Hello and welcome back and thank you for listening to Ask Pastor John with longtime author and pastor John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke. We get loads of hard questions that require us to think carefully, like this one. Is God independent from his creation or is God dependent on his creation?

Does he need his creation or does he not need his creation? The implications here are huge, Pastor John, and the email is from a listener named Chris. "Dear Pastor John, I have followed your ministry for many years. I have long considered myself a seven-point Calvinist as well, specifically when it comes to the argument that we are in the best of all possible worlds because God is after the greatest amount of glory for himself and greatest good for his people.

But I see a potential conflict with the independence of God here. If it is true that God truly exists independently and without need of anyone or anything, does this conflict with him needing creation in order to display the fullness of his attributes and receive the fullness of his glory?" Another way of asking it is this.

Could God have been just as glorified without creation? If so, then does the doctrine of best of all possible worlds lose meaning? And if he could not have done it in another way because of his commitment to his glory, then wasn't he in a sense forced all along to act out of a dependency on creation?

Let's take three of Chris's phrases and analyze them and then move toward a general answer to his concern. And I'm not picking on Chris here. Virtually everybody who asks this kind of question I think runs into these kinds of difficulties. So let's start with the phrase "glorified without creation." He asks this.

Could God have been just as glorified without creation? Now the passive verb "glorified" implies that there's a glorifier. And if we supplied this glorifier, the question answers itself. So if we ask, here's what it would sound like. Could God have been just as glorified by creation without creation? No.

If there's no creation, then creation can't glorify God. And since creation is everything that is not God, the only thing outside God that could glorify God is God's creation. So there aren't any other viable options for God being glorified by anything outside God except creation. Which brings us to the real question, namely, does God's intra-Trinitarian glory—before there's any creation at all, just Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the eternal joy of the Trinity, the beauty of that fellowship, the holiness of that fellowship—does God's intra-Trinitarian glory need to be glorified by creation?

So Chris asks this. If God truly exists independently and without need of anyone or anything, does this conflict with Him needing creation in order to display the fullness of His attributes and receive the fullness of His glory? Now that's a tricky question, because the word "need" changes meaning in mid-sentence.

The first use of the word "need" is that God is fully God, complete, without any defect in Himself at all. And he says, Chris says, "If God truly exists independently and without need of anyone or anything," and the answer is yes, yes He does, that's right, "He is independent from all that is not God, and as such He has no need of anything outside God to make Him any more God, any more perfect, any more complete than He is." So far, so good.

No need at all for anything like that to make Him more God, more complete, more perfect. But then the sentence continues. Does this conflict with Him needing creation in order to display the fullness of His attributes and receive the fullness of His glory? Well now, Chris has made the word "need" here refer to God's display of His fullness and receiving glorification from outside of God.

That was not the issue in the first half of the sentence. It's one thing to ask, "Does God need anything from outside God to be the independent, full, perfect, complete, all-beautiful, all-glorious, all-worthy God that He is?" And the answer is no, He doesn't. It's another thing to ask, "Does God need a recipient of His glory outside of Himself in order to receive glorification from outside Himself?" Well of course He does.

The answer is really contained in the way the question is posed. So I'm going to come back to this, the word "need" might not be the right word there, because it has connotations that would be all wrong. But let's cut to the chase. His concern began with my claim, and He agrees with my claim, that this is the best of all possible worlds, from creation to consummation, all things considered.

This is the best world for God to accomplish all He aims to accomplish, namely the revelation of the full range of His glory in the sum total of all His attributes, climaxing in His grace, supremely revealed in the redeeming work of Christ on the cross, with all its undeserved benefits for His people, and best of all, their enjoyment of Him in His glorious presence forever and ever.

It is the best world for the accomplishing of that, and that was His ultimate purpose. And the implied question from Chris is, if this world is best, and God must surely do what is best, then is God, to use Chris's words, "forced all along to act out of a dependency on creation." That is, since this world accomplishes all that God aims for it to accomplish in revealing the fullness of His wisdom and the holiness of His nature and His righteousness and wrath and goodness and mercy and love for the enjoyment of His people, then is He forced to create this world and thus be dependent on it, and thus be less perfect in Himself.

Now here are three reasons why I think we are sent on a wild goose chase by the word "forced." Three reasons why that word cannot properly describe God's action in creation and redemption. Let me read again what he said. He said, "Is God then forced all along to act out of a dependency on creation, since He has to do what's best, this best of all possible worlds, therefore He has to create, therefore He's forced, and therefore He's imperfect?" So I think that's a wild goose chase, and to use that kind of language for God is wrong and unhelpful in three ways, or for three reasons.

Number one, for some, the word "forced" would connote that there is a power outside God that coerces Him to act against His internal preferences. That's not the case. And so that implication of "forced" does not apply to God, and we should get it out of our heads. Number two, for others, the word "forced" would connote an internal struggle within God with one side of God not wanting to create the world and another side of God wanting to create the world, and the creating side wins and forces the other side of God to submit.

But there's no such warfare in God. God is one and acts with all His being consenting. And here's the third, and I think this is the most important thing of all, which is why I'm a Christian hedonist and why you and I, Tony, see that Christian hedonism is not icing on the cake of theology.

It is so close to the center of who God is. So here's the third point. God in fact creates and governs and redeems the world because that is what He loves to do. He delights to create and guide and save, and He is doing in it what He is doing to bring the people into joy in Himself.

But we do not call doing what you love to do being "forced." Nobody uses being forced for doing what you love most to do. In fact, we call being able to do what you love to do "freedom." The meaning of freedom, being able to do whatever you love to do and not regretting it in a million years.

It's the fullest of all freedoms when the actor of freedom has no regrets. In a million years, God will be approving of the wisdom and the gladness of his action. So, conclusion. No, God does not need creation in order to be God, and He is not forced to create by any coercive power outside Himself or inside Himself.

Instead, He loves to create and govern and redeem, and doing fully and completely what you delight to do, what you love to do, without regret in a million years, is the freest of all freedoms, and therefore God is the freest of all beings. Amen. This is deep and heady.

But if you're thinking about these kinds of ultimate questions—questions about why God created everything in the first place, if He was not coerced by any power outside of Himself—there's a great book I have to commend to you. It's by Jonathan Edwards. We've titled it "God's Passion for His Glory." God's Passion for His Glory.

And you can download the entire book online free of charge right now at DesiringGod.org/books. God's Passion for His Glory. Well, on the other side of the weekend, we will talk about fatherhood. When young wife and mother is perplexed as to why her husband seems distant from their new daughter, what's going on?

What should a husband's disposition be toward his children and caring for them? Good questions up Monday. I'm your host Tony Reinke, and we'll see you then. Have a great weekend. 1. What is the purpose of fatherhood? 2. What is the purpose of fatherhood? 3. What is the purpose of fatherhood?

4. What is the purpose of fatherhood? 5.