Simple answer: no.
Does God need us?
Real answer: (below)
I love reading this old book called "The Knowledge of the Holy" by A.W. Tozer. It's a great old classic on the attributes of God. Each chapter is dedicated to a single attribute.
The book takes off with with chapter titles like "The Self-Existence of God", "The Self-Sufficiency of God", and "The Immutability of God". For nineteen chapters he describes our high and holy God, infinite and never-changing, completely satisfied in the Trinity, sufficient, above, and wholly other than humans. And while it really is a conservative picture of the untouchable God that we know, He really is an awesome God.
At chapter 20, though, something changes.
Suddenly, in the chapter titled "The Love of God", it's as if Tozer has found himself in a wrestling match with the constraints of human language, trying to somehow describe how this high and holy God feels about us. While Tozer is careful to maintain God's self-sufficiency and everything else he's described to this point... there's something that he won't- that he can't gloss over.
There's something that Tozer sees in a sheep that was worth risking everything for, in a lost coin that's celebrated over, in an old man who runs down a driveway to kiss his son- that while God doesn't depend on us, his feelings for us are approaching, similar to, whole lot like, and dangerously close to... a need.
This God loves so much it hurts him- he is jealous, he pursues, he shows his heart, and he puts it on the line for you to accept or reject. This awesome and majestic King of Kings has chosen to tie his heart to us in a way that makes him vulnerable.
Somewhere between "want" and "need", between "I'd like" and "I-must-have", between "be mine" and "you will be mine" is Yaweh's love for sinners like me and you.
Of course, the epicenter of this tension is the cross of Jesus Christ. For most of us, whether we believe it's possible or not, we're looking for a love that throws itself out there- that risks everything for a chance that we'll love back. A love that's not indifferent, that's not halfway. That gives everything and that tells our heart that we matter- that we're known- that we're wanted.
And at the cross, we see God's bleeding heart for sinners. For God, it's his vulnerable moment. It's his DTR. It's at the cross where we see God sharing his heart- and then tragically... we see it mocked, spit at, humiliated and killed.
But God has left the invitation open- the invitation to believe and enter into what another of my favorite authors calls "crazy love" remains.
It's not a need. But it's love.
It is a strange and beautiful eccentricity of the free God that He has allowed His heart to be emotionally identified with men. Self-sufficient as He is, He wants our love and will not be satisfied till He gets it. Free as He is, He has let His heart be bound to us forever. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. “For our soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest,” says Julian of Norwich, “that it overpasseth the knowing of all creatures: that is to say, there is no creature that is made that may know how much and how sweetly and how tenderly our Maker loveth us. And therefore we may with grace and His help stand in spiritual beholding, with everlasting marvel of this high, overpassing, inestimable Love that Almighty God hath to us of His Goodness.”
-A.W. Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy
