Divine Aseity

The third installment in our explainer video series examines God's incommunicable attribute of "Divine Aseity."

Our full explainer video series on the incommunicable attributes of God can be viewed on our Clearly Reformed YouTube channel. Click To Watch Now

Transcript

The first attribute of God we encounter in the Bible is God’s self-existence. We meet God as Creator—that’s obvious. But we also meet him in his aseity. The word aseity comes from Latin: *a* meaning “from” and *se* meaning “self.”

Divine aseity means God exists in and of himself. He is before all things, and on him all things depend. He exists absolutely independent of anything or anyone. Think about the first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.” These opening words are more than an introduction to Genesis, or to the Pentateuch, or even an introduction to the whole Bible. These opening words introduce the entire history of the universe. They give us an entire way of seeing, understanding, and inhabiting our world. They tell us the origin of all things and the end for which God created all things.

In the beginning, there was God. Actually, even before there was a beginning, there was God. Genesis is about the beginning of everything except for God. He always has been, always is, and always will be. God is God. There is nothing else and no one else who compares with him.

God doesn’t get lonely or bored or scared. He doesn’t need anything from anyone. He is the great *I Am*. In other words, the Bible starts with the God who never started.

The Bible’s opening sentence is important, not only for what it says but for what it does not say. There is no preface before the first verse, no background material before the action gets started in Genesis. There is nothing about a struggle among the gods and goddesses—those stories were common in ancient Near Eastern mythology. There is nothing in Genesis 1 about God needing something or someone. There is nothing about pre-existent matter that God then shapes and forms. The story you and I inhabit is a story that has God as its author, its object, and its center.

God doesn’t enter into the story, because he is the story. God’s independence and self-existence are assumed throughout the Bible. Jesus tells us that the Father has life in himself and has granted the Son also to have life in himself (John 5:26). Likewise, Moses prays, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Ps. 90:1–2).

Paul reminds us that we live and move and have our being in God (Acts 17:28), not the other way around. In a world that constantly tells us to “express ourselves” and “find ourselves,” and sometimes even to “create ourselves,” we must remember that only God has life in himself, only God exists of himself, and only God owes his being to no one and nothing. Only God possesses aseity.

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.