Two things need to be clear in our thinking. First, we must realize that God didn’t need to create this world or to create us. Remember that God possesses within his own life everything that is good and wise and perfect. He didn’t need the creation that he made, and he didn’t have to create us. Some have thought that God made us because he was lonely, but this just is not true. As Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (we’ll talk about this more in the next section), he delights in the fellowship he has as three persons in one. And since God already possesses everything that is good within his own life, creation could never add anything to God that he lacked. So, we are not here to fill some supposed emptiness in God or because God needs us somehow to help him out. Second, we must remember that after God created us, we turned against him, rejecting his goodness and wanting to live our lives our own way (we’ll talk more about this later also). Because we have sinned against God, we deserve to be rejected by God, not accepted by him.

So, it really is amazing and wonderful that even though God doesn’t need us, and even though we have turned away from God in our sin, God comes to us, makes himself known to us, and desires to give himself fully to us. While God is fully God apart from us, amazingly, God is also a God who has chosen to be with us.

Isaiah 57:15 gives us a beautiful description of God in both of these ways: “For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.’” Can you see both of these truths about God in this verse? First, God is “high and lifted up,” and he lives “in the high and holy place.” As such, God is God apart from us. In himself, he lives fully as God apart from this world that he has made. But even though God is so great and full in his own life, he has chosen also to come and “dwell” with those who are “contrite and lowly.” Why has he chosen to do this? Has he come because he needs something from us? No, rather God sees that we need something—everything!—from him. God chooses to come to those who are humble before him, “to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.” In other words, God comes to us not so we can fill up some emptiness in God (there is none), but so he can fill up the huge emptiness in us. Even though God doesn’t need us, he loves us, and he wants us to receive from him all of the goodness, blessing, and joy that he has for those who will be humble and dependent before him.

One thing this makes clear is how different God’s love for us is from our love for each other. A husband may truly love his wife, and the wife may truly love her husband, and yet in their love for each other, they both have needs that the other person must meet. Their love for each other, then, is a matter of both giving to serve the other and receiving what one needs from the other. But since God has no needs that he himself does not meet within his own life as God, his love for us is completely unselfish. God’s love, as C. S. Lewis put it, is “bottomlessly selfless, by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive” (The Problem of Pain). God’s love for us is not a because of love; God doesn’t love us for what he can get from us, as if he needed anything we could give him! Rather, God’s love is an in spite of love; God loves us even though we cannot benefit him, and even though we have sinned against him. As Paul puts it, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8), and John says, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).