We need to be reminded of God’s aseity because we are often guilty of using our own characteristics and experiences as the template for understanding the attributes of God. This can make God seem just like one of us, if we were able to keep our New Year’s resolutions. But that is not God. Our God is not like the gods of Greece and Rome who needed man to feed them and serve them. Our God does not look to our prayers or sacrifices to determine how to direct our lives or who to bless. Our God is in a class of His own.

The answer to Hamlet’s famous question “To be or not to be?” is simple for God. God can only “be.” He is “I am,” meaning He exists infinitely and independent of anything, without beginning or end, as the source and sustainer of all things. There has never been a time where God has not existed in and of Himself. This is known as the aseity of God.

Aseity is not a word that will appear in your Bible’s index, but the concept can be found throughout its pages. Moses declares in Psalm 90:2 that, “from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” Job 41:11 reminds us that God owes us nothing because God owns everything. Jesus affirmed his equality with God in John 5 by saying that both the Father and the Son have life in themselves. In Acts 17:25, Paul explains to the men of Athens that God is not “served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” And in Romans 11:36, he insists that, “from him and through him and to him are all things.”

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