Benevolence or Ego?

So, God created humans simply so that we could worship him? Why bother? That seems like the height of narcissism. (A comment from an atheist participant to an online forum on theology)

As our culture proceeds down the path of ever increasing secularism and the knowledge of Christian orthodoxy disappears from the popular psyche, statements like the one above will proliferate. Such sentiments are helped along by the new batch of belligerent atheists residing on the best-seller's lists who are not satisfied with simply repeating the arguments of Bertrand Russell against the existence of God, but seemed determined to indict the very idea of God as a fount of evil. So Richard Dawkins characterizes the instruction of children in Christian faith as a form of child abuse, and Christopher Hitchens titles his book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

This kind of rhetoric can leave those of us who understand God as the source of all that is good and just and loving in our existence in a kind of stunned silence. It can be difficult to know where to even begin to defend God's fundamental goodness against this kind of rancorous assault, yet that is our challenge, and indeed our mandate from scripture: always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you(1 Peter 3:15 ESV).

Certainly some of the problem with answering such statements as the one above is that the truth of the matter is so self-evident it's hard to formulate an answer, such as when a child asks why the sky is blue followed by an interminable succession of "why?" questions; the temptation is to answer, "because I say so!" And perhaps in my analogy lies the real answer after all.

To think that our obligation to worship God means that God was narcissistic in creating us is equivalent to a child considering her parents narcissistic for having her and then demanding obedience.  This attitude in the child is actually due to her inability to interpret the world around her by any other criteria than by how it directly affects her. She sees her parent’s demand of obedience as being unfair; indeed, if the world does not conform to her comfort and immediate desires, even the world is unfair.  We call this self-centeredness.  If she could see her situation from her parent’s perspective, she would understand that her parents had her as an expression of their love--that their love wanted to expand to include another, and that their demands of her obedience is for her good, and, in reality, another expression of their love.

The seed of seeing God as a narcissist is our resentment in having to give up the center stage. One can almost hear the petulant mewling of the child, "but what about me?"

Coupled with this is a constricted and anthropomorphic vision of God. If He is seen as the angry old man with the long white beard frowning at all our fun and casting down thunderbolts from on high--a common caricature by popular media--He becomes that much easier to resent.

Of course the biblical vision of God is one that stretches our perceptions to their limits, and perhaps beyond. It is a vision of unsurpassable power:

Who has measured the oceans by using the palm of his hand?
Who has used the width of his hand to mark off the sky? 
Who has measured out the dust of the earth in a basket? 
Who has weighed the mountains on scales? 
Who has weighed the hills in a balance? 
Who can ever understand what is in the Lord's mind? 
Who can ever give him advice? 
Did the Lord have to ask anyone to help him understand? 
Did he have to ask someone to teach him the right way? 
Who taught him what he knows? 
Who showed him how to understand?
The nations are only a drop in a bucket to him. 
He considers them as nothing but dust on the scales. 
He weighs the islands as if they were only fine dust. (Isaiah 40:12-15 New International Readers Version)

But it is also a vision of incomparable love:

Dear friends, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born again because of what God has done. That person knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
How did God show his love for us? He sent his one and only Son into the world. He sent him so we could receive life through him.
What is love? It is not that we loved God. It is that he loved us and sent his Son to give his life to pay for our sins.
Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we should also love one another. No one has ever seen God. But if we love one another, God lives in us. His love is made complete in us.
We know that we belong to him and he belongs to us. He has given us his Holy Spirit.
The Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. (1 John 4:7-14 New International Reader's Version)

Unlike the unitarian view of God, such as Islam, the trinitarian view of God revealed in the Bible shows us that God existed in a state of love within his own being expressed among the three persons of the Godhead. The statement written above by the Apostle John, "God is love," is never made about Allah, and indeed could not be made. But when we read in Genesis that God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness," it bears a striking resemblance to the creation of children by a husband and wife who wish to enlarge the love already shared between to two of them. It is not the attentive and disciplining parents whom we characterize as narcissistic, but those who give over to hired help the raising of their children.

We worship God because He created us in an act of love, because He provided all the beauty and wonder of our world we enjoy, because even after we separated ourselves from Him in rebellion, He provided a second chance to be reconciled to Him through Christ. Does He demand our worship? Yes. He even demands our love. But just as loving parents must demand obedience and respect from their children, even that is an act of His love, and meant for our good.

"You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being." (Revelation 4:11 NIV)