Kim Jong-Jesus?

"Everyone ought to love, serve, even worship me above all else.” What a sinister, egotistic and deranged thing to say! If you met someone who really believed that about themselves, you would probably not want to meet them a second time. But isn’t that what Christians believe about God? When Jesus was asked which commandment was most important, he answered: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Doesn’t that prove the point? Like a North Korean dictator, God seems to demand nothing less than wall-to-wall adoration!

Imagine finally reaching that distant light at the end of the tunnel – leaving Imperial – and getting a job offer (an unlikely scenario, I know). The job description: with every waking moment you must pursue with resolute determination your own happiness. Vast resources and all the help you could ask for are at your disposal. You might start out trying to buy satisfaction: a suit, a yacht, a peerage – whatever does it for you. If those didn’t hit the spot, you might turn to art, music and natural beauty for happiness. Failing that, perhaps relationships: marriage and children, or maybe just a goldfish for the time being. The latter two categories will probably offer you a degree of satisfaction; appreciating that which is beautiful, and loving someone who loves you in return could be the most profound joys of all. That is what worship is. Forget prostration and mindless chanting; Christian worship is all about appreciating God’s beauty and delighting in our relationship with him. And since he outshines anything you’ll see in the world, and his love is more loyal than that of a mother, worship turns out to be a hedonist’s best course of action! So when God commands us to worship and love him, he is actually telling us to pursue our best chance of happiness. That’s a command I’m happy to obey.

But that might still leave us with the impression that God is needy, like a ronery North Korean premier, or an Imperial student desperate for love and affection. Was God lonely before he made people that he could relate to? Did he create humans so that he could be fulfilled in some way? The Christian answer is that even before time existed, God was already enjoying perfect relationships in a community of three. In God there are three ‘people’: Father, Son and Spirit, having their own thoughts, actions and personalities. Not three gods, but one god in three persons. So unlike a singular god, the god of the Bible created not so that he could be loved, but to share the love he already had. We may flatter ourselves by suggesting that God needs us, but ultimately we need him. The best attempts of the human race to find satisfaction apart from God have left even the most accomplished men in history insecure, unfulfilled and facing death with uncertainty. So the better question isn’t “Is God needy?” but “Who needs God?”