“Show Me Your Glory” by Steve Lawson
Theologians use a small word to describe one of God’s more profound attributes. The term ‘aseity’ has great implications for His character and for God’s people. Aseity combines two Latin words for ‘from and ‘self’ and means “to have being or existence within oneself. It means that God exists in Himself and possesses all that He needs within Himself. He is the all-sufficient Sustainer of His own being. He lacks nothing with Himself and needs nothing outside Himself. Yet, everyone and everything is dependent upon Him.”
Steve quotes R. C. Sproul definition, “God is self-sufficient. He has the power of being in and of Himself. He depends on nothing and no one for His existence.” I had the joy of hearing Dr. Sproul speak on this topic thirty years ago. He said that saying the term sends chills up and down his spine. The idea of anything in the universe having the ability to be truly independent of anything outside itself should amaze. At the end of his lecture, the crowd of several hundred people sat there spellbound. His words filled everyone with a deep awe of God.
Steve builds on Sproul’s teaching with these wonderful words about our great God. “He is beyond all the processes of space and time and is therefore immovable and unchanging. Without his all-sustaining presence, all creation and the laws of science would crumble. The universe would collapse without His sovereign and powerful cohesion of all order, all life, and all matter. His self-existence guarantees the existence of all else.” Scripture teaches this truth in Acts 17:28, “In Him we live and move and have our being” and Colossians 1:17, “He is before all things and in Him all things hold together.”
Please do not see this as a dry and dusty doctrine. This is about the essence of God’s character, as well as our physical and spiritual existence. “only God exists without beginning and maintains Himself by His own self-sustaining power. He is the uncaused first cause, the uncreated Creator, the unmade Maker, the unsustained Sustainer. No one upholds God. Nothing sustains Him. He is independent of everyone and autonomous from everything. Yet, all that He has made is – at every moment – dependent on Him for everything.”
His aseity calls God’s people to declare their dependence on Him and rests in His perfect, self-sustaining character. In this time of pandemic we need His aseity!