Is God Egotistical for Wanting Our Praise?

Josh and Emily’s relationship started out like something you’d see in a Hallmark film, minus the snow and flannel shirt. He was everything she dreamed of, and because of this she consistently showered praise upon him. He rescued her out of a bad relationship and she felt it her duty to broadcast to everyone what a wonderful rescuer Josh was to her.

What Emily didn’t know was that Josh was really a narcissist. All of those “love bombs” were only to create a dependence upon him. No matter how much she tried, she was never able to satisfy Josh’s insatiable need for praise and adoration. When she didn’t compliment him enough or seemed focused on something else, Josh would grow distant, sometimes refusing to talk to her for days as a form of punishment.

As it tends to happen when love morphs into duty, Emily’s affections grew colder. There was no way that she could keep up with all of the praise when her heart no longer believed that Josh was all that great. As soon as it became evident to Josh that she didn’t love him like he thought she should, he ended the relationship. He cast her aside like the hot garbage he thought she was.

You might be thinking, “Wow, Josh is a jerk. Emily is better off without him. What kind of person would end a relationship because you do not praise them enough?” Why then, do some have no problem thinking that God punishes people for not offering praise? Is God egotistical for wanting our praise?

What Does It Mean for God to Want Something?

If we say that Josh wants Emily to praise him, what do we mean? We likely mean that Josh has some emptiness within him that he needs her adoration to fill, much like we might say “I need to eat,” if we are hungry. Can we speak this way of God?

According to Scripture God is self-sufficient (Acts 17:24-25, Psalm 50:10-12, Job 41:11, Isaiah 40:28). We cannot speak of God needing praise as if it fills in some sort of void within him. He is not like Tinkerbell, needing belief and approval in order to fly. Therefore, we cannot say that God wants our praise in the same way that Josh wants the praise of Emily.

What we find in Scripture is that God is worthy of praise, that humans were created for praise, and that God commands us to praise. But none of this should lead us to believe that God somehow needs our praise.

We’re so accustomed to giving an order for our good, or even for the good of our company or our society, that we barely have a category for commanding someone to do something for their own good. To us the idea of being commanded to do something — to put it in the category of duty — seems to have no place for delight. But I think John Piper is correct when he explains his view that, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” Piper explains:

“Every time God commanded me to praise him for his glory, he was commanding me to bring my pleasure in him to its fullest delight. That’s what he was commanding. My pleasure in God is not complete unless it overflows in praise. And my praise of God is not glorifying to God unless it is the overflow of pleasure in God. God is not an egomaniac when he commands me to praise him. He’s acting in love, because my praising him is the apex of my pleasure in him. What a discovery!

I think there is still an unanswered question here: why does God command our praise?

Why Does God Command Our Praise?

There is a joke about spending hundreds of dollars on a Christmas present only to find your kid playing with the box instead of the toy itself. It’s funny because most of us have had those baffling moments when our small children are lost in their own world playing with a stick, instead of going for something which will be far better.

And I suppose we might argue that if the kid is having fun, we should simply let them keep playing with sticks. But this supposes that we are content when our children have a capacity for joy no larger than stick-playing. Yes, true joy is able to delight in monotony. True and abiding joy can play with sticks. But there is an impulse within us to expand our children’s capacity for joy in such a way that a stick is seen for what it really is.

Our goal for our children stems from God’s own goal for us. He wants us to enjoy things as they rightly are. Sticks to be sticks, food to be food, sex to be sex, and glory to be glory. But we all know that our desires and our capacity for joy gets all mixed up. We are, as CS Lewis said,

“…half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

A good parent, then, will tell the child to put down the mudpie and go about enjoying the holiday at sea. It’s an effort to capture and righten our hearts. It’s not good parenting to allow a dull child to be delighted with base things no matter how wide their grin. Their base happiness is not our goal — proper happiness is the goal.

God commands praise because it, He, is the pinnacle of our delight. His command to praise is a call to turn from mud-pies and enjoy the holiday. In the same way that we might earnestly command our child to put down the stick and come open his Christmas present, God calls us to put down our lesser loves and enjoy Him.

To summarize so far, God does not need our praise, but He commands it for our good. Some of you might still be unsatisfied by this answer. It might seem to you that the only difference between Josh and God Almighty is that Josh just isn’t awesome enough to command lasting praise. To put that another way, it sounds like we’re saying that God can command our praise because He is God — and it’s not egotistical because it’s really for our good.

If you’ve been around a narcissistic abuser for anytime, this all sounds far too familiar. God demands praise for our good and then punishes us when we don’t match up. I think we’re missing something here: the fundamental difference is between the character of God and the character of Josh.

God’s Self-Centeredness Leads to Self-Giving

If I tell you that Josh is self-centered, you know what I mean, don’t you? It means that everything he does is for the furtherance of himself — he is self-exalting. But if I say that God is self-centered there is something entirely different happening here.

God’s self-centeredness expresses itself by self-giving for others. Consider Genesis 1-2. God exists in a perfect Triune community. Father, Son, and Spirit exists with a fullness of joy and lacking nothing. And out of this joy creation happens. Not as an accident but as an intentional self-giving action. One that will result in the very death of the Son of God. One which calls into being everything that is — not because of some need but because God-sized love impulsively brings others-in. God is, by His very nature, self-giving.

What I am attempting to say is that Josh wants Emily’s praise for Josh. God wants Emily’s praise for Emily. That is fundamentally what makes God not egotistical. He is self-giving. The more we are brought into the praise of God, the more we will paradoxically be filled up and emptied out for others. There isn’t an egotistical moment in the entire transaction. It’s all for the sake of the other.

Photo credit: Unsplash/priscilla-du-preez