God is the source of all reason and morality, humans can only go so far afoul of God’s standards before the consequence of His perfect being silences them and squashes them. This makes ultimate ethical standards fixed, not subject to the changing winds of culture, not situational, or an expedient maxim for determining our next selfish impulse. The moral order of the universe is tethered to a perfectly moral God and all ethical understanding bears the imprint of His character. Which means, that if I am going to experience growth in righteousness, sanctification in my behavior, then it can only happen in the pursuit and chase of God. Christians do not improve themselves by working on themselves. They grow in grace and righteousness by drawing closer to the creator, whose spotless morality is a necessary feature of His being.

“The Christian is either strong or weak depending upon how closely he has cultivated the knowledge of God.” – A.W. Tozer

As John Calvin once said in the Institutes, all wisdom comes from the knowledge of God and the knowing of self. Between the two, the most needful knowledge of all is certainly the knowledge of God. Without this knowledge, we cannot even know ourselves. Which means, if we are not familiar with who God is, we cannot know who we are, and we will be doomed to repeat our confusions forever.
This teaches us something very instructive. To know anything rightly at all, anything under the sun, we must know God truly and rightly. We must know Him as He is, which cannot be done exhaustively by any stretch of the imagination. We may try peering down into the celestial caverns of His maximal infinitudes, straining to comprehend increasing degrees of knowledge, but, we will never understand the LORD as He understands Himself. We cannot and will not.
Yet, in spite our limitations, God in His grace has allowed us to understand Him truly. He has allowed us to gain real knowledge, while not omniscient, is true and accurate to who He is. That is what we are aiming at today.
Like all of the attributes of God, we will learn something about Him as we endeavor to study them. Take for instance, God’s holiness. In that great doctrine we learn that God is of such immense purity and otherness, that His presence is dangerous to us (Isaiah 6:5) without the help of a mediator. As we study God’s love, He begin to see the limitless reservoir of His care for His covenant people (1 John 4:16). In His wrath, an oft avoided attribute of God, we see both His holiness and His care wed together in perfect fury against the rebellion of man (Romans 1:18). Quite simply, His attributes teach us who our God is and allows us to behold Him in truth.
This is especially important, when looking at unfamiliar attributes, or the ones we may have trouble understanding, such as the aseity of God. It may not seem essential, however, to the average believer, to study such an ethereal doctrine with such an esoteric title. But to the degree that a Christian understands the aseity of God will be to the degree one may know Him. Thus, as all of His attributes behooves us to study,  today we will narrow our focus onto His Aseity, not to gain more knowledge to store away in the head, but to gain the more of Him. To know Him better, to love Him more passionately, and to serve Him more faithfully.
What is the Aseity of God?
When theologians talk about the Aseity of God, they are speaking about His independence. Unlike every other contingent being who is dependent upon causation to come into existence, God needs none of that. He exists because He determined it to be so. He is in need of no outside force or will to create Him, or sustain Him, He does those things timelessly for Himself, which put Him in a class all by Himself.
This is precisely why the Christian Church may sing on Sunday morning: “there is no one like our God.” Because, when we do, we are acknowledging the clear and obvious fact, that nothing in heaven or on earth can rival Him, nothing is His equal, He has aseity.
This fact alone is enough to make our hearts leap in praise and to sing of His matchless power, which is the goal of all theology. Theology was never intended to produce a class of lifeless nerds who pine away in libraries. Theology was meant to produce musicians, composers, congregations of voices shouting to our God, with pastors at the helm leading the worshippers to Zion. But, there is still so much more!
Five Additional Aspects of Aseity
1) God’s Aseity is Foundational
Among all of God’s attributes, it can be argued that aseity is fundamental. This is because it is the attribute that serves as the cornerstone for understanding all of His other attributes (like His love, mercy, grace, and justice). Think about it this way, if God were a contingent being like you and I, having both an origin and a cause, then all of His attributes would be subject to the same limitations as ours. He would be beholden to space and time and His attributes would have limits placed upon them that could be exhausted, overridden, or resisted. Along with that, a “god” who is subject to limitation – of any kind – is also capable of change, whether that means change in time such as decay or death, or change in space such as changing allegiances, motivations, or goals. With that it is simple, the only way you get a God, who is perfect in love, maximal in mercy, inexhaustible in benevolence, unlimited in kindness, immutable in regard to change, or insatiable in divine fury and justice is if that God has no cause and derives His existence from Himself alone. He must be free of any temporal constructs such as beginnings, middles, and ends. And He must be free of any limitations upon His person and instead able to perfectly and forever sustain Himself from within Himself. To say that differently, your God must have aseity in order to love you perfectly and to save you truly.
Exodus 3:14; Psalm 90:2; John 5:26.
2) God’s Aseity and Necessity
The attribute of aseity not only positions God as self-existent and independent but also reinforces the notion that His existence is essential and necessary.  In philosophical terms, God is not a contingent being (one that might or might not have existed), but a necessary one – His existence is a fundamental aspect of all existence. This means that God is not an optional or accidental being, but rather one whose existence is mandatory for all reality. To say that most simply, He must necessarily exist for anything else to even have the possibility of existing.
This necessity is also crucial in understanding other attributes of God and why we see these attributes alive and manifesting in the world. For instance, His love, justice, and grace are not contingent characteristics that merely result from His will; they are necessary characteristics and essential parts of His nature. God’s love is necessary and eternal, without which there could be no love in the world.
Read More
Related Posts:

