Good News, He Doesn't Need You

What was the last thing you needed — and what did needing it do to you?

For someone it might be a broken HVAC unit. You needed heat, and needing that heat made you realize how cold you were at night. For another it might be a customer service agent to book your flight. In the most serious case, you might have needed a loved one to pull through a difficult diagnosis. You needed them to escape death.

We are contingent beings. That means we have needs, and most of the time those needs are met by people around us. Our very existence depends on things outside ourselves — not just comfort, not just convenience, but being itself.

Now imagine what it would mean to be a being with no needs.

On the one hand it may seem good, because with our needs come our longings and with those most of our worries. But on the other hand, a being with no needs may seem heartless. What does it do to you to consider that God is a being with no needs? Is it a freeing thought, or a threatening one?

Let's do a little thought experiment.

Imagine being called into your boss's office and hearing him say, "This company doesn't need you." Immediately I would feel threatened — because if the company doesn't need me, I'm expendable. But what if the company had infinite value in and of itself — what if it could never run short?

God has infinite value in and of himself. He does not seek glory from another because he has all glory from himself. From himself — the Latin phrase is a se, and from that phrase we get the word aseity: the attribute of God that teaches that God has no needs. There is no lack in him, which means he does not need anything to fill what isn't missing.

The Bible teaches aseity not as a threat but as a great comfort.

In Genesis 1:1 — in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth — creation comes from nothing, with no explanation offered. Compare that to the creation stories surrounding ancient Israel. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the world is born out of a war between gods, and humans are created primarily to feed those gods and meet their needs. In another ancient myth, the flood comes because humans had grown too loud and the gods couldn't sleep.

Needy gods. Irritable gods.

But Genesis opens differently. No war. No hunger. No annoyance. Just a God who speaks, names, and calls it good — from himself, a se.

Psalm 50:10-12 says it poetically. God declares that if he were hungry, he would not tell you — and anyone who knows the God of the Old Testament stops at that line and says, wait, that's not what he's like. John 5:26 says it plainly — the Father has life in himself and has granted the Son the same. And when Paul stands on Mars Hill in Acts 17:24-25, he begins here — with a God who is not served by human hands as though he needed anything.

It is his foundation. Everything else rests on it.

So does this matter — or is it just theological trivia?

I am a contingent being. And so are you. We need things. We depend on others. That neediness longs for proper fulfillment, but so often our neediness only compounds with another person's neediness. A friend of mine jokingly calls this compounding neediness "two ticks, no dog."

But when God creates, it is out of the overflow of his fullness. Not because he is lonely or hungry. He created you out of that fullness — and it didn't cost him anything. When two humans create a little human, it takes something from them. They lose sleep, they lose energy, they become less. But when God creates the human race, he gives freely and does not become less.

When he rests on the seventh day, it is not because he is worn out. Out of his infinite self-sufficiency, he stops to look at what he has done and sets a pattern for his creatures to follow. Sabbath rest is not modeled from exhaustion. It is modeled from fullness. God rested not because he needed to, but because it pleased him — and then he said, you do the same.

If that is how aseity works when he creates, what is it like when he redeems?

Think about what every rom-com is actually selling. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. They spend ninety minutes realizing they don't need each other — they want each other. That's the bow on every one of them. The psycho-thriller works for the opposite reason — when someone needs another person so desperately that they hunt them down, the horror isn't the violence. It's the need itself.

Both genres are trading on the same deep human longing from opposite directions. We are wired to want to be wanted freely. Need distorted becomes a cage. Need redeemed becomes a choice.

This is not sentiment. It runs all the way down into who we are, because we are made in the image of a God for whom free wanting is not an aspiration — it is simply his nature. He does not need you. He has never needed you. Out of his fullness, he has freely chosen you. He wants you.

Hear it again. He doesn't redeem you because he needs you. 

He redeems you in Christ because he wants you.

There's one more Bible verse on this topic that could change your week. It's Romans 8:32: He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? What if God, who gave his Son, is withholding nothing you need?

He is the only being in the universe who lives without need, eternally complete in himself. You are not. You need things. You will always need things. But this God — the one with no needs — has promised to meet all of yours in Christ.

Out of his fullness, he created you. Out of his fullness, he redeemed you.

He doesn't need you. He wants you.