God is in need of nothing. Yet why do we see Him otherwise? Why do people condescend to ideas that God wants “stuff” from us? Why do people retreat to their beliefs and traditions that say: “Love not freely given is simply rape!”—as if God needs our love. As if God needs our sinful tainted version of love. As if our concept of love would ever come in par with the eternal perfection of the love of God. As if anything we give God would somehow add to Him. As if us loving Him would make Him more lovelier. As if us glorifying Him would make Him more glorious.
We have to realize and engrave into our minds the fact that “God is God” and all the heavens tremble before Him. He is love and He already is infinitely glorious. A god that needs is not a God that truly gives.
A.W. Pink: The Solitariness of God – [eBook]
“In the beginning God” (Genesis 1:1). There was a time, if “time” it could be called, when God, in the unity of His nature (though subsisting equally in three divine persons), dwelt all alone. “In the beginning God.” There was no heaven, where His glory is now particularly manifested. There was no earth to engage His attention. There were no angels to hymn His praises; no universe to be upheld by the word of His power. There was nothing, no one, but God; and that, not for a day, a year, or an age, but “from everlasting.” During eternity past, God was alone: self-contained, self-sufficient, self-satisfied; in need of nothing. Had a universe, had angels, had human beings been necessary to Him in any way, they also had been called into existence from all eternity. The creating of them when He did, added nothing to God essentially. He changes not (Malachi 3:6), therefore His essential glory can be neither augmented nor diminished.
God was under no constraint, no obligation, no necessity to create. That He chose to do so was purely a sovereign act on His part, caused by nothing outside Himself, determined by nothing but His own mere good pleasure; for He “works all things after the counsel of His own will” (Ephesians 1:11). That He did create was simply for His manifestative glory. Do some of our readers imagine that we have gone beyond what Scripture warrants? Then our appeal shall be to the Law and the Testimony: “Stand up and bless the Lord your God forever and ever: and blessed be Your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise” (Nehemiah 9:5). God is no gainer even from our worship. He was in no need of that external glory of His grace which arises from His redeemed, for He is glorious enough in Himself without that. What was it that moved Him to predestinate His elect to the glory of His grace? It was, as Ephesians 1:5 tells us, “according to the good pleasure of His will.”
- A.W. Pink, Preface – The Attributes of God
