Why God needs to be God

Why God needs to be God

It is vital that God exists, otherwise, I am God, and the love that I claim God has for me, and I – to lesser extent – have for him is really just me loving myself.

Let’s consider why this is so.

I believe devoutly and devotedly in God. I do so because I am so impressed by his wisdom and love. Perhaps my key belief is that God is “other” – he is not like me. This is the essence of the idea of “holiness” too. God is supreme in every good category. I can freely accept that I, and others, can also be good to some degree, and this is usually understood to be a sharing in God’s goodness. However, no matter how good I can ever be, my goodness is not in the same class as God’s. One of the most precious elements of my faith is that, should I ever do something particularly praiseworthy, or achieve something particularly good, I say to myself, “This is the Lord’s doing”. And I give him the praise and honour due to him for working his good purposes in and through me.

However, if there is no God, then I must be God. And, of course, you must be God too. That is, the person whom we have understood to be God living and working in us, is, in fact, ourselves. We might like to distinguish it from our everyday selves by saying that this is “the best me”, but it is, nevertheless, all our own work. It must be if there is no God to help us. This throws all my thoughts into disarray, for I have always said that I can distinguish the work of God in me from my own actions because when God acts he does so with love that I simply don’t have. I do not care that much about others – but God does. But if there is no God, then it is I who have this much love after all. I have been giving God the praise when I deserve it myself. This is the very essence of idolatry – to give honour to something other than to God, and, in this case I now need to give praise and honour to myself. All the good things that I believe God is, are, in fact, my own attributes. Or, if I acknowledge that these good things are just my good intentions, even then I deserve credit, because I thought of these inspiring things for myself (or I borrowed them from some other person who had the idea) – I did not rely on God to inspire me, for everything that I had thought was God’s inspiration is really my own.

Now, I really don’t want to claim that I am God. Given what I know about myself, it is sheer mockery to claim that I can be anywhere near God’s status, let alone actually be him. Yet this is the clear implication if there is no God.

Even worse, I think, is that, if there is no God, I turn out to simply be a narcissistic, utterly self-absorbed person, endlessly saying how much I love myself. Up to now, I have understood the situation to be one where I have a sober appreciation of my terrible weaknesses and limitations, and I have adored God for the way that, even though he knows the full truth about me, nevertheless he still loves me. And more than this, he loves me with a perfect, never-ending, unconditional love. This is the “supreme fact” of reality that has consistently lifted me up from despair and given me new hope and strength to carry on and to try and love like God loves me. Yet, if there is no God, not only do I get the credit for being so loving (in tune with the first point) but this creditable quality of love becomes discreditable (I think) because all I am doing is saying how much I love myself. And no matter what wrong or harm I do I will always forgive it – but no longer in the altruistic sense of God forgiving me, but in the selfish sense of me writing that off – yes what I did was awful, but we won’t pay any attention to that anymore.

Hence, it is so vital that God actually does exist. Then I can accept the truth about myself – with my strengths and my weaknesses, and acknowledge that I am so far short of where God calls me to be, yet I can be inspired by him to not simply be the best human being I can be, but also to adopt some of God’s own qualities. And the love that I feel for him is pure, and expresses complete self-giving to the one who loves me utterly. My love becomes infused with gratitude and thanksgiving, with adoration and devotion. It is true love, because it is love given away, given to the other, and directed by God through himself to those other people who need love. I pray to God that he is real.