Aseity

God is entirely other. All that we understand is insufficient to describe the nature of the God. We have adopted verbage to attempt to do justice to our collective understanding of God, describing but never explaining. Orthodoxy has taken great care in the discussion of the Godhead, the nature, essence, or Ontology, of God.

We know first of all that God is uncreated; “There is not reality beyond Himself to which He owes His being [Bounds].” We know this principal as Divine Aseity. In the ancient world, that existed after the fall, there was a prevalence of acceptance that a god existed. Many civilizations believed in many gods, most of which were fickle, and limited in power. These mythic gods often bore god-children among each other, and grew to and lost power in the heavens. When we look at the one true God, that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, we see that God is not born of another being, or that He is not derived from a substance that predated Him, but is in fact uncreated.

Due to His Aseity we know that He does not depend on any other being for His existence. We know this idea as Divine Independence. I believe that there is truly one, and only one God that exists. I refute the ideas of polytheism, which would require other gods to exist, and I also refute henotheism. God is not merely the greatest of gods among gods, He is the only; this doctrine is known as Divine Oneness. In fact there is a series of Scripture verses that were threaded together by early Jews called the Shema; Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Deuteronomy 11:13-21, and Numbers 15:37-41. My Freshman year of college I set myself upon the task of memorizing some sections of Scripture; the first one being Psalm 139, and the second being the entirety of the Shema. The importance of the Shema was that it is the foundational text for the doctrine of Divine Oneness. We must remember the affirmation of this text that “The LORD our God, the Lord is one [Deuteronomy 6:4, NIV].” I needed to assert the Oneness of God as a precursory note to the Doctrine of the Trinity, in order to prevent confusion.

We also understand that God is living. What we know to be life is only a reflection of the Divine Life. “God's life is the eternal, un-derived energy of His being, enabling life, change, and movement in creation [Bounds].” What we know to be life is but a shadow of the true Life that is an ontological facet of the Godhead.

One of the most precious facets of God is His infinity. We understand that space and time are merely constructs of God, a skeleton upon which to create all that we know. When we begin to look at the ontology of God we must understand that God exists outside of, as well as within time. It is pertinent to know that God cannot be circumscribed, He transcends all spacial relations, making Him both transcendent, and immanent; which we call the Immensity of God. We know that time and space are created by God and that He is not bound to them (immensity), we also know that God was never created but always existed (aseity), He is currently alive, and we understand that God will always exist into the future; all of this to say I have built a case that God is eternal in nature. God's Divine Eternality is a key principal to understanding the manor in which we speak of God. He has always existed, and will always exist - but how?