Devotional 12: Of God, and of the Holy Trinity: Every creature that draws breath is a debtor

The Confession Read

God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever himself pleaseth. In his sight all things are open and manifest; his knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to him contingent, or uncertain. He is most holy in all his counsels, in all his works, and in all his commands. To him is due from angels and men, and every other creature, whatsoever worship, service, or obedience he is pleased to require of them.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 2, Section 2

Introduction

Every creature that draws breath is a debtor. The infant at his mother's breast depends on a supply outside himself. The scholar sits at the feet of teachers who received what they pass on. The strongest man owes his strength to bread he did not create and air he cannot command. The sun burns by consuming its own substance. The oceans rise and fall at the bidding of a moon they did not hang in the sky. The angels themselves, for all their power and purity, hold their being moment by moment from a hand they cannot compel. Dependence is the signature of creaturehood, inscribed into the very structure of our existence. We are receivers before we are givers, and at every moment we draw upon resources we did not generate and cannot replenish. But God is the great, glad exception. He alone is not a debtor. He owes nothing to any source beyond Himself, depends upon no supply outside His own infinite fullness, and stands in need of nothing that His hands have made. The theologians have a word for this: aseity, from the Latin a se, meaning "from Himself." God does not have life as a gift bestowed or a flame kindled. He is life, original and underived. He is the fountain that swells from no tributary because the spring is in Himself. This truth, which the Westminster Divines unfold in the second section of their chapter on God, is not an abstraction for the lecture hall. It is the ground beneath every promise and the deathblow to every pride that would make the creature the centre of its own existence. Consider the difference this makes, beloved. If God needed you, if some lack in the divine being required your worship to fill it, your relation to Him would be one of mutual dependence. That is the religion of the pagans. They feed their gods with sacrifices and imagine the deity's favour can be purchased. The God of the Bible is not hungry. He does not need your praise, though He delights in it. He does not depend upon your obedience, though He commands it. He was infinitely blessed before the first star was kindled, before the first angel sang, before the foundations of the earth were laid. Your sin does not diminish Him. Your righteousness does not enrich Him. He is the all-sufficient God, and the discovery of that truth is at once the humbling of every pretension and the freeing of every soul that has worn itself out trying to give God something He did not first give.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of divine self-sufficiency is not a philosophical deduction from the idea of perfection. The Divines did not sit down with Aristotle and reason their way to a God who needs nothing. This truth rises from the page of Holy Scripture, where God Himself speaks and by speaking reveals who He is. The clearest declaration of this truth in all the Bible falls from the lips of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in John 5:26 declares: "For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself." Here is the fountainhead of the doctrine of aseity. The Father possesses life, not as a derived quality, not as a gift received, not as a flame passed from another torch, but in Himself. The Greek is compact and devastating: zōēn echei en heautō, life He holds in His own being as its native possession. The Son, in the mystery of the eternal generation, receives this same prerogative from the Father. The entire triune life is self-existent, self-sustaining, self-sufficient life. Before there was anything else, there was this: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in the infinite fullness of blessed life, needing nothing, lacking nothing. The eternal ocean of being from which every stream of creaturely existence would one day flow. The Apostle Paul, standing on Mars Hill amid the forest of Athenian idols, seized upon this truth as the sharpest weapon against pagan religion. In Acts 17:24-25 he proclaims: "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things." The Athenians built temples to house their gods. They imagined the deity required a residence where his needs could be attended to by a priesthood. Paul sweeps all that away: the God who made everything cannot be housed in anything made. Then he goes deeper. God is not served by human hands as though He needed anything. Men do serve God, as Scripture commands. But they do not serve Him because He lacks and they supply. They serve Him because He is Lord and they are creatures. The direction of all true giving runs from God to the creature, never the reverse. He gives life, breath, and all things. He is always giving, and we are always receiving. Every heartbeat is a fresh grant from the throne. The Old Testament sounds the same note with astonishing boldness. In Psalm 50:7-12, God speaks words that would be blasphemous on any creature's lips: "I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof." Israel brought sacrifices as God commanded, but they were tempted to imagine that their offerings supplied something God lacked, that the smoke of the altar placed the Almighty in their debt. God will have none of it. "If I were hungry, I would not tell thee." Even if He could hunger, an impossible supposition, He would not need to inform His creatures. He already possesses everything they might offer. The cattle on a thousand hills are His before they reach the altar. The sacrifice adds nothing. It merely returns what was always His. This truth reaches its most searching expression in God's address to Job from the whirlwind. In Job 41:11 the Lord demands: "Who hath prevented me, that I should repay him? whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine." The question is rhetorical and its force is absolute. No one has ever given God something for which God must render an account. No one has placed the Almighty in his debt. The word "prevented" carries the older English sense of "preceded" or "gone before": who has gone before God with a gift, a service, a righteousness that originated in the creature and obliged the Creator to make recompense? The answer is silence. Everything under the whole heaven belongs to Him already. Whatever we offer was first received from His hand. This is the death of every thought of merit, every whisper of entitlement, every secret belief that God owes us something for our faithfulness. He does not. But the Confession presses beyond God's independence to His exhaustive knowledge. Here Scripture is no less emphatic. Psalm 147:5 declares: "Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite." The Hebrew word translated "infinite" is mispar, which literally means "number." Of His understanding there is no numbering, no measuring, no cataloguing. You cannot count the things God knows. His knowledge, like His being, has no boundary and no horizon beyond which there is something He has not yet grasped. The psalmist does not say God knows a great many things. He says God's understanding cannot be quantified. Every fact in the universe, every possibility that could ever be, every thought in every mind, every event in every moment of time past, present, and future: all of it is present to the divine intellect in a single, eternal, undivided act of knowing. The prophet Isaiah sharpens this by asking questions designed to silence every pretension before God. Isaiah 40:13-14 demands: "Who hath directed the Spirit of the LORD, or being his counsellor hath taught him? With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him, and taught him in the path of judgment, and taught him knowledge, and shewed to him the way of understanding?" The answer to every question is the same: no one. God has never taken a lesson. He has never consulted an advisor. He has never needed to be brought up to date. His knowledge is independent of the creature, which is precisely the Confession's language. It does not depend upon anything outside Himself. He does not learn by observation, does not discover by investigation, does not reason from premises to conclusion as a finite mind must. He knows all things through the knowledge of His own being and His own decree. And because His knowledge is independent, it is also infallible. Hebrews 4:13 paints the most searching portrait of divine omniscience in all of Scripture: "Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." The Greek behind "opened" is tetrachēlismena, a word borrowed from the wrestling ring or the sacrificial altar. It means to be bent back at the neck, exposed and defenceless, laid bare to the gaze. Before the eyes of God, every creature is like a wrestler pinned or a sacrifice laid open on the stone. Every thought unguarded. Every motive exposed. Every secret intention stripped of its covering. And this is not the gaze of a distant spectator. It is the eyes of Him "with whom we have to do," pros hon hēmin ho logos, the One to whom our account must be rendered. The knowledge of God is not passive. It is the knowledge of the Judge before whom every life will be weighed. Finally, the Confession's climax, that to God is due all worship, service, and obedience, finds ultimate expression in the doxologies of the New Testament. Revelation 4:11 gives us the song of the elders: "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." And Revelation 5:12 expands the chorus to every creature: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing." Not because God is needy and our worship fills a lack. Because God is worthy and our worship fulfills our created purpose. The debt of worship is infinite, not because God's need is infinite. He has none. It is infinite because His worth is infinite. Creatures made to reflect His glory can never exhaust the obligation to honour their Maker.