God Is Independent
God Is Independent
(God Is… 1)
Jason Procopio
I took Jack to see the latest Star Wars movie while we were in the U.S. We both liked it a lot, but I’m not going to talk about it today.
I’d like to talk about the movie before this last one—The Last Jedi. (I promise, I have a reason for saying this.)
I loved that movie. It did things no Star Wars film had ever done, one surprise after another, and I loved it.
But even more surprising than the film itself was the reaction to it among many Star Wars fans. The rage that was kicked up over it was shocking. And that rage centered around the treatment of a character called Luke Skywalker. (You might have heard of him.)
Don’t worry, I won’t get into details, but people were upset because they thought the Luke Skywalker we saw in that movie wasn’t the Luke Skywalker they’d grown up loving from the original trilogy.
Now let’s be clear—I disagree with that. If you want to debate this later, come see me and we can talk.
But even so—even if Rian Johnson did destroy the Luke Skywalker we know and love… So what? It’s a movie. I mean, I grew up on Star Wars too; I love Star Wars as much as anyone; but it’s just a movie. Luke Skywalker is a fictional character, and so by definition, what you do with him has absolutely no impact on the real world in which we live.
I bring this up because a lot of people feel that way about God. If God doesn’t exist, if he is just a figment of our imagination, then it doesn’t matter what you say about him. But if he does exist, then just like with anything that’s real, certain things will be true about him and other things won’t.
Human beings can’t fly, because we don’t have wings. Birds can’t play video games, because they don’t have opposable thumbs. On and on you could go—real things have attributes about them that just are. And if you try to say otherwise, you’ll be wrong.
It’s okay if you’re wrong—we’re all wrong sometimes—but even in our ordinary, human relationships, being wrong about the people we know and love can go really badly. If I tell my wife I think she’s beautiful because I love her blue eyes and her blonde hair, that’s going to go bad for me…because she has brown hair, and brown eyes. She’s going to think I’m talking to someone else.
So if thinking right things about others matters even in our ordinary human relationships, how much more should we want to say right things about God?
In 2019 we began the year with a short series during the month of January, simply titled, “God is…” In this series we looked at some of the attributes of God—in other words, those characteristics of God which God has made known to us in his Word.
So this year, we’re going to do the same thing—we’ll be looking at more of God’s attributes together. And the reason we’re doing this is incredibly simple: you can’t worship or delight in what you don’t know. If God is only an imaginary being, then it doesn’t matter what you say about him. But if he is real—and we believe that he is—then we would be well served to study and to search and to think hard about the things he says about himself, so we can know who he is, so we can worship him accurately, and so we can take pleasure in what is actually true about him.
Last year we looked at four attributes of God. We saw that he is trinitarian—that is, he is one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We saw that he is simple—that is, none of his attributes can be separated from all the others, but they all work together to make God who he is. We saw that God is holy—he is altogether good, altogether pure, and altogether set apart from the rest of creation. And we saw that God is eternal—he has always existed and will always exist.
The attribute we’re going to see to kick off 2020, we probably should have begun with last year: today we’re going to look at the fact that God is independent.
And to see that, we’ll spend the bulk of our time this morning in Acts chapter 17.
Paul in the Areopagus (Acts 17.22-31)
Now if you want an idea of what’s going on in this chapter, the apostle Paul has been traveling around preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he has arrived in the city of Athens. And as he made his way through the city, he noticed that there were idols and temples everywhere. They had gods for everything—gods for the weather and gods for commerce and gods for fertility and even one temple for “the unknown god” (v. 23)—basically, if there’s a god we’ve missed, here’s your temple.
So weirdly, the Athenians found themselves in a very similar situation to what I described earlier with The Last Jedi. They would talk and talk and talk—v. 21 says that all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. So they’d talk constantly, but they’d talk about fiction, and take these fictional gods seriously.
So Paul arrives in this really strange environment, he looks around and he realizes, These people are spending their lives talking about gods which aren’t real, and they are totally ignorant concerning the God who actually IS real.
That’s the context. Paul arrives in the Areopagus—the place of public discourse—and he decides to tell the Athenians about the one true God, whom they don’t know.
