What is the aseity of God?

God, and God only, has self-being. He is the "I am," and so speaks of Himself. He is the Most High, the Almighty, and the Eternal, and thus made His name known in due time; and He alone can rightly say "I will."

There is, and in the very nature of things there can be, only one First Cause of everything. There is such a One — the living and true God. He is self-existent, never had a beginning, eternal; never ending, everlasting; the only One infinite in power, and therefore answerable to no one, knowing no check or hindrance to His will or action except that of His own character and essential goodness and truth.

God is self-existent. There never was a beginning of Deity, and that is where the human mind fails. Tell me of a life that is never to end, and I can understand it; but when a self-existent One is put before me it is beyond my grasp. Man cannot grasp an effect without a cause.

God alone is sufficient for Himself. He requires nothing outside Himself to make His happiness supreme. The creation, which is the work of His hands, has added nothing to His happiness. He brought it into existence for His own pleasure. But that fact does not prove that He could not have done without it… it could not increase His happiness, for all that He saw in it was, as far as it went, the reflection of Himself, and by it nothing was added to the infinite wealth of joy that lay in Himself.

Supreme above all, it is only in this way that He can be near to all; not living in temples made with hands, which shut Him in and keep Him apart; nor served by human hands, as if He were in need. Sufficient to Himself, He is the Source and Centre of all; life and breath and all things are only His gift. So no one can make Him his debtor, or give Him anything except what is already His own.

Jehovah is the living and unchanging God, acting from Himself as independent of all else, finding in Himself the sufficient reason for what He does. So no consideration of man has to come in to hinder the fullest blessing for him. If man came in, it would only be to hinder God acting from Himself, for the glory of His Name. His purpose stands.

It is clear that no creature can continue in truth except in absolute dependence on God… It has lost its place as a creature if it is not in the truth of it. The first principle of its being is that dependence… so the moment it has made itself independent in will (in fact it cannot), it has falsified its existence — morally its existence is a lie, opposed to the truth of the condition by which alone it exists. So dependence alone is the truth of any creature.

"Life in Himself" stands for life that is inherent, uncaused, unsustained by any outside power, from eternity to eternity. It is the affirmation of Deity. Only God can possess this life. In the nature of things it cannot be shared with another outside the Godhead.

If He were not sovereignly supreme to maintain Himself while displaying His character and work, what could a poor ruined creature do? But when I look at His Being, self-existent, and at His power, and character, and works, even I can say: there is no refuge for the ruined creature like the one in the unruined Creator.