The Character of God Part 2

One of the most difficult things to comprehend about God, Who is, admittedly, incomprehensible, is His "self-existence." There is a wonderful term for this as I have learned recently. It is called aseity. This simply means that God exists uncreated; He had no beginning and will have no end. Once you can accept this attribute of God the rest just falls into place. I remember as a child wondering where God came from. Mind you, in my thoughts as a child I always supposed there was a God or a "higher power" or whatever you want to call it. It is rare when it is otherwise with a child. But I always wondered, nonetheless, how God came to be. Recently in our Church's Vacation Bible School children began to ask a similar question. Along with questions like, "What color is God?" or "Why were 'they' so mean to Jesus?" One child asked, "Who created God?" When the answer came back that God was not created and has just "always been." You could almost hear their young minds plim as they took in this idea of God. It is beyond human understanding. We tend to think of things as finite. Everything we see, typically, has a beginning and an end. From the TV programs we watch to vegetables we grow in the garden, our work-day, our very lives. As humanity is absolutely constrained to being finite, God certainly is not. He is infinite. It takes an infinite God to be able to rise above the constraints of time and humanity...to be able to see "the beginning" and "the end," as it were. This, of course, proves to be quite the stumbling block for people. For the scientific mind, it is almost impossible to grasp since it is neither provable nor disprovable. For the Philosopher, it provides a lifetime of ponderability and what-ifs. For those whom God gives faith to believe, through Jesus, His Son, it is but another glimpse of his ineffable depth and glory. What a great and awesome Being our God is! His ways are beyond our ways, His thoughts beyond our thoughts. As we weigh this attribute of God, we must exclaim, as 1 Corinthians 2:9 does: "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him!" Ian B. Johnson put it this way,

"Behold the magnificence of God. He exists in himself. He exists apart from his creation. But he simultaneously exists at every place and at every time within his creation, having no need to go from place to place or from today to tomorrow. He is still at the beginning of time. Yet He is already beside me, and on the farthest star, tomorrow, next year, and at the end of time. Praise his name!