And he’s going to tell them about God by talking about God’s attributes—or rather, three aspects of this one attribute: God’s independence.
Let’s read the text together, and then we’ll get into what he says. Acts 17.22-31:
22 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for
“ ‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
as even some of your own poets have said,
“ ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
29 Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. 30 The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
Paul’s argument here is actually quite basic. For the Athenians, their gods were made of metal or stone, and had houses they built for them to “live” in. But if God exists and is powerful, then he is necessarily independent.
And here’s how he describes his independence.
First, Paul says:
God created all things (v. 24, 26)
He says in v. 24:
God...made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth...
No one will be surprised to hear that as Christians, we believe God created the world. Most people know that’s what we believe, and it’s not hard to imagine how it’s possible. If God is all-powerful, if he can literally do anything, then of course he could make everything out of nothing.
But even many Christians don’t give a lot of thought to the implications of that claim. One of the common objections to this belief is, “Okay, God created everything—but who created God?” And the answer of course is, “No one.” This is incredibly simple to learn—it’s one of the first things Jack could tell you about God when he was two years old. If you asked him, “Who made God?”, his answer was immediate: “Nobody.”
But it’s incredibly difficult to understand how that could be.
In theology the word we use to describe this is the “aseity” of God. You don’t need to remember the word, but the idea behind the word is absolutely vital for the Christian faith.
God’s aseity means that God is completely self-existent and self-sustaining. He exists because he is. He is (as many have said) the uncaused Cause; the uncreated Creator. He is the force of existence behind all of existence, because in him is all existence.
The reason why God could create all things, and yet not be created himself, is that he is self-existent.
So because God exists in himself, he made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth.
He created all things—every leaf, every animal, every strand of DNA in every object or person.
And he governs all things—he is LORD of heaven and earth.
So not only does everything exist because he created it; everything continues to exist because he governs it. The letter to the Hebrews says of Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1.3):
He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.
Or, as Paul told the Athenians in v. 25: ...he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
God created the world, Christ created the world…and he continues to re-create the world, every second of every day. Because he exists in himself, and is totally independent, he is the creative force behind everything that exists.
Now, all this may sound a bit nit-picky. It’s interesting, perhaps, but what does it change, really, to affirm that God alone has aseity? that God alone created and sustains the world?
First of all, it changes the way we see God. If God really is the self-existing Creator and Sustainer of all things, then by necessity he is far more involved in the affairs of this world than we imagine. As Jesus said in Matthew 10.29, not one bird falls to the ground apart from the Father. So knowing that fact gives us a healthy fear of God, a healthy respect for the immense scale of his everyday work in this world.
Secondly, it changes the way we see ourselves. It flies in the face of all of our natural instincts. Because no matter what we might affirm, we are always, on a functional level, attempting to be this God. We are constantly trying to create our own world the way we want it, and to govern what we have “created.”
Think about it. Think about the life you want for yourself. The family you hope to build. The career you hope to build. Everyone has an idea of what they want their life to be, and works to make that life happen. We try to manage our friendships so that they’ll give us what we feel like we need. We try to manage our marriages so that the other person will be the person we need, rather than the person they are. We try to manage our kids’ behavior so that they can reflect well on us. We try to manage our jobs so that we might find satisfaction and pride in them.
How is that going for you?
Are your friendships everything you wish they were? Are they always exactly what you need, always there at just the right time? Of course not. Our friends have lives, and they’re busy, and they need things too.
Does your spouse ever frustrate you? Does he or she ever seem to be stubbornly refusing to be the person you want them to be? Of course—because your spouse doesn’t exist for you. You didn’t get to make her in a lab; she is a person, with her own problems and her own strengths (which will be frustrating because all too often they show you just how screwed-up you are).
Do your kids ever disappoint you? We tell our kids, “We didn’t raise you to act this way!” Of course we didn’t—we don’t have to. They’re sinners. They’re going to fight against the way we raised them.
Do you ever feel like you’re not getting fulfillment out of your job? The saying goes, “Find something you love to do, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” That is so untrue! Listen, I love my job. But even this job I love doesn’t always work for me. And even when it does, there are other people involved, who will frustrate your plans, who won’t always appreciate the work you do.
We are always trying to be the self-existing, all-sustaining God of our own lives, and it never works.
