Does God suffer from Loneliness?

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You have to understand that there are two kinds of emotions or passions, (no I am not talking about the concupiscible and irascible passions), and to illustrate them one only has to examine the Seven Deadly Sins, for all of the Deadly Sins are passions that are out of control.

Now the Seven Deadly Sins can be divided into sins of weakness and sins of malice. Sins of weakness are passions or emotions that are not meant to be extinguished but are meant to be controlled.
  • Wrath is when you let anger get out of control.
  • Lust is when you let your desire for sex get out of control.
  • Gluttony is when you let your desire for food get out of control.
  • Greed is when you let your desire for property get out of control.
The sins of malice on the other hand are passions or emotions you are not supposed to have at all.
  • Pride is pleasure in and desire for one’s false goodness.
  • Envy is sadness for another’s good.
  • Sloth is sadness towards the things of God.
The sins of weakness deal with the sensitive passions or emotions. The generation of these passions come from our bodily senses, and therefore as we cannot control what we sense, we also cannot control their generation, but only how they will be expressed.

The sins of malice however are rational passions or emotions. They arise not from what we sense but from our ideas, from our reasoning. The rational passions are therefore fully in our control: pride, envy, and sloth come out because we willed them out through intention or negligence, and they can and should be stopped dead in their tracks once we notice them. They however can be harder to detect because they arise from our higher faculties and therefore we may not “feel” them like the sensitive emotions if they do not “overflow” as it were to our lower faculties. These are the reasons why the sins of malice are considered to be more serious than the sins of weakness.

Now going back to God’s emotions, since God is Spirit, He has no senses like we do but rather He is purely rational, and thus He only has rational emotions. When He says He wants us, it is because He chose to want us.
And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." (Exodus 33:19)
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meltzerboy2 said:
This implies that G-d does, in a sense, “need” us to strengthen His holiness.
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This I disagree with. HE IS HOLY ITSELF…

And JOY is one of His Spirits…

He knows Eternity…

And Disobediences - From Satan - and some of His creation… Including Israel

And Jews and Christians await (albeit in certain significantly differing manners) the return of Messiah
 
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Not really but on the begining of the right path. People are correct in stating that God has no need for humans.

As the Mystical Cty of God which is a Catholic approved private revelation states this.

The Majesty of God,
beholding the nature of his infinite perfections, their virtue and efficacy operating with magnificence, saw thatit was just and most proper, and, as it were, a duty and necessity, to communicate Himself and to follow that inclination of imparting and exercising
his liberality and mercy, by distributing outside of Himself with magnificence the plenitude of the infinite treasures, contained in the Divinity.

God simply wanted to share. But He had none to share with minus Himself. He would have been content to not share but He chose to. So being God:
  1. first intent was that he desired to communicate Himself byond Himself.
    2.) He created the intention that would fufill His desire.
    3.) He created how He intended for this to come about.
From the mysitcal City of God:

The third instant consisted in selecting and determining the mode of this communication, so as to realize in an perfect manner the most exalted ends.
The order namely, which is in regard to the communications of the Godhead and its divine attributes; so that this activity of the Lord may have its proper reasons and objects, and so that it might proceed with the most beautiful sequence, harmony and subordination. In this instant was decreed first of all, that the divine Word should assume flesh and should become visible. The perfection and the composition of the most holy humanity of Christ our Lord was decreed and modeled in the divine intelligence. Secondarily, also were formed the ideals of the rest of men in imitation of the First The divine mind prearranged the harmony and adornment of the human nature composed of an organic body and a vivifying soul, endowed with faculties to know and enjoy its Creator, to discern between good and evil, and with a free will to love that same Lord."

4:
The fourth instant was to determine the gifts and
graces, which were to be conferred upon the humanity
of Christ, our Lord, in union with the Divinity. Here
the Most High opened the liberal hands of his Omnipotence and his other attributes, in order to enrich the mostsacred humanity and the soul of Christ with the highest possible plenitude of his gifts and graces. …

Excerpr
this instant also, and, in natural sequence, pertain the decree and predestination of the Mother of the Divine Word incarnate for here it was ordained that pure Creature before everything else whatsoever. Thus, before all other creatures, She was conceived in the divine mind, in such state as befitted and became the dignity, excellence and gifts of the humanity of her most holy Son by the divinity.
5.) Then God created the angelic host to glorify Him and worship Him and to aid us “lest we dash our foot against a stone.” They were created with the knowledge that some would serve their self pride instead.
6.) This instance was the creation of people and mankind and earthly home for Christ made in the image of Christ as brethren. The fall of Adam was forseen and known.
 
