Today I posted on God’s aseity at Out of the Ordinary. Here’s an excerpt:
Aseity is an old word an uncommon one, even in lists of God’s attributes, where you’ll more often find self-existence, self-sufficiency, self-containment, independence, or solitariness used to describe this characteristic of God. But these words don’t all mean exactly the same thing, at least as I understand them. I prefer to to use aseity, because it describes this particular perfection of God more precisely than any one of the other words, and includes within it everything they mean and more.
Aseity comes from the Latin a se, meaning “from or by oneself.” To say that God is a se tells us that he exists wholly “from himself.” There is nothing else that causes God to exist; rather, he exists uncaused, “by the necessity of His own Being,” to quote Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology. In other words, he is eternally self-sustained and he can’t not exist. Our God, scripture tells us, “has life in himself”(John 5:26).
The first scriptural evidence of God’s aseity is found at the very beginning of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Creation, we’re told, has a beginning: “In the beginning” when God created. But not so with God. He was there before the beginning, when there was nothing but him, existing eternally in all his perfection from himself and by himself.
I plan to be back later with this week’s post on The Discipline of Grace. It should have been posted yesterday, but wasn’t, partly because of The Great Yukon-Wide Communications Black-Out of 2012 and partly because I was too busy. My internet connectivity has been spotty again this morning, so if you don’t see this post from me later today, that might be the reason.