But there is a God who is self-existing. Who is all-sustaining. And all of our failures and disappointments and frustrations should serve to help us let go, and trust God to be the one who knows better than us what friendships we need, what we need in our marriage, what’s best for our kids, what’s best for our jobs.
So Paul begins his description of God’s independence by reminding the Athenians that God created all things—that he is this great God they don’t know.
And he continues by telling them that God needs nothing.
God has no needs (v. 25)
V. 24 again:
24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
One of the hardest delusions for Christians to get over is the delusion that God needs them.
Think of the way we speak in our churches. We talk about serving God. We talk about blessing God. We talk about giving our lives to Christ. We’ve adopted this idea—more from pride than from Scripture—that God needs us.
But he doesn’t need us. He doesn’t need anything. He is self-existent. He is self-sustaining. He is entirely sufficient to himself. He existed an eternity before anything else did, and guess what? He was fine during that time.
He enjoyed a perfect, eternal love within the persons of the Trinity for all eternity; he didn’t need to create humanity to fill a void in himself. There is no “you-shaped hole” in God’s heart.
He has never been lonely. He has never been weak. He has never been confused. He has never been lacking.
God doesn’t need anything, and he certainly doesn’t need us.
When we talk about serving God, or blessing God, that is biblical language—but it is the language of our response to God’s all-sufficient grace. If we don’t serve him, we’re in trouble, but God will get along just fine.
He calls us to serve him, not because his job won’t get done without us, but because he loves us and wants us to know the joy of working with him.
Teachers understand this very well. They don’t stand up in front of a classroom because they need help with the math. Honestly, they could do those problems way more quickly if there weren’t all these kids around to get in their way.
So why do they do it? They do it because they love that moment when a kid who has struggled with a particular kind of problem, and they finally get it. Teachers don’t teach because they need the kids, but because the kids need them.
And once again, the self-existent independence of God reminds us, not only of what he is, but of what we are not.
We want to be independent like him; we want to be self-sufficient like him. A quick look at Instagram will remind us of our desire to be what God alone is. We not only want to be happy; we want everyone else to think we’re happy. We not only want to have well-managed lives; we want everyone else to think we have well-managed lives. So we’ll show them pictures of those times when we were happy and good-looking and successful (even if we weren’t—we posed for that picture).
There’s a great show on Netflix right now called Nailed It! It’s like the anti-Instagram. Three contestants are shown a crazy cake with incredibly ornate decorations, and their job is to try to bake that cake. Every time, it’s a disaster, and it’s hilarious. When I watch that show with Loanne, I think, This is what we need. We need to realize how far behind the curve we actually are. God is the master baker, and we’re the contestants trying to do what he does, and failing miserably every time.
Knowing that God needs nothing from us reminds us that we need everything from him. He doesn’t just give us “our daily bread,” as the prayer goes—he gives us life, and breath, and EVERYTHING. If God didn’t keep your lungs running, you would not be able to take another breath. If God didn’t sustain your bodies, you would disintegrate in an instant, Infinity War-style.
Everything we have comes from him, and everything we need will come from him.
And yet, how much of our time do we spend acting as if we didn’t need him?
How much of our time do we spend not praying? If we realized our need, and that God was the only one who can give us everything we need, we wouldn’t stop asking for his help.
How often do we forget God’s past provision for us? We pray; God answers the prayer and provides for our need; and we immediately move on to the next thing. We forget his goodness to us in the past, and so we forget to ask for it in the present.
How often do we try to hide our mistakes rather than come to God with our mistakes? If God is the only possible source of forgiveness and freedom from our sin, how crazy is it to delay in coming to him with that sin, and repenting of it?
How often do we isolate ourselves from other Christians? We forget that we do not have what it takes to grow as we ought to, and that the main tool God has given us to grow, outside his Word, is the church. And yet—particularly when things are hard—we isolate ourselves and try to tackle our situation alone, rather than leaning on the body he’s given us.
And even if we don’t isolate ourselves physically, when we gather with other believers, how often do we actually let them see what’s going on in our lives? How often do we pretend that everything is fine? If we really understood our need, we would remember that no one has it all together, and we wouldn’t feel the pressure to be anything other than we are: imperfect people in need of a perfect God.
Remembering our need allows us to depend on the only One who has no needs, and who always perfectly provides for us.
So God is the self-sustaining Creator of all things; he has no need of anything outside of himself. And finally, Paul shows the Athenians that unlike everything and everyone else, God’s will is entirely free.
God’s will is entirely free (v. 26-27)
He says (v. 26):
26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.
There are a few assumptions in these verses that we can’t get around, even if we wanted to.
The first is that God created the world for a specific reason.—v. 27: that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.
I love that he says it this way, because it’s not typical biblical language. He’s describing what it feels like, because he’s speaking to unbelievers—theological jargon won’t mean anything to them, so he’s using language that reflects our experience.
I can’t tell you how many people have come to me after service saying they came to church because, for some reason even they don’t understand, they want to know more about God, and they didn’t know where else to look.
We feel this pull in us we don’t understand, so we go looking wherever we can. We feel around for him, and occasionally, we find him.
Of course there is a theological reality behind what happens when we find God, and how that happened. Paul says elsewhere (in Ephesians 2) that the Holy Spirit takes the spiritually dead people we are and makes us alive together in Christ—he opens our eyes to the truth of the gospel and gives us new desires. This is what it means to be born again.
But that’s not Paul’s point here. He’s trying to call our attention to the fact that God created all things, he created human beings, and he did so for a specific reason: that we might seek him, and find him, and know him. That’s the first assumption.
The second assumption is that God ordains not only the goal of humanity, but the way that goal will play itself out in humanity. V. 26: And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place...
In other words, God not only created the world and sustains the world, he is actively engaged in what happens in the world.
Now that thought will be unsettling to a lot of people, because it brings up questions about evil in the world, and “why bad things happen to good people”. But rather than stay there too long, I’d like to move right on to the third assumption, because it’s related, and it can be even more unsettling.
The third assumption here is that God can decide how the goal of humanity can play itself out in human history, because only his will is entirely free.
Not only is God completely independent, completely self-sustaining and self-sufficient; his will is too. God’s will is entirely free from external constraints.
Psalm 115.3 put it much more succinctly than Paul does:
3 Our God is in the heavens;
he does all that he pleases.
Anything God wants to do, he does. If he wants to give grace, he gives grace. If he wants to show judgment, he shows judgment. Sometimes he wants to stop suffering, so he heals or rescues; sometimes he allows suffering to continue.
Let’s just be honest—that’s unsettling. The idea that there is an all-powerful God who can do absolutely anything he wants to do is a scary one.
But here’s what we need to see: the only thing that makes God’s infinite power not frightening is the fact that God’s will is entirely free and independent.
To put it another way, nothing can make God want something he doesn’t want. Nothing can change his mind. Nothing can influence his decisions or his desires.
Now one common objection is, “Sure we can influence God; we can change God’s mind when we pray.”
That is a misunderstanding of what prayer is. In those texts which talk about God “relenting” or “repenting” of something he was about to do, that’s not what they mean. When Moses prays that God not kill the people, and God decides not to do it, it’s not as if God thought, You know what? You’re RIGHT, Moses! You convinced me! That’s not what happens there.
Prayer is effective—it actually does make a difference—not because in prayer we change God’s mind, but rather because in his sovereign grace, God has decided to accomplish his will through the prayers of his people. Prayer is one of the tools God uses to fulfill his plan.
But nothing can make God will something he didn’t will before; nothing can make him see things differently.
And that is very good news.
The fact that God is independent means that his free will is a good thing, because it is not conditioned by anything outside of him. He’s not susceptible to clever arguments. He can’t be “sold” on something he doesn’t want to do. His free will is rooted in who he is—in his own self-existing person, character and attributes.
To put it simply, God wants what he wants because of who he is.
And if we remember what we said when we talked about the simplicity of God, we’ll remember that all of God’s attributes are at work in everything he does. God is just; he is loving; he is good; he is holy; he is wise. He makes judgments, and wills things, according to his own perfect character—which means that everything he wills is the best thing; everything he wants is the best thing.
Now when we think about this even for a minute, we realize once again why this is pertinent to us. Knowing that God’s will is entirely free reminds us of how limited our own freedom is.