Alex4Mary said:
People are correct in stating that God has no need for humans.
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It’s a rather poorish human way of trying to say something about God…

AS LOVE - It wasn’t by Chance He Created Children of God…

Need? There’s no need to bring need into Understanding a Movement of Love

_)
 
Did you read the actual excerpts? Or just to blast what is already known to me as weak statement?
 
Alex4Mary said:
Did you read the actual excerpts? Or just to blast what is already known to me as weak statement?
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I disagree with it … Why even think along those lines? For what Purpose?

God Created US - To Know Him, To Love Him and to Serve Him. .
 
The Godhead: Population 3

God is not and cannot be lonely. Man has the ability and freedom - yes, freedom - to be lonely when he chooses to ignore his Cretor.

Rather than loneliness, it is poverty.
 
God is the cause of eternal joy. He is surrounded by the most beautiful most majestic court in the universe. He is the source of all good and love with no beginning and no end.
There is not the tiniest particle of suffering of anything anywhere in or near the courts of Heaven.

If you could stand blind for just a microsecond in front of God and survive, you live your days out as the happiest person on Earth.
 
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I have some other thoughts as well. Ironically it was something a rabbi said. It was," God is an atheist." Which essentially means God has no God. It was a prelude statement to another where he asked," what does God get out of the deal?" The deal being related to the question about God needing us, but a slightly different question. Your answer reminds that it is reasonable to imagine there was a reason for creation, and that it roughly corresponds to the intent of the question," what does God get out of the deal."
I think it safe to imagine God does get something out of the deal. That alone generates a special status for us. I think need is superfluous except with regard to the unique characteristic of love, in that it requires two.
Need exists in a different respect than the statement," God doesn’t need us."
Love does not exist in the absence of subject and object. ( Recalling the Atheist statement).
God is love, and the very nature of God as Trinity is one of loving relationship ( father son/ son father). This is the foundation of being. Of reality.
With respect to need, I would not think that God needs in terms of your deficiency idea, but it seems love needs a relationship to exist. In that respect we are needed in order to love. God could choose to love something else but the love God has for us as his creation requires us.
 
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And Christ came so that we may be able to partake in the Divine nature.
 
I really like you. this is by far the most brillaint reasoning I have ever read on this topic.

thank you
 
That is kind. I can’t take credit for things I have heard from others, but I can appreciate sharing them with someone who appreciates them.
 
You have learned well, young Maximus

What say you to this:

If God transcends all space and time, then He still suffers (but that might be a different thread 🙂
 
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I am partial to the idea that God is both transcendent and imminent. That which is the pure act of being philosophers tell us about is ineffable, and so terms like suffering become like sifting through strands of smoke for me. If you want to say Christianity abounds in what appears to be an observable cruciform reality, I can see that.
 
Maximus1 said:
It was," God is an atheist." Which essentially means God has no God.
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I am sorry, but I cannot do anything but strongly, vigorously disagree to this. It is the equivalent of calling Jesus a liar in His last moments, for we know dying men utter the most important things to them, when He cried “My God, My God, why have You abandoned Me?”
Maximus1 said:
I think it safe to imagine God does get something out of the deal. That alone generates a special status for us. I think need is superfluous except with regard to the unique characteristic of love, in that it requires two.
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No, God’s not needing us is of the absolute, unambiguous terms. In fact, it is Catholic dogma that we cannot love Him but only by having God, the Holy Spirit, love God in, with, and for us. That is our special status in creation, that God dwells in us to love Him in heaven and in others.

In fact, God’s utter un-needing of anything from us is such that whatever we give to God in worship reflects back to us. When we give praise to God we are glorified. When we give our riches to Him we are enriched. God is overflowing with goodness such that whatever good we give to Him it comes back to us.
 
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Did Jesus experience loneliness? I believe he did. And God is relationship - see Trinity.

On one side of the coin, God does not need us, yet desires relationship with us. On the other side of the same coin, God needs all of us to help bring about the Kingdom of God “on Earth as it is in Heaven”.
 
For sure He was lonely in the Garden, and yes, He really does need us to be the workers in the vineyard. Great point.
 
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