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Assembly took up the doctrine of God in the mid-1640s, they were not writing in a theological vacuum. The question of God's relation to the world was among the most bitterly contested of the age. Does He stand in need of it? Can He be enriched by it? Does His knowledge depend upon it? The Divines had to navigate between errors ancient and modern, and the language they chose for Section 2 is a masterpiece of theological precision. Every clause is aimed at a specific deviation from biblical truth. The opening declaration, that God possesses "all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself," strikes at the root of every system that would make God and the world mutually dependent. The ancient pagans imagined gods who required human attention: temples to house them, sacrifices to feed them, praises to stroke their vanity. The Epicureans, by contrast, imagined gods so detached from the world that they took no notice of it at all, beings of sublime indifference who neither needed nor cared for the affairs of mortals. Against both errors, the Confession insists that God has all fullness in Himself, yet freely chooses to manifest His glory in creation. He is not enriched by the world, but neither is He indifferent to it. The God of the Bible delights to reveal His perfections. He stoops to covenant with dust. He rejoices over His people with singing. Not because creation completes Him, but because His fullness overflows. The phrase "not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made" was aimed with surgical precision at a corruption that had grown up within the medieval church: the notion that human merit could place God in the creature's debt. When the Reformers recovered the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone, they were recovering precisely this truth. God owes nothing to any man. The best works of the saints are stained with imperfection. From first to last, salvation is of the Lord. The Divines embedded that Reformation insight into the doctrine of God Himself. If God needed nothing from creation before He made it, He needs nothing from it now that it exists. Your righteousness does not fill a deficit in heaven. Your sin does not deplete a divine resource. God is the all-sufficient fountain, and the creature is always and only the recipient. The Confession's language about divine knowledge, "infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to him contingent, or uncertain," was directed against the Socinians. In the seventeenth century, they revived an ancient heresy: the denial that God knows future contingent events. The Socinians reasoned that if human choices are truly free, they cannot be known in advance even by God. Knowledge of a future free act, they argued, would make it certain and therefore not free. The Divines saw that this reasoning, however plausible it might appear, gutted the biblical doctrine of God. A God who does not know the future is not the God of Scripture. He declares the end from the beginning. He knows the thoughts of men before they are formed. He has ordained whatsoever comes to pass. The Confession anchors divine foreknowledge in divine independence. God's knowledge does not depend on the creature as its source. He does not know because He observes. He knows because He has decreed, and His decree encompasses all things. The closing assertion, that to God is due "whatsoever worship, service, or obedience he is pleased to require," established the regulative principle of worship that would become a hallmark of Reformed piety. God alone determines how He is to be worshipped. The creature does not invent acceptable worship; the creature receives it. And this principle reaches far beyond the gathered assembly on the Lord's Day. Every act of obedience, every deed of service, every movement of heart and hand and voice that honours God must be done according to His command, not our invention. The whole of life is worship, and the whole of worship is regulated by the Word of the God who needs nothing yet requires everything. Not for His enrichment. For His glory and our good.

Theological Depth

Archibald Alexander Hodge, whose commentary on the Westminster Confession remains a standard text for Reformed students more than a century after its publication, opens his treatment of this section with a striking observation. The attributes here confessed are not additions to a generic concept of deity. They are necessary consequences of the truth that God is a self-existent, independent Being. "The all-sufficiency of God," Hodge writes, "is that attribute whereby He possesses in Himself all that is necessary to His own infinite blessedness and to the fulfilment of all His purposes. He is the fountain of all being, but He Himself drinks from no fountain but His own." For Hodge, the practical weight of this truth falls upon the doctrine of grace. If God needed anything from us, grace would be a transaction, something given in exchange for something received. But because God is all-sufficient, grace is purely a gift. "The creature can confer no benefit upon its Maker. All its service is but the return of what was first received, and even that return is made possible only by His enabling. Salvation, from its origin in the eternal decree to its consummation in the resurrection, is of the Lord." But if Hodge anchors the doctrine of aseity in grace, Francis Turretin anchors it in being itself. In his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, the Genevan scholastic devotes an entire locus to the attributes of God, and the first attribute he treats after simplicity is independence. "Independence," Turretin explains, "is that perfection by which God exists of Himself, does not depend upon any other either in His essence or in His operations, and is the first and supreme cause of all things." The Latin theologians spoke of God as ens a se, the being from Himself, and every creature as ens ab alio, a being from another. It is not merely that God happens to exist without a cause. God's very nature is to exist. Non-existence is impossible for Him. The creature might not have been; God cannot not be. Because His being is necessary and self-existent, so are all His perfections. His wisdom is not acquired. His power is not bestowed. His goodness is not developed. He is what He is, in the fullness of all His perfections, from eternity to eternity. For Turretin, this is the metaphysical bedrock upon which every other doctrine about God must rest. John Owen, the prince of the Puritan theologians, approaches the same truth from the angle of worship. He observes that the self-sufficiency of God is the reason why worship must be entirely for God's sake and not our own. "God's blessedness consists in the eternal, ineffable satisfaction He has in His own perfections," he writes. "He needs not the creation for any addition to His glory or happiness, for He was infinitely glorious and blessed in Himself before any creature existed." Yet God does command worship and receives it with delight. Not because worship fills a divine deficiency, but because worship is the creature's highest good. Owen's insight is that the aseity of God does not make Him distant or indifferent. Precisely because He does not need us, His love for us is sovereign and free, unmotivated by anything in us that could attract or repay. "He loves because He will love, not because He finds loveliness. And this is the love that cannot fail, for it depends upon nothing in the beloved." Thomas Watson, whose Body of Divinity was intended for ordinary families to read aloud by the hearth, brings the soaring metaphysics of divine self-sufficiency down to the level of daily devotion. "God is a fountain that hath its spring in itself," he writes, borrowing the very image the Confession uses. "The creature is like a stream that is fed by the fountain; cut off the fountain, and the stream dries up. But God is the fountain that is never drawn dry. He is called the Almighty because He is the All-sufficient: sufficient for Himself, sufficient for His people, sufficient for every need of every creature in every age." Watson's genius is to connect the aseity of God directly to the comfort of the believer. If God is the fountain, and I am drawing from that fountain, my supply is as secure as God Himself. The fountain does not depend on the stream; the stream depends on the fountain. Because the fountain is inexhaustible, the stream need never fear that grace will run out, that mercy will reach its limit, that patience will be exhausted. The all-sufficient God is the guarantee of inexhaustible grace. But the Confession does not rest with independence. It presses on to sovereignty and knowledge. B. B. Warfield, the great Princeton theologian, gave particular attention to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human contingency. The Socinian objection, that certain foreknowledge is incompatible with genuine freedom, had not died in the seventeenth century. It has only grown louder in ours. Warfield insisted that the root of the error lies in imagining that God's knowledge depends on the creature, as though God knew the future because He looked down the corridor of time and saw what free creatures would do. "The knowledge of God," Warfield writes, "is not a passive reception of information from without, but an active, creative knowledge that grounds the reality it knows. God knows things because He has determined them; they do not happen and He then knows, but He knows and therefore they happen." God's knowledge is "independent upon the creature." The creature does not supply God with information. God's knowledge is the cause of things, not their effect. Robert Shaw, whose Exposition of the Westminster Confession was the standard textbook for Scottish Presbyterians throughout the nineteenth century, helpfully connects the various threads of this section into a unified whole. "The design of this section," Shaw explains, "is to set forth the absolute perfection and independence of God, His universal sovereignty, His infinite knowledge, His perfect holiness, and the homage which all creatures owe to Him." He notes that the Confession moves in a logical sequence. It begins with God's self-existent fullness. From there, His creative sovereignty. From there, His exhaustive knowledge. From there, His perfect holiness. From there, the worship that is His due. Each truth builds upon the one before it. Because God has all life in Himself, He is the fountain of all being. Because He is the fountain of all being, He has sovereign dominion over all He has made. Because He has sovereign dominion, His knowledge of His domain is perfect and complete. Because He is this kind of God, self-existent, sovereign, all-knowing, perfectly holy, He is owed the worship of every creature. The sequence is not arbitrary. It traces the path of the creature's understanding from the recognition of God's transcendence to the offering of obedient worship.

