Hello and welcome back and thank you for listening to Aspastor John with a long time author

and pastor John Piper, I'm your host, Tony Ranky.

We get loads of hard questions that require us to think carefully like this one.

Is God independent from His creation or is God dependent on His creation?

Does He need His creation or does He not need His creation?

The implications here are huge, Pastor John, and the email is from a listener named Chris,

Dear Pastor John, I have followed your ministry for many years.

I have long considered myself a seven point Calvinist as well, specifically when it comes

to the argument that we are in the best of all possible worlds because God is after the

greatest amount of glory for Himself and greatest good for His people.

But I see a potential conflict with the independence of God here.

If it is true that God truly exists independently and without need of any one or anything,

does this conflict with Him needing creation in order to display the fullness of His attributes

and receive the fullness of His glory?

Another way of asking is this, could God have been just as glorified without creation?

If so, then does the doctrine of best of all possible worlds lose meaning?

And if He could not have done it another way because of His commitment to His glory,

then wasn't He in a sense forced all along to act out of a dependency on creation?

Let's take three of Chris's phrases and analyze them and then move toward a general answer

to His concern. And I'm not picking on Chris here, virtually everybody who asked this kind of

question, I think runs into these kinds of difficulties. So let's start with the phrase glorified,

without creation. He asked this, could God have been just as glorified without creation?

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