We love to talk about free will, but we know our wills aren’t entirely free, at least not the way we’d like to think they are.
If you need to be convinced of this, just look at Black Friday. Have you ever bought anything, not because you truly desired it or needed it, but because it was on sale? The crazy vegetable slicer you bought because usually it costs 30€, but on this particular day it was on sale for 5€—and it seemed like such a great deal, you couldn’t pass it up. But once you bought it, it went in your cupboard and you’ve literally never used it.
Our wills are not free. We are so easily convinced to do things we wouldn’t have done otherwise. A bit of clever rhetoric or a bit of extra incentive is all we need to make a decision we’d never have made otherwise.
And we see this most acutely when we sin. When everything’s going well, and we’re at peace—when we’re in front of our Bibles, or at church with our brothers and sisters—we hear talk of sin, and with complete sincerity, we don’t want that. We don’t want to act that way. We don’t want to commit this sin.
But then during the week, when we’re exhausted or simply caught off guard, we’re confronted with the opportunity to do it, and suddenly it seems like a good idea. Suddenly it seems desirable.
Or maybe we’re in church, and we’re talking about living courageously for Christ, and we’re all in. YES! That’s how I want to live!
But then we get home, and we realize what living for Christ will actually cost us…and we lose our nerve. We realize everything we stand to lose if we stay faithful, so we allow ourselves to be unfaithful.
Our wills are not free like God’s will is free. We can do what we want, sure—but we don’t get to decide what we want. We can do the things we want, but we can’t want the things we should. Naturally, on our own, we are slaves to our sinful desires.
And God’s totally free, totally independent will is the only solution to that problem.
In his freedom, he sent his Son to live the life God called us to live, and to suffer the punishment for our sin, and to rise from the dead in order to apply that work to us. The Holy Spirit comes to us and makes us alive in Christ, and frees us from sin—he gives us new desires, right desires, and helps us act according to these new desires.
When we realize that only God’s will is entirely free, we realize that only he can tell us what is right and what is wrong. Only he can tell us what desires are helpful, and what desires are harmful. Only he can lead us in the path of life he has freely set before us.
Conclusion
At the end of Paul’s time in the Areopagus, he summarizes everything he has said to the Athenians, and concludes (v. 30):
30 The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed [Jesus Christ]; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
Paul describes God to the Athenians to show them their own idolatry. He describes God so that they can see just how deeply they are enslaved to their own false ideas and assurances. And he calls them to repentance, which simply means he invites them to do an about-face, to reject their sin and to follow Christ.
He calls the Athenians to repent, and it makes sense—what other choice is reasonable, when we realize that God is independent, and that we depend on him for everything?
So if you don’t know Christ this morning, then you too are called to repent—because like the Athenians, you have inevitably been trying to find meaning in things that can never provide them. You were created for God—to know him and be like him—and you’ve gone looking for your meaning in places that can never provide them.
So turn to him; turn away from your own ideas of right and wrong, and let him tell you what right and wrong is. Because he created you, and he is self-existent; what is right is who he is. Only he can tell you who you are, and what is right.
But even for those of us who do know Christ, my guess is that this morning, in the light of our self-existent, independent God, we need to repent of some things as well.
Maybe you need to repent of your own efforts to make your life what you want it to be, rather than trusting God to make you what he wants you to be. God is the self-existing Creator and Sustainer of all things. So we are called to stop trying to create our own worlds in our own image, and trust that his will for his creation is better.
Maybe you need to repent of your pride. You look at the world, and you know how you would run things if you were God. You look at your life, and you imagine that what you want is obviously better than what God commands you to do. But only God’s will is both entirely free and entirely good. So we are called to trust that his plan for his world is good, and that he knows better than us how we should live, and how we can be free to live life as he has designed it.
Maybe you need to repent of your fear. You’re worried that you’re not good enough, you’re not proficient enough. And you’re right—but that fact shouldn’t drive you to worry. God alone has no needs; he alone is completely self-sufficient. So we are called to stop worrying about everything we aren’t, and to rest in everything he is for us. We are called to stop worrying about everything we need, and turn to the God who provides every breath for us. To trust in his Son, who has given us access to our God, and to rest that his work for us is finished.
