What does God want?

Geoffrey Baron
6 min readJul 9, 2021
Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

We talk and think a lot about what we want from God.. and how upsetting it is when he doesn’t make the world how we want it.

But what about God? What does God want?

For the typical Christian this answer comes easily, but is also varied depending on what flavor of Christian you are talking to.

“God wants us to love Jesus”
“God wants us to be holy”
“God wants us to live with him forever”
“God wants us to love him and others”

But let’s start at the beginning.

Why create anything in the first place? What did God want in creating us and our reality?

If God is anything like us, and he said he is as he made man in his likeness or image, then he’s got a strong creative bent to him. People make stuff, it’s what we do.

(FYI: I’m going with the traditional “him” pronoun for simplicity sake)

So, God, like us, likes to make stuff. Great. Does that mean we are just an intergalactic painting, sculpture, or some sort video game to test theories? Maybe?

If the story of Job is to be believed one of God’s heavenly beings seems to make a sort of wager with God about the nature of man. They basically said that the only reason humans like God is because he gives them nice things. Which I believe is a fair wager. Had Job lived with nothing but suffering he could rightly question God’s goodness or even his existence.

I joke about stubbing my toe and crying out that there is no God. I’m only half joking. What was the point of that? What about the child born with painful terminal illness? How does fit the “God likes to make stuff” theory? And who are we to judge anyone that comes to a different conclusion about the nature of God? If your life is suffering it seems fair to believe God either enjoys watching suffering or is incapable of doing anything about. Or.. that somehow it’s worthwhile because it’s producing something that couldn’t be created any other possible way.

The Bible contains many references to processes of changing people. They are not great.

They include “threshing”.. a violent process for separating wheat from its chaff.. the chaff is then burned and the wheat gathered.

Am I chaff?

Or refining gold. A process that requires a lot of heat as the gold melts and “dross” is left behind and thrown away.

Am I dross?

Or “vine dressing”. If you’ve ever pruned a plant this is a sort of violence done to the plant. You need to cut back all the branches that won’t produce fruit. Typically you can take about a third of a fruit tree off without killing it. It’s a tough process.. picking and choosing what stays and what goes. The tree can look pretty sad afterwards.. but what you are left with will be much healthier and more productive. The dead branches are burned.

Am I dead branches?

Or there is the process of making pots from clay. Sometimes you need to toss the failures, smashing them up.. and make new ones with the remains.

Am I a broken pot?

So, is that it? Is the planet a farm or gold mine? What is the fruit here? What is the end product? Are we pots to sit on some intergalactic shelf God can show all his cool friends?

Or, maybe he truly wants children.

I didn’t understand God very well until I had children of my own. They came from nothing (or next to it really).. they gave me nothing of any real value (still haven’t). And yet.. I want to be with them. I would fight for them. I would die for them. Any one that did them harm would feel my wrath.

So, how does the work in world full of suffering? Are some of his “children” not his? How does this work? How does this not create a horrible “us vs. them” where is his children vs. .. well, anyone not “his”?

It’s probably for the best that I can’t answer this. It would be like knowing an asteroid is going to hit and destroy the Earth and there is nothing you can do about it.

I know the pat Christian answers.. but they don’t hold up to critical thinking.

What to do with the billions who were raised and died well outside the reach of Christendom. Or even those in the Bible who died before Jesus? For some Paul gave them the “faith in God” free pass. But what about those who grew up apart from YHWH. What about the children of Ra? The kids of Thor? The daughters of Zeus? Will their faith be accredited as righteousness?

If you believe they were created to suffer eternally, you are probably the real monster in this story. If you plan on spending an eternity in bliss due God’s love for you while other burn forever… you might want to make sure you are on the right path here.

So, what does God want? He wants the gold, the good fruit, and the great vases this world can produce. The chaff, dross, and waste gets burned and swept away.. I suppose eternally.

And what does this look like? What does good fruit look like: Peace, happiness, love, joy, patience, kindness, understanding, gentleness. It means stepping out of your comfort zone to help your enemy when they’ve been beat down. It means a love for people who are unlovable. It means giving them your coat when it’s cold out.. even it makes you cold.

A worked at a grocery store and watched people all day. A teaming mass of people. I could tell my heart had grown cold and tired of humanity. I asked God to show me people through his eyes. I started crying. I had to go in the back so no one saw me. Why would God want to cry?

Sometimes this planet makes me think God was depressed and he needed something worse to cheer him up.. like sad music or even cutting.. just so he could feel something.

Maybe that’s what God wants. He wants to feel. He wants to love and be loved.. and maybe that means losing and being lost.

I do know that maybe if we thought more about what God wants and less about what we want perhaps we could learn to see the world differently.

Another helpful tool in thinking about this might be Simulation Theory. Suppose we live in a simulation created by.. someone. Elon Musk believes our simulation was probably created by our ancestors to simulate the past. A museum of sorts. This would suggest that perhaps we are being viewed and possibly interacted with by beings on the outside not bound by our laws of physics etc. Sound familiar?

Suppose that the simulators were looking for something to be produced by the simulation? It’s not uncommon for AI developers to run simulations to test and train AI. They are looking for AI that can pass tests. It’s possible this existence is a test of sorts. Maybe it’s to teach us faith? Humility? Love?

Maybe this world is capable of producing beings that wouldn’t be able to be created any other way?

Personally, I know the hardships of this world (and I’ve lived a fairly soft life) have crafted me in ways that wouldn’t really have come otherwise. I know if things had been completely easy in my life, I would probably not be the person I am today and that seems like it’s probably a good thing.

One thing that that nearly everyone can agree on about God is that he wants us to love one another. How that plays out is.. complicated.

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