I was out driving the other day with the radio turned to a Christian radio station, when a song lyric jumped out at me: Because you would rather die / Than to ever live without me. Lines like this have never sat well with me, but I always attributed my discomfort to a question of perspective - a focus on God versus a focus on man, for example. It was only that day it dawned on me that there is a fundamental error in this song lyric - the same that thousands of Christian self-esteem messages spring from; the same that tickles our ears with popular notions of self-worth and esteem. The difference between a haughty spirit and a humble spirit before God ultimately lies in how you answer the question, why does God love us?

The explanation for why God created the human race that I always heard growing up hinges on choice. First the question is posed, would you want a spouse to love you because she had to - a robot, if you will - or because she wanted to? The argument then goes on to contrast our worship with that of the angels: the angels are simply programmed to worship God and can do no other, the reasoning goes, while we can choose to love God - therefore our praise is preferable to that of the angels because ours is voluntary.

So God loves us because we have choice? This runs into several problems (we’ll even ignore the fact that Lucifer and a third of the angels didn’t adhere to their “programming”). First, our choice is constrained by sin. In the flesh - in our own effort - we cannot choose God (Romans 8:7-8). We have no capability in ourselves to love God. He enables us to love Him by the Holy Spirit for the very reason that we cannot by ourselves do so.

Second, this reasoning would imply that God loves us because of some innate good within us, namely, choice. There is nothing good within us that would commend us to God (Isaiah 64:6, Jeremiah 17:9), and we are certainly not in an inherently better position before Him than the angels. The belief that God loves us because we are made in His image - because we have some “spark of the divine” - even so far as to say that God loves us because we (can) choose Him, is to say that at some level we deserve God’s love, and this is fundamentally no different from the pride of Lucifer.

But God obviously loves us, as we see throughout the Bible (John 3:16). Why then, if we have nothing to commend ourselves to God, does He still pursue us? The answer is not within us, but in God. God does not love us because of who we are, but because of who He is. One thing I am indebted to John Piper for is the proof and justification of a selfish God (Deuteronomy 6:15): If God, being at the same time omniscient and the highest good in the universe, had as His ultimate aim anything other than the highest good in the universe, He would no longer be a good or perfect God. Therefore God’s ultimate goal can only be His own glory. His duty is not to us, but to Himself.

So how does mankind factor into God’s glory? God’s love of and offer of salvation to mankind is not so He can enjoy the pleasure of our company, but in order to demonstrate His power to redeem that which had nothing good of its own to boast. Paul tells us that salvation is entirely the work of God for this very purpose: “Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:9). The glory is entirely God’s.

With this in mind, our focus shifts away from ourselves and towards God. Prayer becomes less of our will and more “Your will be done”, in faith that God makes all things to work together for the good of those that love Him (Romans 8:28). Father, forgive me, not because I’m coming to You, but because You have brought me to Yourself. This is a humble spirit before God: unpretentious gratitude that while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies of God with nothing worthy of love about us, Christ still died for us.