God Doesn't Need You: The Good News of the Only Begotten Son’s Aseity

The doctrine of God’s aseity is a simple assertion that God has no source outside of Himself. He needs nothing and depends on nothing. This means that while everything else depends on our Triune God, those things cannot add to or take away from Him because they came from Him.

So how then do we make sense of the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son? If God has no source outside of Himself, how can the Son find His “source" in the Father? Two points here. First is the simple assertion that like begets like. My daughter Collins is just as much a human being as I am a human being. In the same way, God the Son is just as much God as God the Father is, which is the clear teaching of the Nicene Creed. Next, while creatures beget in time, when we speak of the Father begetting the Son, we are speaking of an eternal, timeless relational truth. God the Father has always been the Father because He has always begotten the Son. They are two distinct persons, who with the Spirit, each give subsistence (a fancy way of speaking about how a person provides existence to a being) to the one being of God.
 
A key text for this discussion is John 5:26. The Father grants the Son (begotteness) to have life in Himself (aseity). While being relationally distinct, the Father and the Son each have life in Themselves because They are each the one true God. If Son was a distinct being from the Father, He wouldn't have life in Himself. He would have life from another.

Hopefully you're still with me. A lot of theology in a few paragraphs. Why does this matter? Because it means that God doesn’t need you. Because the Father and the Son (and the Spirit!) have eternal life in themselves and have eternally loved each other, you don’t have anything to offer Them. They have everything a being could need or want in Themselves. In his book on aseity titled The Fountain of Life, Samuel Parkinson states that, “The doctrine of the Trinity is what makes the happy doctrine of aseity happy. To be God is to be infinite love.”
 
So why does God love us? Because He wants to! Because it pleases Him to do so. And because the Father, the Son, and the Spirit love you, not because you are so desirable or because you have something They need, there is no way for you to lose Their love. If God chooses to love you, it is from an overflow of perfect love, not from a deficiency of needy love. In a culture of fickle love, where people’s love commitments are changing all the time, this is the solid foundation that the gospel gives. If God the Father so chooses to love you that He gave His only Son, the very Person who is the object of His infinite love, what can separate you from that love, and what else could He have done to assure you of His love for you if you are in Christ (Romans 8:31-39)?

God doesn't need you. But you need Him. And the good news is that the Fountain of Life was filled with blood so that all to whom the Son grants life (John 5:21) might lose all their guilty stains and forever sing of His amazing power to save. Grace Fellowship, may we root our identity in this unchanging, overflowing love.