Three human needs

Humans have numerous needs – physical, social, emotional… and I want to highlight three.

First we desire, and need, some kind of purpose or aim in life. We are so constituted that we are purposeful: all the time we envisage what we want to accomplish and set out to achieve it. To have no aim in life is the gateway to despair. Now it is odd that on atheistic assumptions, where the universe is supposedly just the result of chance and therefore purposeless, that it should have given birth to persons whose very fibre is to seek to fulfil their purposes. We must be clear: if there is no God, there is no purpose to anything. The fact that we do live by purposes, however, fits in well with the biblical vision that we are made in the likeness of a Creator who has a purpose for us, his creatures.

Secondly, human beings, from the cradle to the grave, need love. A purely materialist origin of the universe and mankind cannot account for this personal need we all have. But if “God is love” (1 John 4.8) one can easily see that persons made in his image are capable of loving and are in need of love. “God loved the world”, Jesus tells us (John, 3.16): he loves us all. Here our need for love can be uniquely satisfied. If we are loved by God, we must love him in return – and this is the most important commandment of Scripture, according to Jesus. Blaise Pascal wrote: “The sign of the true religion must be that it obliges men to love God… No other religion than ours has done so” (Pensée §214/491). You cannot really oblige or force people to love God; love must be won. But God can be loved when we first receive strong evidence that he loves us. This evidence is supremely provided by Jesus: “God proved his love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5.8). That verse is so full of rich truth I will come back to it another time to explain it more fully, for it speaks of divine love that alone fully satisfies our needy heart. The apostle who wrote it also said: “the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2.20). To grasp what that means will deliver you forever from despair and aimlessness.

Our third need is for intellectually satisfying answers – in other words, we need truth we can rely on. We are rational beings and our reason requires true answers to our basic vital questions. There can be no satisfaction to this need except through the infinite wisdom of God’s mind; he alone can answer our dilemma. The atheistic materialist has problems here: “on his assumptions,” said Cornelius Van Til, “his own rationality is a product of chance.” If our brains resulted from chance movement of atoms and molecules, there is no real intelligence, only an illusion of personality. Without a rational creator on whom we can ground the validity of our rationality, we are for ever lost in confusion, for the very value of our mental processes would be undermined. God’s rationality alone can justify the value of human rationality. “Unless God is back of everything, you cannot find meaning in anything” (Van Til). 

All three of these needs are met by our Creator God. His wisdom specialises in revealing truth to satisfy our minds. His loves is like none other, to satisfy our hearts. His purposes are the best for us as the true way to find fulfilment.

Clive Every-Clayton