Why does God want to be worshipped?

Put it at its sharpest, the way it is usually meant: a being who creates people and then requires them to tell him how wonderful he is sounds less like a god than like a bad king.

It is a fair objection and it was C. S. Lewis’s own. He wrote that this was one of his largest obstacles to belief — God struck him as behaving like a vain woman fishing for compliments. His answer is still the best one, and it takes three steps.

Nothing is being gained

Start with the assumption buried in the objection: that God is getting something he lacks.

The Christian claim is that God is self-existent — he depends on nothing, needs nothing, and was not lonely or incomplete before making anything. Paul says it directly in Athens: God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything.

Acts 17:25KJVNeither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.

If that is true, worship cannot be a supply of something he is short of. Which means the command has to be doing something else.

Praise is what enjoyment does when it is finished

Here is Lewis’s actual observation, and it came from watching people rather than reading theology.

We praise whatever we enjoy. Not because we are told to — we cannot help it. You finish a book and immediately want someone else to read it. You hear a song and send it to a friend. You meet someone and find yourself telling people about them.

And the praising is not a separate payment made afterwards. It completes the thing. Enjoyment that cannot be expressed feels unfinished, which is why not being able to tell anybody about something wonderful is genuinely frustrating.

So if God is the most worth-enjoying thing there is, then telling him so is not a fee charged at the door. It is what enjoying him consists of.

Where else would he point you

There is a third step and it is the one people find hardest.

Suppose God, out of modesty, directed you to worship something else — a person, a cause, your own achievements. He would be pointing you at something smaller than the thing you were made for.

Everyone worships something in the loose sense: there is some thing your life organises itself around, that you would be devastated to lose. If Christianity is right about what human beings are for, then aiming that at anything created is a misfire, and the misfires are visible everywhere — in what people do to their careers, their bodies, their children.

Humility is having an accurate view of yourself. For God, an accurate view is being God. Pretending otherwise would not be modesty; it would be a lie told at our expense.

Objections answered

A good person wouldn't demand praise. Why is it different for God?

Because when a person demands praise they are claiming something untrue — placing themselves at the centre when they are not. The claim is only arrogant if it is false. If God actually is the source of everything, saying so is accuracy.

Then why the threats attached? Worship or be punished.

That is a caricature of most of what the Bible says, though not of every sermon ever preached. The consequences described are largely the consequences of turning away from the source of life — like the consequences of not eating. There is a difference between a punishment imposed and a result arrived at.

Isn't this just a nicer way of saying the same thing?

It changes what the word means, which is the whole issue. If worship is grovelling before a superior, the objection stands. If it is what happens when you finally see something for what it is, the objection is describing a different activity under the same name.

How to say it

Ask what they do with things they love

“When you love a film, what do you do?” They tell someone. That instinct is the whole answer, and it comes from them rather than from you.

Say that nothing is gained

“He isn’t getting anything out of it. He doesn’t need anything.” It removes the picture of a needy being, which is the actual objection.

Acts 17:25KJVNeither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.

Use Lewis's own doubt

“Lewis thought exactly this and said so in print.” Someone raising it is in good company, and hearing that is disarming in a way an argument is not.

Shared ground, and where traditions differ

All Christians hold

All the traditions hold that God is complete in himself and needs nothing from creation, and that worship is for the good of the worshipper — a participation in God rather than a service rendered to him.

Eastern Orthodox

Frames the whole Christian life as worship leading to theosis, becoming like God by participation — so worship is not one activity among others but the point of the exercise.