It is not age-old wisdom, but credentialed expertise that engenders our trust nowadays. We take our cue not from grandpa and grandma and their advice of “a little bourbon on the gums,” but from experts in psychology and sociology penning peer-reviewed studies that tell us obvious, common-sense verities.

Several years ago my wife and I attended a party composed mostly of DINK (dual incomes, no kids) urbanites. We acknowledged to a pregnant woman and her husband that we had two children at home under the age of three. The wife, an expectant first-time mother, expressed her grave fears about crying babies, and confessed that she had spent hours searching for all the right videos she could show her newborn on her iPad to entertain or distract. Jokingly, I responded: “Well, what else can one do?” She, misunderstanding, nodded in solemn agreement.
Call me late to the party, but I just got around to reading Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 best-seller The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, based on the authors’ viral 2015 Atlantic article. It is a decent book, identifying three terrible ideas popular among young Americans: we are fragile human beings who need to be protected from all pain or discomfort; that we should unequivocally trust our emotions; and that life is a battle between categorically good and evil people. Lukianoff and Haidt even offer some solid practical solutions to address these problems.
But as I read Coddling of the American Mind, I kept thinking of that nervous millennial couple clutching their electronic devices, trusting that technology and technocratic expertise, and not inherited wisdom, was the key to perfect parenting. Lukianoff and Haidt identify trends among American youth stemming from that parental faith in technology as something that can protect their children from harm, or, heaven forbid, anything that might curb future academic and professional success.
“On average, eighteen-year-olds today have spent less time unsupervised and have hit fewer developmental milestones on the path to autonomy (such as getting a job or a driver’s license), compared with eighteen-year-olds in previous generations,” they write. Smartphones and social media have in turn dramatically altered the way American children spend their time and the types of physical and social experiences that guide their development (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The results are alarming, to say the least. “Children deprived of free play are likely to be less competent — physically and socially — as adults. They are likely to be less tolerant of risk, and more prone to anxiety disorders.”
Members of iGen have far higher rates of anxiety and depression, and the suicide rate of adolescent girls has doubled since 2007. Many experts claim frequent use of smartphones and other electronic devices are the primary cause of that increase in mental illness. Add to that paranoid helicopter parenting (“safetyism”) that restricts children’s exposure to danger or ability to “develop their intrinsic antifragility,” and it is little wonder our universities have descended into hotbeds of emotive, activist outrage, prone to violent hysterics when confronted with any perceived threats to students’ well-being.
Lukianoff and Haidt offer many practical solutions for modern parents, most of which are aimed at restraining their protectionist tendencies and letting kids explore the world, encounter ideas different than their own, and even (gasp!) fail.
Read More
Related Posts:

