The doctrine of aseity tells us that God’s decision to create cannot be because of any deficiency in God. He didn’t need the universe in order to be happy. He wasn’t lonely without us! So, why create? God’s creation of the universe—and human beings—must be the abundant, joyful, gracious overflow of his goodness and kindness. What an amazing thought! God’s creation must be a result of his joyful delight to share and display his glory in all the universe and with all his creatures!

God’s Aseity
The first time I heard the word aseity was while sitting in a seminary class at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School with Dr. D. A. Carson. He was my advisor during my seminary years, and I heard Dr. Carson say many times: “I’ve learned over the years that my students don’t remember everything I teach them . . . but they do tend to remember what I am most excited about!” God’s aseity was a doctrine that I still remember Dr. Carson being excited to teach!
God’s aseity refers to God being eternally and completely “of himself.” The word comes from the Latin. It’s a compound word made up of two smaller words: “a” (from) and “-se” (self). To talk about the aseity of God, then, is to say that God is from and of himself. He is completely self-originating and dependent on nothing other than himself.
When we’re talking about God’s aseity, we are referring to the way that God has existed from eternity past completely independently of anything else—completely “of himself”—and therefore satisfied and delighted in himself. It goes without saying that this is not a “communicable” attribute of God (humans don’t share this attribute with God!). Now, here’s how I found this doctrine connecting with other systematic theological categories.
What does God’s aseity mean for the creation of the world?
I remember learning about creation (Genesis 1–2) in a Sunday school class when I was probably 6 or 7 years old. One of the kids asked the Sunday school teacher, “Why did God make Adam and Eve?” I remember her answering something like this: “God made Adam and Eve because he was ‘lonely’ and he wanted people to be with him and be his friends.”
Is that correct? Why would God choose to create the universe and human beings?
The doctrine of aseity tells us that God’s decision to create cannot be because of any deficiency in God. He didn’t need the universe in order to be happy. He wasn’t lonely without us! So, why create?
God’s creation of the universe—and human beings—must be the abundant, joyful, gracious overflow of his goodness and kindness. What an amazing thought! God’s creation must be a result of his joyful delight to share and display his glory in all the universe and with all his creatures!
What does God’s aseity mean for the salvation of sinners?
In Genesis 3, God could have been justifiably done with humanity! Adam and Eve had been living in the Garden of Eden, walking with God, enjoying his creation and stewarding it, and living in perfect fellowship with their Creator. And in that terrible moment, they listened to the lies of Satan and rebelled against the word of their good God. God could have wiped humanity from the earth, but he doesn’t do that.
Instead, we get Genesis 3:15, the protoevangelion or “first gospel.” God looks far into the future and promises that Eve’s seed—his own Son—will crush the head of the serpent and destroy Satan, sin, and death for his sinful people! The question is Why?
I want to suggest that the doctrine of God’s aseity gives us only one answer: God does this out of his sheer delight in demonstrating his grace! It’s the joyful overflow of God’s demonstration of this aspect of his character: his mercy and grace.
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You don’t need something extraordinary. God can use anyone, in spite of their abilities, gifting, talents, intelligence, and appearance. Men and women in Scripture weren’t great because they possessed the X-factor but because they served a great God. You don’t need to be anything other than a broken yet dependant vessel, to see the Lord at work in your life.

God always uses foolish and weak instruments. He uses broken vessels. Put differently, he doesn’t depend on our strength or abilities.
History Celebrates Great People
History is crafted by the inspirational tales of men and women who have done and achieved extraordinary things. There are heroes and heroines in almost all vocations of life. Men and women who defied the odds stacked against them. These people became number one, receiving acclaim and being recognised as superior to their peers. 
In philosophy we read about men like Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. Coming to science we meet men like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin. Touching sports we are told about men like Pele, the great Brazilian soccer player. In boxing, names like Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr (Muhammad Ali) echo through time. Political history upholds and reveres men like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. From the entertainment industry we see history presents us with musicians like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Diana Ross, and Aretha Franklin. This is to name just some of the heroes and heroines of history.
What Makes People Successful or Special?
All of the above mentioned people are thought to have had the X-factor. It is believed these people are in the history records precisely because they possessed something not inherent in other people. No one seems to know exactly what this X-factor is. And everyone has their own idea of what this extraordinary something is. So we’re told that we don’t know what it is, but when we encounter it we’ll know. It is that undefined something special. 
The world is at pains to constantly discover people with this extraordinary quality. That’s why we have programmes like The X-factor, Pop Idols, Master Chef, and The Apprentice on our televisions. People are persistently seeking to discover the next Michael Jackson. They long to unearth the next Usain Bolt.
Almost every parent fancies their child or children to belong in this group of people. From the time we are born, we are subjected to immense pressure to prove ourselves. Each of us believes that we’re destined to write our names in the history books.
Culture Enshrines Excellence
The truth is, like the ancient Greek nation, we live in the times of a worldwide cult. The cult of hero worship. A prevalent idol of our culture and generation is hero worshipping. In Greek mythology the Greeks had heroes such Hercules, Achilles and, Perseus, to name a few. Like them we live in a culture that creates heroes and then worships them. The naive admiration of these idolised philosophers, politicians, athletes, and musicians has elevated them to the status of superhuman. Unwittingly, we regard certain figures as demigods.
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The particular men that we fear or people that we seek to please may vary. But the temptation to do so is universal. And the Bible places a sharp antithesis between seeking the approval of men and seeking the approval of God. As Paul says in Galatians 1:10, “For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

A week or so ago, I was observing the way that certain Christians write, preach, and engage on social media, and a phrase came to mind that I’d picked up from conversations about race in America. The phrase was “the white gaze.” Popularized by novelist Toni Morrison, the concept has to do with one’s default reader or observer, the idealized audience for which someone writes. Black authors writing under the white gaze feel constrained to adapt to the assumptions of white readers, which are taken to be normative. As the entry in Wikipedia puts it, “Various authors of color describe it as a voice in their heads that reminds them that their writing, characters, and plot choices are going to be judged by white readers, and that the reader or viewer, by default, is white.”
Morrison once wrote, “What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free?” No doubt he is suffocated and strangled by the pressure.
I thought about the concept, because it seems to me that many Christians write, speak, and act under “the progressive gaze.” That is, the default unbeliever, before whom we live and move and have our being, is presumed to be urban, liberal, and progressive, and thus, we write and speak in such a way that our words (we think) will have maximum persuasive power to them.
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