s the point where Paul lost them:
God overlooked people’s ignorance about these things in earlier times, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and turn to him. For he has set a day for judging the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and he proved to everyone who this is by raising him from the dead.
—Paul, Acts 17.30-31 NLT
Why would a removed, disinterested God care about the sins of us humans? Or want to judge the world with justice? Or raise a person from the dead—isn’t it better to be dead, and in heaven, in a shiny new spirit body, instead of walking around this dirtball of a planet in a falling-apart carcass?
That entire previous paragraph is the thinking of first-century Greek philosophy. Not Christian philosophy, nor Hebrew philosophy. None of it comes from Jesus, or the scriptures. And you can see for yourself—by how much of it that you personally believe, or how much of it your church or fellow Christians teach and agree with—how much it’s permeated Christianity.
But back to what God needs. Obviously he doesn’t need food; he doesn’t eat our sacrifices, nor had he ever pretended to; he only ever claimed to note their “pleasing aroma.” (Ge 8.21, Ex 29.18, etc.) He doesn’t need our offerings, or our money. He doesn’t need our information, or calculations, or for us to find out something for him. He needs no house to live in, no place to sit or stand, no possessions because he already owns the cosmos. In other words, he needs no material things. And sometimes neither do we. We have money in the bank, food in the pantry, gas in the car, and stuff in our houses. We’re good.
It is only in that sense that God is independent. He doesn’t need stuff. But there are other things he needs—specifically relationships he needs to maintain, and things that he needs to do.
God has obligated himself.
In creating humans, in giving us commands, and in stating what will and won’t happen when we follow or ignore those commands, God has set aside his independence and put himself into a dependent position. He must follow through with whatever he said he’d do. His own character—his integrity and goodness—won’t let him do otherwise.
I have sworn by my own name;
I have spoken the truth,
and I will never go back on my word:
Every knee will bend to me,
and every tongue will confess allegiance to me.
—The LORD, Isaiah 45.23 NLT
In order for every knee to bow to him, God needs us to bow our knees to him. In order for every tongue to confess allegiance to him, God needs us to confess with our mouths that we’re his. He needs our cooperation—or he needs to work around our lack of cooperation. Either way, God needs us.
God could have chosen to create a universe in which we’re independent of one another, and he can remain aloof and away and let things happen as they will—or create angels as his intermediaries, and let them deal with us while he does his own thing. But he chose to get involved. He made demands. He made promises. He bound himself to his creation. He even became a man himself, and submitted to other men—including the ones who executed him.
So when we talk about the independence of God, we’re talking about an attribute that God could have… but has personally rejected. He didn’t want to be that kind of god. He wanted to interact.
“Should I hide my plan from Abraham?” the LORD asked. “For Abraham will certainly become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. I have singled him out so that he will direct his sons and their families to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just. Then I will do for Abraham all that I have promised.”
So the LORD told Abraham, “I have heard a great outcry from Sodom and Gomorrah, because their sin is so flagrant. I am going down to see if their actions are as wicked as I have heard. If not, I want to know.” […]
Abraham approached him and said, “Will you sweep away both the righteous and the wicked? Suppose you find fifty righteous people living there in the city—will you still sweep it away and not spare it for their sakes? Surely you wouldn’t do such a thing, destroying the righteous along with the wicked. Why, you would be treating the righteous and the wicked exactly the same! Surely you wouldn’t do that! Should not the Judge of all the earth do what is right?”
And the LORD replied, “If I find fifty righteous people in Sodom, I will spare the entire city for their sake.”
Here’s an obvious example of God letting a human in on his plans—and allowing the human to talk him down. (Abraham eventually talked him down to ten righteous people, and sadly there wasn’t even that; there were four, and they weren’t all that righteous.) We can debate over whether God does this sort of thing because he wants to be talked down, but the point I want to make is that an independent God would never bother to do such a thing. Or he’d only do it to show off; the human would think he made an impact when he actually didn’t, and God would be leading him on—which shows an utter lack of integrity, and that’s why I can’t accept that hypothesis.
No. God arranged things so that he needs us. We affect him; we make him joyful or angry, pleased or disappointed. We give him ourselves to love and nurture, and prepare a Kingdom for. We will be his children, and he will be our God. (Rv 21.7) That’s how he’s always wanted it.
The dispassionate, removed God is a human invention, and needs to be countered whenever we run into it. It gives people the idea that just because God can do all this stuff by himself, he chooses to, and doesn’t care about us, or loves us in some odd, freakish way that doesn’t resemble anything we call love. It is not God as he is. Accept no substitutes.