In our ongoing consideration of the attributes of God, we noted that God is the uncaused first Cause. Either someone or something was prior to everything, and, if we say it was something, we begin everything and everyone from an origin of non-intelligence, and that’s a very big pill to swallow. Logically, philosophically, scientifically, and biblically, that pill won’t go down at all.
Biblically, the position of Genesis 1:1 is in place. God, the intelligent Person behind it all, was responsible for having created the universe, consisting of intelligent, biological life and non-intelligent matter in its various forms. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The subsequent verses in Genesis 1 detail how and when God created the remainder of our world. All of this preexistence of our Creator refers to Him as the uncaused first Cause. And this very designation presupposes certain other things about the Deity. His self-existence is clearly in view, which is reflected in His very name of L-0-R-D, LORD, in the Hebrew “Yaweh or Jehovah”, and this is the meaning of the “I AM” that God famously explained to Moses in Exodus 3. It is the Hebrew grammatical form of the verb “to be”, and it reflects God’s constant being. He is not the “I was” or the “I will be”, but the ever constant, eternal “I AM”. And, it also conveys the notion that God is because of Himself, that is, the self-existent One. Nobody we know, and certainly no “thing”, exists because of itself, but God does, and He is the only One who does. And, because God is because He is, He must also be self-sufficient to Himself.
Self-existence and self-sufficiency are related. His self-sufficiency means God is able to meet all the needs He has from within Himself. There is nothing outside of Himself that He is in any wise dependent upon, and this is, of course, so utterly unlike us. We are all profoundly dependent upon everything outside ourselves. For starters, think of oxygen. We are all radically dependent upon an outside source for every single breath we take. All our food and water sources are not from within us but from outside us. Minute by minute, we constantly sustain our life by utilizing sources outside ourselves.
It is not so with the Deity. God is both self-existent and self-sufficient. He who always was and always will be remains the independent One who has no needs He cannot and does not meet from within His own Person.
Then, why did God create anything? Revelation 4 reveals that. God created simply because He was pleased to do so. He did not need angels or human but chose of His freewill to bring them and all else into creation, along with time and space in which they would exist. No necessity compelled Him. God’s self-existence and His self-sufficiency are simply two more very profound attributes separating God from man.
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