It is Satan who would have Jesus to be something other than the king he is really meant to be. And straight away we can begin to see what is at stake in Mark 8. This passage is incredibly relevant today because it gives us a picture of the issues that have always been at stake when it comes to the son of man. People have always wanted to make him into the king that they want, the king who stands in direct parallel and therefore opposition to earthly kings. But what must be realized over and over again throughout history is that while Jesus is parallel to earthly kings, he is not the same as any earthly king. He is absolutely different, and it is satanic to suggest that he can simply be like an earthly king using earthly powers.

This is a somber article to write, simply because its issues are very close to home. January 6th has just passed, a second anniversary of when rioters stormed our nation’s Capitol building, something that continues to be a highly politically charged issue, still being investigated today. Nor is the issue limited to the United States, as Brazil suddenly attests.
Why is this relevant in an article about Mark 8:27-38? Why is this important? It is important because Jesus’s words, his exchange with Peter in this passage, speak to the issues of how Christians should see ourselves in the midst of revolutionary situations when we possess of limited human powers, the questions of what we should do and think about Jesus and his kingdom in its relationship to kingdoms of this world. Of course, Mark 8 will not be the final and exclusive word on these questions—other passages must be brought into the mix as well. Nor is this article at all intended to be the final word on how Mark 8 is understood. But what I hope to do is at least alert readers to some things Jesus says here, very relevant to us, as we ponder how Christians should think and act when it comes to the power of governments and the way Christians respond.
And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him. And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:27–38, ESV)
Here Peter proclaims that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ. Here he makes his famous grand statement about who Jesus is. But what comes next exposes Peter’s misunderstanding of what his own confession actually means. To the extent that we may share Peter’s misunderstanding, this passage powerfully challenges us to reflect further.
Note the way Jesus responds to Peter. He affirms the good part of what Peter has to say. And this is an affirmation we must hear too. But he also challenges Peter, a challenge that must be heard loud and clear, a challenge to the wrong ways of thinking about Messiah and kingdom. Only as we fully understand who Jesus is, not just potential “political revolutionary” but as the true king, can we understand all this in its fullness, appreciating what we must do also.
A strong case can be made that the whole of Mark’s Gospel is about the identity of Jesus. This book is written to suffering Christians living through Nero’s persecutions in the 1st century, Christians having to wrestle with how they will respond not just to the general vague suffering that surrounds them, but also to the suffering that occurs via the power of the political regime over them. Even as the Christians suffered under the hands of this great tyrant, they were wrestling to understand how their leader, their ruler Jesus, would be greater than Nero and yet not like him at all.
Our story begins all the way back at the beginning of Mark with a discussion of how Jesus will be the king envisioned by the prophet Isaiah, a king who does not rule over simply a worldly Kingdom, but instead a king who rules over an eternal Kingdom, yet paradoxically an eternal kingdom that is already here. But Jesus rules this already-present kingdom not with an iron fist but with gentleness.   Isaiah 41 says he will not break a bruised reed, not snuff out a smoldering wick. This is Jesus the powerful and yet compassionate king. Isaiah 40 indicates he leads captives back gently, leading those who carry their young quietly, close to his breast.
The picture of Jesus is the picture of a great and yet compassionate king, unlike Nero in every way. But as well as being great and compassionate, he is also a king who suffers. The disciples had been trying to understand and needed to understand that Jesus is all of these things – and therefore the kingdom that he rules must be like this as well.
As we reach Mark 8:27-38, we have come to the climax of Mark’s gospel. This exchange is the middle of the book, not just spatially, but conceptually, the place where everything comes to a head. Immediately preceding this passage, Jesus heals a blind man, something that will recur in 10:45.
Read More
Related Posts: