The Self-Sufficiency of God

Exodus 3:2 …So he looked and behold the bush was burning with fire but the bush was not consumed.

In the book of Exodus, as Moses had been living as a shepherd for 40 years and as a fugitive from Egypt, his attention was captured by a bush that was on fire. This probably wouldn’t have been a big deal but what he saw made him investigate even further. “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” The flame spoke to Moses and identified Himself, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” God told Moses He will send him to Pharaoh to deliver His people. Moses then asked, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

The name God gave Moses encompasses His attribute of self-sufficiency. “I Am Who I Am.” As Matthew Henry puts it, the representation of I Am Who I Am states “that he is self-existent; he has his being of himself, and has no dependence upon any other…Being self-existent, he cannot but be self-sufficient, and therefore all-sufficient, and the inexhaustible fountain of being and bliss.”

When a bush is on fire, the fire must consume the bush as fuel to exist. However, God was showing Moses several things in this display. He was showing Moses that He didn’t need the bush to exist as a flame. God doesn’t need fuel. God is the self-existent and self-sufficient I Am. He was also displaying that God didn’t need the bush or Moses to display His power. But by His providence and sovereign will, God chooses the lowly things to be His vessels of special purpose. God knew Moses was an 80-year-old fugitive who was “slow of speech and of tongue”, that in spite of his failings and shortcomings, would still be the man to approach the most powerful man in the land and lead His people to freedom. Moses knew that it would not and that it could not be of his own power and influence that he do what God desired of him. He had to rely on the One who needs no outside source.

The self-sufficiency, or aseity, of God should give us comfort. When God has called us to do something we can rest in the fact that He has all power and knowledge and the God that created the universe will equip us to do the task at hand. Our human bodies require rest and sustenance. According to the laws of nature, set into place by God, we must rely on something outside of ourselves to even exist. God, however, requires nothing. As John Piper states, “God exists ‘from Himself’. God owes His existence and completeness as God to nothing outside Himself.”

“nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things;” Acts 17:25

For more of God’s Attributes download this PDF

Derrick Stokes
Theologetics.org