The Aseity of God

As true followers of our Lord Jesus Christ, we serve an amazing God. Truly there’s no one like Him. As a result, our response to Him should be fear, joy, love, and undivided worship. The best way to know God is through His Word—the Bible. In it, we learn about His perfections, which is just another way of talking about His characteristics or His attributes. The first one is His aseity.

In John 5:26, Jesus told the religious leaders a profound statement about God. He said, “for just as the Father has life in Himself, even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself...” In that verse, Jesus revealed one of the greatest truths about God: He has life in Himself. In other words, it’s God’s ability to exist without any dependence on anything outside of Himself for His existence. This is hard for us humans to grasp since we are so utterly dependent.

The word “aseity” is from a Latin word that means “from itself.” This means that God is self-existing. He has no beginning. He did not come into existence. He just is. He shares this perfection with no other creature, and no other creature can say they can impart life, let alone say they are self-existing. This perfection belongs to God alone.

What follows that reality is that God is the source of life. Since He is Life, God is the author of it. He created all things in six literal days and filled all of creation with creatures and gave them life. Unfortunately, there is a false teaching that the world teaches today that posits that life does not come from God. Instead, it comes from a “big bang” that happened billions of years ago. As time moved along over millions of years and through a series of macroevolutionary events, we see creation as we know it today. But the Bible makes it clear that, “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1)” without the aid of anything outside Himself.

Not only is God self-existing (that is, He depends on nothing outside Himself for His existence, nor did life come from anything or anyone except from God), but He also sustains life. In Colossians 1:17, Paul said that, “in Him (referring to Christ) all things hold together.” Right now, our God is making sure that His universe does not become unraveled and that His creation stays intact, and the means He uses to accomplish that is His Word, the very means He used to bring all of life into existence.

So be amazed at your God. He is truly incomparable. Get to know Him more through the reading of the Bible. In the months to come, we will look at some of His other perfections to get to know Him better.

FOR FURTHER STUDY: Exodus 3:14; Psalm 90:2; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Hebrews 1:3; Revelation 4:11