Puritan Application

First, let the self-sufficiency of God liberate you from the exhausting labour of trying to give Him something He has not first given you. There is a weariness that comes upon the religious soul when it imagines that its standing before God depends upon the quality of its own offerings. That the acceptability of its worship rests upon the purity of its motives. That the security of its salvation is tethered to the consistency of its obedience. When that weariness settles deep into the bones, the Christian life becomes a treadmill: always striving, never arriving, never sure that enough has been given. But the doctrine of divine all-sufficiency cuts through this exhaustion at its root. God does not need your worship. He commands it for your good. He does not depend upon your obedience. He blesses it as the fruit of His own grace. Your best righteousness adds nothing to His glory. Your deepest sin cannot diminish His being. Rest in this, weary saint. The God you serve is not a tyrant whose happiness depends upon your performance. He is a fountain whose fullness needs no tributary, and the grace He pours out is as free as it is inexhaustible. Let this truth unbind you from self-reliant religion and set you free to serve Him with the gladness of a child who knows that the Father's love does not waver with his achievements. Second, humble yourself before the truth that you are a creature who owes everything to God while God owes nothing to you. The spirit of our age is a spirit of entitlement. We demand our rights. We insist upon recognition. We nurse grievances when we imagine ourselves slighted. We carry that same temper into our dealings with the Almighty. We pray and expect answers on our terms. We serve and feel that God should take notice. We suffer and wonder why He has not compensated us for our pain. But the doctrine before us strips away every pretension to independence before the throne. "Who hath prevented me, that I should repay him?" God demands of Job, and the question echoes down the centuries to ourselves. What have you brought to God that was not first His? Your talents were woven into your nature by the hand that formed you in the womb. Your opportunities were ordered by the providence that governs every circumstance. Your faith itself was kindled by the Spirit who blows where He wills. Even the breath with which you praise Him was given you moment by moment from the fountain of life. You stand before God as a pure recipient, a vessel empty of all native goodness and filled only with what He has poured in. This truth is mortifying to pride. But it is also the foundation of all true gratitude. The man who knows he has been forgiven much loves much. The soul that recognises its absolute dependence upon grace will love its Benefactor with a love that asks nothing in return. Third, find comfort in the infallible knowledge of God, even when that knowledge searches the dark corners of your heart. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that all things are naked and opened to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do, and the instinctive response of the sinful heart is to recoil. Yet for the believer, the exhaustive knowledge of God is both a terror and a comfort. The deeper the saint grows in grace, the more the comfort outweighs the terror. Consider what this means: God knows the worst about you. He knew it before you were born. He set His love upon you nonetheless. There is nothing hidden in your past that will one day come to light and surprise Him into revoking His mercy. There is no thought too dark, no failure too thorough, to lie beyond the scope of His foreknowledge. There can be no surprise that undoes the decree of His love. The God who sees every defect in your devotion, every wandering of your heart in prayer, is the God who has promised to complete the work He began. His knowledge of your sin is not the knowledge of an enemy gathering evidence. It is the knowledge of a surgeon who sees the whole disease and has already prepared the cure. Take comfort: you are known, and you are loved, and the One who knows you perfectly has loved you with an everlasting love. Fourth, submit joyfully to the sovereign dominion of God, who does whatsoever He pleases and whose pleasure is always good. The Confession declares that God has "most sovereign dominion" over all His creatures, "to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever himself pleaseth." To the natural man, this is tyranny: the arbitrary rule of an absolute power whose will is unchecked by any law outside itself. But to the redeemed soul, this is liberty. The God whose will is sovereign