This one is a bit "thick" but still excellent as far as the order of God's relationship to the universe truly is....
If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may
love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If
He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we
need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man,
as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act
of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of
God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who
but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and
is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to
know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But
to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the
wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to
our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form
false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role
must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to
light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not
initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory
form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our
conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as
it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.
From The Problem of Pain
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