Behold your God: “God, having all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of Himself, is alone in and unto Himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creature which He hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting His own glory in, by, unto, and upon them; He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things.” (Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, 1689, 2:2). 

The Living and True God

Our God is the living God. Some people say, ‘If God made everything, who made God?’ But that fails to take into account the most fundamental theological distinction: God is the Creator and everything else that exists is his creation. The existence of all other things is derivative and dependent. The Lord God has life in himself. He did not derive his existence from any other source. He is dependent on nothing. God had no beginning and will have no end. He simply exists, Hebrews 11:6. If the one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit owed his existence to another being, then that being would be the supreme God than whom none greater can be thought or imagined. We confess, 1 Corinthians 8:5-6.

That God is the Living One with life in himself is revealed in his divine Name disclosed to Moses at the burning bush. That the bush seen by Moses was ablaze, yet not consumed is suggestive of the Lord’s self-existence. This was appropriate for the one whose name was revealed to Moses as,  ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (Exodus 3:14), or Yahweh. Pagans believed that gods were fed and sustained by offerings of their worshippers. Not so the Yahweh, Psalm 50:12-15. Acts 14:15, 17:24-25, 19:26-27. God doesn’t need us, or anything from us. We can add nothing to him. He is perfectly fulfilled in the fulness of his divine life as one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Lord is the living God who speaks and saves, Deuteronomy 5:26. He showed himself the living God when arose to defend his outnumbered people and defeated their enemies against all odds, 1 Samuel 17:26, 36. 2 Kings 19:4, 16. The Living God is the object of people’s longing, Psalm 42:2, Jeremiah 2:13. Even Pagans acknowledged Israel’s Lord the living God, Daniel 6:20, 26. The gospel proclaimed by the apostles had this effect, 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10. The atoning work has this end in view, Heb 9:14.

The God who gives life

Did not create the universe to satisfy some need in himself, or as fuel for his existence. God is not in a process of becoming that is dependent on the evolution of the universe. He chose to create all things simply to display his wisdom, power, goodness and glory.

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