God’s Plentitude
One of my favorite doctrines to contemplate is the doctrine of God’s aseity. Divine aseity affirms that God is from himself (it derives from the Latin: the prefix a means “from,” and se means “self”). This doctrine is sometimes treated as synonymous with God’s independence, but that’s not the whole story. Granted, God is indeed independent, and this certainly follows from God’s aseity—God is not dependent on anyone or anything else for him to be God. He does not derive life or joy or meaning or anything from another. This is gloriously true. But to say that God is a se is to say more than that he is independent. Positively stated, aseity further clarifies that God is independent because he is the fullness of life. Theologians like to use the word “plentitude” when describing divine aseity, for good reason. “Plentitude” is a rich word—it makes us think of an over-the-top fullness, which moves us in the right direction.
In other words, it’s not simply true that God is in need of nothing, but rather that he is in need of nothing because he overflows with life. He spills over, everlastingly, with light and life and love. So, aseity is not just a negative doctrine—namely, a doctrine that says what God is by describing what he is not (like how immutability or infinity describes how God is not changeable or how he is not finite, respectively). Rather, aseity positively names God as boundless life. Divine aseity is not simply something we should affirm in theory; it is a divine attribute we should adore. Here are four reasons to love God’s aseity.
As part of the Contemplating God series, author Samuel G. Parkison offers an accessible and engaging exploration of divine aseity—God’s complete independence as the eternal plentitude of life—inviting readers to marvel at the wonders of the living God.
1. God’s Aseity Helps Us See His Bigness
Divine aseity is everywhere assumed in Holy Scripture. As far back as the creation account in Genesis, we can infer this doctrine. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). God created all that was not God out of nothing—ex nihilo, in Latin. To be a creation is to be created by a Creator. Another way of saying this is that to be created is to be dependent on God for existence. This may sound unnecessarily obvious, but sometimes we forget to be properly wowed by the obvious. If creation’s “trademark” is to be utterly dependent on its Creator for its existence, what does that imply for God and his existence? It implies that he, as the one who caused creation’s existence, is essentially and existentially independent of his creation and is the boundless source of his creation’s existence. We need him, but he does not at all need us.
This fact ought to fill us with gratitude, for if “the earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps. 24:1–2), what do we have that we have not received? We are, purely and exhaustively, recipients. All we do is receive, receive, receive, and our great Benefactor gives and gives and gives. It is all gift! Another way to say this is that creation has its being by participation in the likeness of its Creator. What God has in and of himself (life and being), creation has by gratuitous participation in God. Aseity, therefore, reinforces the all-important distinction that persists between the Creator and the creature. All our rightful recognition of God’s bigness, and our appropriate worship as a response, is predicated on this distinction between the Creator and the creature, which is why we should love God’s aseity.
2. God’s Aseity Invites Our Worship
This reason follows very naturally from the first. What could a meditation on God’s a se bigness do but call forth a posture of praise? Rightly understood, the contemplation of God’s aseity makes us familiar with the sentiment of Jonathan Edwards when he read 1 Timothy 1:17 as a young man. “To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” Recounting the experience of being moved by this passage, Edwards writes:
As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before. Never did any words of Scripture seem to me as these words did. I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to him in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him.1
In truth, there is nothing more practical than contemplating God, since this is the very thing we were created for as human beings. The “chief end [or purpose] of man,” says the Westminster Confession of Faith, “is to glorify God and fully to enjoy him forever.” If this is true, then taking time to be dumbstruck by the majesty and wonder of God’s aseity is not a distraction from practical living—it is material to the very purpose God made you for! To contemplate God is not a break from the real world; it is an exercise in reality. Contemplating God’s aseity invites our glad-hearted worship, and this is why we should love it.
It’s not simply true that God is in need of nothing, but rather that he is in need of nothing because he overflows with life.
3. God’s Aseity Fills Out Our Trinitarian Theology
As the story of Scripture unfolds, we learn that the God who created everything out of nothing and redeemed a people for himself from the family tree of Abraham is actually triune in nature: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one nature. To worship the Father is to worship the Father of the eternal Son and Spirit—one does not receive glory apart from the other two. Their “glory is equal, their majesty is co-eternal,” as the Athanasian Creed says.
What does all of this have to do with the doctrine of aseity? Everything! Remember, divine aseity affirms that God needs nothing because he is the plentitude of life and blessedness—he is the infinitely bursting forth reservoir of happiness that never stops pouring and never diminishes. His delight and contentment cannot wane because it is boundlessly radiant. Well, the doctrine of the Trinity helps us get how this Fire burns; how this Fountain pours; how this Light radiates. The doctrine of the Trinity is what makes the happy doctrine of aseity happy. To be God is to be infinite Love—Love of Father for Son, Love of Son for Father, Spirit as Love from Father and Son. In this way, our doctrine of the Trinity and our doctrine of divine aseity are mutually illuminating.
4. God’s Aseity Deepens Our Understanding of Salvation
All of this offers great clarity for us on what it means for us to experience eternal life in salvation. For God so loved the world,” says the beloved disciple, “that he gave his only [begotten] Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). How is it that “believing in the Son” can become a means for having “eternal life?” Such is fitting because the Son is he who has been given to have life in himself (cf., John 5:26). How is it that the Son can grant rivers of living water, which eternally satisfy our thirst for the life of God (cf., John 4:14, 7:37–39; Rev. 21:6)? Such is fitting because the Son is he who eternally breathes out the Spirit, whose presence causes the heart to “flow rivers of living water” (John 4:14). In other words, to be united by faith to Jesus Christ—the eternal Son in whom is life and light (John 1:4)—is to be united to eternal life. Our life is eternal by virtue of its share in the life of the Son, who is, as the Nicene Creed puts it, “God from God, Light from Light, very God from very God.” The sum of salvation is the creature’s coming to share, by grace, in the life that is God the Son’s by nature. What is his by nature becomes ours by the grace of adoption: the eternal life of sonship (cf. Gal. 4:4–7). Such affirmations almost feel too scandalous to say out loud! Could it really be this good? Yes, it can and it is.
So, let us not content ourselves with assenting intellectually to this doctrine of divine aseity as a dry and dusty effort to cross our theological “t”s and dot our theological “i”s. Contemplating this doctrine is not simply an academic exercise; it is a spiritual exercise of praise. Let us not merely affirm this doctrine; therefore, let us love it with everything we have.
Notes:
- Jonathan Edwards, Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, Volume 16: Letters and Personal Writings, George S. Claghorn (ed.), 792.
Samuel G. Parkison is the author of The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God.
