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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Written by Benjamin J. McFarland |
Friday, July 5, 2024
In the twentieth century, Lehman was given the third verse of “The Love of God” first as an act of grace, communicated globally and over centuries, not last as an instant and focused deus ex machina to his initial efforts. He held onto that third verse like a diamond in the rough. Then, when it was time, Lehman fashioned the two previous verses for the diamond’s setting.

I want to tell stories that reveal deep truths. I never want to “tell stories” in the sense of making stuff up. This May, during a devotional for our Faculty Senate meeting, I told my colleagues a story that I hoped was in the former category. And it was—once my colleague helped me see through the parts that were simply made up.
I told the story of how Fredrick M. Lehman and his daughter W.W. Mays wrote the hymn “The Love of God.” I drew from several sites on the internet that share how they had written the first two verses but were stuck needing a third, when it was provided in a remarkable way:
During their travels, the father/daughter team came across a German insane asylum. One of the prisoners had recently been put to death, and when the soldiers examined his cell afterwards they found the following words penciled onto the walls of his prison:
     ‘Could we with ink the ocean fill,     And were the skies of parchment made,     Were every stalk on earth a quill,     And every man a scribe by trade;     To write the love of God above,     Would drain the ocean dry.     Nor could the scroll contain the whole,     Though stretched from sky to sky.’
…  F.M. Lehman and his daughter were amazed—the words etched onto the walls of this asylum matched the rhythm of their new hymn perfectly. They inserted these words as the third and final verse of their hymn and published The Love of God by 1920.1
This miraculous story spoke to me of God providing through words scrawled on hidden walls. All of us in higher education, experiencing turbulent times with more turbulence ahead, need to be reminded of God’s provision. This image promised that God would provide for our needs, even through eccentric means. So I told it.
Yet some elements of the story nagged at me. Its cited source is a 1950 journal for pastors, not likely to have rigorous historical peer review. The poem itself was reasonably attributed to an eleventh-century Hebrew source from Germany, so could it have been passed down locally to a prisoner almost a thousand years later?
But then, why would it be written on a German wall in an English translation that precisely fit the meter of the other two verses? And how could Lehman and his daughter travel to Germany, when he had “lost everything in business and found himself working manual labor in a California packing house”?2 It didn’t add up. As I told the story to my colleagues, I mentioned my skepticism, which now ameliorates my embarrassment at repeating a story that turned out to be too glib and too easy. The truth of how God worked was much bigger than that story allowed.
Immediately after the meeting, my friend Steve Perisho found me. Steve is SPU’s Librarian for Theology, Philosophy, and History, and we were co-leading a reading group on Gregory of Nyssa. Steve is the consummate librarian: He obtained for our group not just a few reference works on Gregory of Nyssa, but an entire shelf-full of books including the massive 10-volume Lexicon Gregorianium. Steve knows how to trace a story back to its source.
I thought Steve would offer to investigate the loose ends of the story. Instead, Steve had already investigated them (Steve works fast). We would continue to pull on the loose ends to reveal a more complicated truth that, even after a lot of work, is still incomplete.
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If Christians are to truly take advantage of the disruption in state-run education, much will depend on the training and formation of teachers. Well-trained teachers educate. Indoctrinated teachers indoctrinate. Thus, Christian educators have an incredible opportunity right now to make a difference in this culture. A few years ago, the Colson Center, in partnership with the Association of Christian Schools International, developed Colson Educators, a set of Christian worldview training and formation resources for Christian educators.

The list of reasons for parental rebellion against public education has grown long in recent years. From trans ideology to DEI curriculum to the constant push for activism, many public school classrooms are more committed to indoctrination than instruction.  
Though recently intensified, the ideological push to reject objective truth and teach social conformity is not new. Karl Marx promoted removing children from families and enrolling them in state education. Adolf Hitler targeted youth with social propaganda well before the beginning of World War II. And for decades, the heavily federally funded Planned Parenthood has monopolized sex education, teaching risky behavior, abortion, birth control, and LGBTQ theory under taxpayers’ noses and with their dollars.  
More recently, even as reading, writing, and math scores plummeted, classrooms and libraries have been stocked with radically sexualized books with no other educational value other than to … radically sexualize kids. Students are forced to comply with the latest “trans equality” efforts and punished if they do not. Third through 5th graders are given “anti-racist reading lists,” and The 1619 Project, which redefined the founding of America as entirely slave-based and racist, boasts that “thousands of teachers across every state” use their content.  
This last point may be the most significant. 
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