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Why did God create?
Published: 4 January 2020 (GMT+10)
God is perfect and needs nothing (see Process theism). So, why did He bother creating anything at all? E.G. from Canada writes:
I have done a lot of reading in the Q&A section, and I haven’t found an answer to my adult son’s question. So, here is his reasoning, and then the question. It’s hard to set it out in order, so I hope this makes sense.
We believe that God is perfect, complete, and needs nothing outside Himself because He is Trinity, and thus has fellowship and communication.
So, why did He create anything at all? If He started with angels, they respected, obeyed and worshipped Him. The Bible says they rejoiced when He created the universe, especially when He made people. He did not create the universe and everything in it simply to have the angels praise Him – that would have been pride, which is not part of God.
God says that He is love, and we know that love is complete when it is two-way, given back to the giver by the one who is loved. If he created people because He needed to be loved, that contradicts the fact that He is perfect and complete.
The Bible tells us the purposes of many things which God created – sun, moon, stars, rainbow, the earth, etc. but I cannot find any indication of why He first chose to create anything. Are we asking to understand the impossible, or is there an answer that a human can comprehend?
E.G.
CMI’s Shaun Doyle responds:
Dear E.G.,
Thanks for writing in.
When it comes to worshipping God, don’t think of it in terms of what God needs; that’s a category mistake. Rather, we should worship God because it’s what we need. And it couldn’t be any other way for us: God is so unfathomably great and good that anything that could exist with a will and mind to worship would need to worship God to be truly fulfilled beings. What could be better for us than for us to value the ultimate good above all others? Well, God just is the ultimate good.
But as Jesus points out, it’s not a competition: loving God and loving others go hand-in-hand (Matthew 22:36–39) to the degree that John says we can’t love God if we don’t love each other (1 John 4:20). This shows that love is in essence self-giving: God gave Himself to us (in creating us, and sending His Son for us—1 John 4:8–10), so we should give ourselves to God and each other.
And that’s indeed what is behind the creation of the world for God: God is giving Himself to others by bringing them into being, so that He can love us and we can love Him. Now, there’s no need in this on God’s part (Is God ‘forced by His nature’ to be loving?); within God’s Triune nature there is a perfect and complete self-giving love between the Father, Son, and Spirit that creatures can only ever experience in part. But that lack of necessity is where we see some of the heart of God’s reason for creating: grace (again, see Process theism). It was a free act of grace on God’s part to create us; purely to ‘share the joy’ of the divine love beyond the divine being.
Think about it like this: when a couple chooses to start a family, can they do it without any need to, but simply to share their love with another? If so for us, then so much more for God.
Another way to think about it is the Father giving His Son a gift (Colossians 1:17; all things were created for – Jesus), which Jesus ultimately presents back to the Father (1 Corinthians 15:28). In that sense, creation then isn’t foremost even about us; it’s about the Father and the Son. This makes creation a free expression of the Father and the Son’s love for each other. Could they have expressed their love differently? Sure! But they both deemed this creation a fitting expression. (Did God create man to be an eternal companion for His son Jesus Christ?)
Hopefully this gives you some thoughts in response to this question. For more information, please see Why did God allow sin at all?
Kind regards,
Shaun Doyle
Creation Ministries International
Readers’ comments
The pastor pointed me to the first three chapters of Ephesians, where God explains the mystery of his purpose - to display to all the principalities and powers in heaven and on earth, the exceeding riches of His wisdom and grace in his kindness to sinners in Christ Jesus. Can we sinners reject or condemn our Almighty Maker for that?
He's writing the great story, in his Word.
But a God who needs nothing and receives no benefit from anything outside Himself complicates this view. Thus the question “why did God create”. If He does everything for a reason, thus giving everything a reason for being, and that reason for being is to function in a way that benefits another, yet He Himself receives from Himself perfectly whatever those benefits are, then why create anything at all?
The answer is love! Love doesn’t need a reason to love. Love doesn’t need the object of its affection to function in a way to benefit the lover. This is the great mystery of God’s love that we will explore for eternity. God’s love opens the door for things to exist just because. No grand overarching purpose, no function, no reason, nothing beyond the fact that it’s there because He loves it to be there. This isn’t to say that the things God created don’t have a function that serves another. They do. But that function is not why it exists. Whatever it does God Himself could do a million times better. God’s love is why it exist.
"Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world came to be. . . . The glory that You have given to Me I have given to them, that they may be one just as We are one — I in them and You in Me — that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me and loved them as You loved Me.
Father, I also want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory—the glory You gave Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world." (John 17:5, 22-24)
This is confirmed by Paul in the letter to the Ephesians:
"He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, in which He has made us accepted in the Beloved." (Ephesians 1:4-6).
How glorious that THE SELF-SUFFICIENT GOD who needed nothing would create a world to receive His love and participate in the eternal fellowship enjoyed between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from before Creation.
Lucifer was causing division in Gods kingdom and needed chastising so the entity we know as Jesus agreed to be Crucified, even before the foundations of the World were laid. The Earth and the stars were created by God through Jesus and Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden. Lucifer was put in charge of punishing of man if he sinned. For 4000 years the trap was baited with sinful man and then a sinless man is born. Jesus kept God’s law and therefore had no sin that alowed Satan to punish Him with death. When Jesus was crucified His death was unlawful and therefore murder.
If this all sounds like a sting operation then we appear to be of the same opinion.
The Father giving all those who are His to the Son and the Son giving back to the Father. (John 17)
The gift of the Holy Spirit being given to us and we presenting ourselves as living sacrifices to God.
The implication of ourselves as gifts to God and the need for such gifts to be without spot or blemish.
Our giving of our lives for the lives of others to show the greatest of love and by this love for one another the world will know we are His.
Much to meditate on and explore the implications for my life.
Your Brother in Christ,
Michael
Well, the whole Bible is full of allusions to marriage - eg. Gen 2:18 - is that talking just about Adam, or is it also referring to THE Man ie. Christ? Similarly, Song of Solomon is a love poem from the King to his (or is it His) betrothed, and Rev 19 speaks of the marriage supper of the Lamb to His bride, the Church, as being the consummation of all things.
Therefore it follows that if marriage is the consummation, then it must also be the purpose.
It is common to say that God created because He wanted to pour His love far and wide, but I believe there is a far more fundamental and intimate reason - the Second Person of the Godhead wanted a Wife!
This seems to have a non-biblical idea of 'perfect'; more a pagan aristotelian idea. Reality is fundamentally about relationship and conditioned by love: that's because that's who God is in himself. We were created for relationship with God: for our good, not his, and that's because that is who God is; one who desires the joy of others in relationship.
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