How is God self-sufficient?
One of the most amazing things about God—His self-sufficiency—is also one of the hardest to comprehend. It’s not very difficult to think of God being so powerful that He could create the universe. Even people who don’t think much about God can at least imagine how an almighty higher power could bring the world into existence. But the idea that God is uncreated and completely self-sufficient, that He has no beginning and has always existed with no help from any other power—well, that just isn’t comprehensible to our finite human minds.
The self-existence of God is such a primal puzzlement that even a child, when told that God made the world, will often respond with the question, “Who made God?” This remarkable bit of reasoning shows that children understand the concept of cause and effect: if something or someone exists, then something or someone else had to have made it.
It’s as if the human race has an origin-seeking gene. We want to know where things came from and how stuff happened. We’re like the police interrogator who asks a suspect, “Where were you on the night of August 27?” because he is following the scientific task of accounting for things and being skeptical of anything that hasn’t given an account for itself.
One of the reasons so many people are skeptical about God is that He won’t give an account of Himself. We want to know where He came from, but He won’t tell us. Instead, He just reveals to us that He is and always was, and with no outside help. God doesn’t fit into our cause-and-effect world, and that frustrates us to no end.
Thank God He doesn’t exist within the bounds of cause and effect. If God were the effect of some other cause, He wouldn’t be God and we wouldn’t exist. You see, you can’t have an endless series of causes reaching back into eternity past. If that were the case, you would never get to the present time, and you would never get to you. The very fact that you and the world exist is proof that at some point there must be a First Cause that itself isn’t caused. There must be an originator. There must be God.
Is your mind spinning yet? Hang on, because here is where it gets really amazing. Take all the wonder of the world and the history of humanity—the billions and billions of people who have ever lived and everything they have accomplished. None of them would have existed were it not for God.
Set aside the proofs for the existence of God and ponder this single startling reality: if there is no God, there’s nothing else. But there is something. There’s you and your life and your ability to think about a self-sufficient God who doesn’t need you for His existence because He was here way before you. And yet He wants you to realize He exists so that you can experience His goodness, grace, and love.
God doesn’t need us, but He wants us to enjoy Him. Why do you think God didn’t just make a world with nothing but dull features but instead created extravagant beauty and unimaginable variety? The simplest and best answer is that He created it all for our enjoyment. He wants us to see the world and everything in it and then give Him the credit for getting it all going.
Two thousand years ago the apostle Paul was walking through Athens, a great city filled with smart and religious people who preferred to give credit to man-made idols rather than the living God. Paul boldly told them that God was the One “who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth.” Furthermore, Paul continued, He is not “served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind breath and everything” (Acts 17:24–25 ESV).
Some of the Athenians got it, but many didn’t—much like it is with people today. So don’t get discouraged if others don’t share your amazement at the First-Cause God. They’re looking for answers in man-made objects. Keep your eyes and your heart and your mind focused on the One who made everything possible.
Bickel, B., & Jantz, S. (2014). God is amazing: everything changes when you see god for who he really is. Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour.
