In his book The Pursuing God: A Reckless, Irrational, Obsessed Love That’s Dying to Bring Us Home, author Josh Ryan Butler paints God’s purpose of creation.
This confronts the caricature of our Creator as a large, lonely giant, kicking the cosmic curb and sullenly saying, “I wish I had some friends!” Some people seem to envision God making the world because he’s bored and needs some buddies. There’s a kind of codependency in this picture, where God is like that needy date who uses you to try and fill that hole inside or fix an identity crisis.
A codependent Creator will quickly resort to manipulation and guilt-tripping to get what he wants. A needy God quickly becomes an obsessive stalker.
But God doesn’t create us because he needs us; he creates us because he wants us. The Father, Son, and Spirit already have perfect relationship from eternity. They share affection, intimacy, and joy. They not only experience life, light, and love; they are life, light, and love. God is not just a being; God is Being, the ground of our existence. The Trinity creates the world in divine freedom, not to fill a need within but from an overflow of their divine love. We are each made as creatures to lavish their affection upon.
They are not trying to get something from us; they are giving themselves to us. Divine love gives birth to creation.
“God did not create under stress of any compulsion, or because he lacks something for his own needs; his only motive was goodness.’’
Augistine of Hippo, City of God
God does not make us out of obligation, but out of desire. God does not have to empty himself to create, but from his expanding fitness shares his life with us. In the words of
“In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”
C. S. Lewis, The Four Love
We were created by the spreading goodness of God, and exist for this goodness—to live and subsist enfolded within the overwhelming, enveloping love of God. God is generous goodness.