O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.  Psalm 63:1

 

Question: What does God need?  I mean, what does He need to stay alive?  Whoa! You may be thinking.  Does God need anything?  There’s one thing for certain:  All human life is predicated upon the fact that needs must be met.  You have physical needs including proper nutrition, clean water, and air to breath.  You have environmental needs as well, which includes clothing and a shelter over your head to protect you from the elements.

You have a second level of needs:  your emotional needs, which include the need to feel worthwhile to yourself and to others, the need to give and receive love, and the need for security, which has to include a God dimension.  There are spiritual needs as well.  But the question I posed is not what your needs are, but what are God’s needs.

God is so unlike us in many ways.  For example, we get physically tired and exhausted, but God never does.  We get weary, but God never tires.  We grow discouraged, yet He who knows the end from the beginning never yields to the virus of discouragement.  There are times when we need money, but God never runs short.  We also live lives which are regulated and controlled by the clock, and often our lives are at the mercy of interruptions which keep us from reaching our goals.  But He who was neither created nor is confined to time and space doesn’t ever have to check His watch to see if there’s time enough to get something done.

We change, too, for better or worse, but God never does.  Listen carefully to what I’m about to say.  It’s important yet hard to grasp.  For God to have need of anything would mean He is less than complete.  Paul says that in Christ dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily.  God is no less today than He was yesterday.  Tomorrow He will be no more than He is today.  He is constant and unchanging.

Obviously, we are not–which means God is different from us in many respects.  Yet the Bible says you were created in His image.  So what does that mean?  You look like God?  You think as God thinks?  You reason and feel?

In the account of creation which we have in Genesis 2, Moses wrote, “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7, NASB).  That’s the difference.  Animals think, and may have emotions, but only you who are made in the image of God will live forever, having been touched by the Almighty.

While it is true that God has no physical needs which must be met, as we do, yet there is a longing in the heart of the Father which can be described as a need.  It is the desire of God the Father to have fellowship with man whom He created.  It was for that reason God came and walked with man and communed with Him in the Garden.  Our English word fellowship comes from a word that means “to be bound together.”  The same word was used of the pages of a book which had been compressed and bound together.  The Greek word was also used to depict intimacy in marriage.

“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you,” says John the Apostle, “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.  If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.  But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1 John 1:5-7).

Ah, yes.  It is certain.  God is our answer.

Resource reading: Psalm 63.