Does God Need Humans?

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers … what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Psalm 8:3-4).

“God has no need for us to meet. No, he glorifies himself in meeting our needs.” John Piper

Imagine, for one moment, an elder brother whom you love dearly. One day he comes to you and tells you that he loves you so much. Your smile from ear to ear. But then suddenly he tells you that he does not really need you, and that he could live perfectly well without you even having existed. How would you feel?

Not very good right.

Then how we can think that God loves us in any way, particularly more than our own parents, as Jesus teaches us in Matthew 7:11, if He does not needs us? After all, Paul the apostle that placed loved above any other gift of the spirit believed that God did not need us: : 
"The God who made the world and everything in it … is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything" (Acts 17:24-25).

Gotquestions.org in answering this concern defines God as "God is holy, eternal, almighty, and totally self-sufficient. He does not need any created being, but we do need Him."

In other words, according to traditional Christian thought, God has no need for anything, including us.  He did not create us because He needs us to either feed him or glorify Him. However, there are different types of needs. 

Abraham Maslow , an American psychologist was the first one to conceive of a psychological hierarchy of human needs.
At the lowest level we have a need for food, water, and sleep. If these needs are not fulfilled at some satisfactory level we may not have the drive to pursue the fulfillment of other needs.

More recently, Anthony Robbins introduced what he calls the six core psychological “needs” that each of us constantly work to satisfy on a mostly unconscious level: certainty, variety, significance, love and connection, growth, and contribution. 
Robbins list focuses on the emotional needs.

When we say that God does not needs us we are certainly right in terms of us being incapable of giving any type of sustenance for his live. However, does God has some type of emotional need for us? 

Jesus taught us something very profound about God that can help us to answer that question.

He taught us that God is our Parent. Jesus went as far as teaching us that God loves us more than our own parents. Those of us fortunate enough to have had parents who really gave their lives to nurture us, raise us up, and forever keep us in their minds, can see that in a way our parents need us. Their profound love for us can cause profound emotional chaos if something very bad were to happen to us. 

If Jesus' teaching about God as parent is real and not some simple metaphorical comparison, some type of anthropomorphism, then God must possess a parental need to see his children do well and grow to become people of good. 

Furthermore, we must assume that God's Parental Heart of Love must have been there before we were even created, just as the a husband and wife who love each other and want to form a family already have a psychological and emotional need that the children will fill. The parents want to have children they can love and nurture and raise up. God must have had those same feelings, though perhaps deeper than any parent have ever had them.

The conception of God as Parent and we as His children appears as the fundamental principle in Jesus' first sermon to the public. Paul later approaches the Athenians and those gathered at the Aeropagus by citing from pagan poets who had also realized that we are (God's) offspring, Acts 17: 28-29. 

As many Christians like to say that when Jesus declared himself to be the messiah he was either lying, being crazy or saying the truth. The same holds in regard to this teaching. Either God truly loves us more deeply than any parent or Jesus was lying.

Obviously, Jesus was telling the truth. 

Consequently, God's love for us as a parent entails that he must hold a profound emotional need to see us do well. When Paul urges his readers to pray for all men, including those in power, he concludes that it is the will of God that all men be saved. Barnes Notes on the Bible compares this desire of God to that of parents willing the welfare of a child.

God as a Parent of Love can only will for the good of all his children. However, not all his children may respond to His will at the same time or to the same degree. Why would God will for something he may not get when he wants it?

God's will for his children to be saved expresses his need of them. In other words, as Rev. Moon says above, God, the Parent, by creating us as His Children, made us into an object of His Love, his counterparts of love. A person that loves someone else can only be happy when that loved is corresponded in some manner.

Even when a parent loves a small child, if the child is unable to correspond to that love because a sickness engulfs him/her in a nightmare of pain and approaching death, the parents suffer immensely, finding no solace. On one occasion Rev. Moon referred to God as having infinite pain, infinite grieve, infinite sorrow.

To say that God would not suffer from our pain would mean that Jesus' own comparison of God's love to ours as more profound was not realistic and instead was even possibly misleading. It is as if Jesus would have been attempting to make us think of God in a manner that does not fit the truth just to make us think of God on a more personal and intimate level which was actually false. Nothing could be further from the truth.