is also the God whose will is holy, wise, and good. He does not exercise dominion as a capricious despot who delights in the suffering of His subjects. He reigns as a Father whose every decree serves the ultimate blessedness of His children. When Nebuchadnezzar was restored to his reason after seven years of bestial madness, his first act was to bless the Most High who "doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?" The king had learned at great cost what every saint must learn sooner or later. Submission to sovereign dominion is not the loss of freedom. It is its recovery. The creature who fights against God's will fights against his own nature and his own good. The creature who bends the knee receives the kingdom. Is your life unfolding in ways you would not have chosen? Are there providences that baffle your understanding and pain your heart? The Potter has right over the clay. Not because He is cruel. Because He is God, and His wisdom transcends your comprehension as the heavens transcend the earth. Submit, and in submitting find the peace that passes understanding. Fifth, give to God the worship He requires, not the worship you imagine He might accept. The final clause declares that to God is due "whatsoever worship, service, or obedience he is pleased to require of them." God does not leave it to the creature to determine what honours Him. He Himself prescribes the terms of His own worship. This was the sin of Nadab and Abihu, who offered strange fire before the Lord, fire He had not commanded. It was the sin of Saul, who spared the Amalekite spoil to offer as sacrifice, as though disobedience could be sanctified by religious intention. It is the sin of every age, including our own, when worship is designed to please the worshipper rather than the Worshipped, when the question "What does God require?" yields to "What will attract the crowds?" The regulative principle is not pedantry. It is piety. The God who needs nothing has the right to command everything, and the creature who truly knows His all-sufficiency will approach Him on His terms, not his own. Examine your worship, beloved. Is it governed by the Word of God or by the wisdom of the world? Is the God you serve the God who has revealed Himself in Scripture, or a god trimmed to fit your tastes? The all-sufficient God is worthy of the worship He commands. Approach Him as He has prescribed, and you will find that the fountain of all being is also the fountain of all joy.

Prayer

O Lord God Almighty, who hast life in Thyself and art the alone fountain of all being: we confess with shame that we have often approached Thee as though Thou wert a debtor to our devotion. We have brought Thee the lame and the blind of our affections and imagined that such offerings enriched Thy courts. We have served Thee with the leftover energies of lives devoted chiefly to other masters and supposed that Thou shouldest be grateful for the scraps. Forgive us, we beseech Thee, for the arrogance that imagines it can give to Thee what was not first received from Thy hand. Thou art all-sufficient, needing nothing from the work of Thy fingers, yet stooping to delight in the praises of Thy people. Thou art the fountain that is never diminished by giving, the sun whose light is never dimmed by shining. We bless Thee that our sin cannot deplete Thy mercy, that our weakness cannot exhaust Thy power, that our faithlessness cannot nullify Thy faithfulness. Thou art God, and we are but dust. We thank Thee that the Son, who is very God of very God, took our nature and our need upon Himself. He who possessed all fullness became empty for our sakes. The Fountain of life tasted death that streams of living water might flow to dying men. In Him, Thy self-sufficiency became our supply. In Him, Thy infinite blessedness stooped to bear our curse. In Him, the God who needs nothing gave everything. Grant us grace to rest in Thy all-sufficiency, to humble ourselves before Thy independence, and to offer Thee the worship Thou dost require. Not the strange fire of our own invention, but the spiritual sacrifices acceptable through Jesus Christ. When our hearts grow proud, remind us that we are debtors who have nothing to repay. When our faith grows weak, remind us that the fountain from which we drink can never fail. Conform us to the image of Thy Son, who, though He was in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, yet made Himself of no reputation and took upon Him the form of a servant. Grant that all our days, from this hour until the hour when faith gives way to sight, may be lived to the praise of the glory of Thy grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.