Is God in a Symbiotic Relationship with Us?
We, each of us, needs God. Without Him, we simply wouldn’t exist in any way whatever. Anyone who believes that God created mankind accepts that immovable reality.
Still, when we think of mankind as utterly subordinate to God and unalterably dependent on Him for our mere existence – we somehow conclude that because we so rely on Him, He has no corresponding need for us. But is that, too, reality?
The question raised here will undoubtedly present itself as sacrilegious to many – the very idea that God might actually be lost without mankind as His supplicants. But, one might ask, why did He create us? Was God lonely? Did He perhaps find Himself lacking purpose without mankind to admire, glorify and worship Him?
We are often disapproved of for anthropomorphically imagining God’s nature; but why? Why is it wrong to imagine that God has His own ways and attributes, and, indeed, his own almost human-like deficiencies: defects similar to those He imposed on us when He first created mankind’s oh-so fallible nature?
Perhaps, one might ask, before He created mankind on the Sixth Day during the week of Creation, He Himself suffered from loneliness, inadequacy or even an almost human sense of meaninglessness. Was it on that turning point moment in time that God recognized that His other earthly creatures – even His heavenly angels – were simply incapable of fulfilling His Divine, albeit oddly extra-human, “needs”. Put simply, did God conclude, perhaps without acknowledging it in Scripture, that He was in need of mankind, as much as we are in need of Him, albeit it in starkly different ways?
The seemingly heretical nature of such thinking – apikorsus, as some might label it – isn’t to be found sui generis in this author’s questioning, arguably challenging, thinking. In Louis Ginzberg’s analysis of the Midrash – “Legends of the Jews”, his chapter on creation begins by explaining that before God created the heaven and earth he created several primordial objects. They included the Torah itself from which He sought counsel – including about the need to be a transcendent God intent on creating a finite, dependent world: “a king’s status is realized in relation to subjects who can recognize and honor him.”
Put differently, “O Lord, a king without an army and without courtiers and attendants hardly deserves the name of king, for none is nigh to express the homage due to him.” The monarchy metaphor presents God as not only having a kingship over mankind, but also requiring an obeisant populus that sees and treats Him as such (“There is no king without . . .”)
Of course, in God we don’t visualize many of the characteristically disturbing actions of many human sovereigns demanding that their subordinates bend to their perverse wills. Still, just imagine a world – imagine God – without mankind. Just a lonely God looking down from on high at an empty-of- mankind cosmos, with no one there to pay Him obeisance for His supernatural works.
Yes, perhaps, this is indeed all-too-anthropomorphic after all. Maybe God isn’t in a symbiotic relationship with us. Maybe He simply doesn’t need us at all. Maybe He doesn’t really want us to worship Him.
And, maybe, we are better off just going about life without giving any thought whatever to precisely why we are here and for what reason, if any, our existence came about?
