Why Does God Call Himself “I AM”?

What Is His Name?

Then Moses said to God, “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?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. (Ex. 3:13–15)

“I am who I am.” Yahweh. This is the name God gives to Moses. It is the covenant name of the covenant-making, covenant-keeping God of Israel. And the name he gives simply is “He is.”

What could this possibly mean? How is this even an answer? The answer to Moses’s question is ultimately incomprehensible to him or to us: The personal name God gave is a disclosure of the kind of being he is—and the “kind” of being he is, is one who cannot be considered in relation to anything but himself. He is absolute Being. One theologian helpfully says, “Strictly speaking, God can only be understood by reference to God. . . . Exodus 3:14 jolts us by saying that God is not grouped with others. God can only be known by comparison to himself.”¹ This cannot be said of any of us. We describe who we are by describing ourselves in categories of genus and species. We learn about ourselves specifically in relation to others. To learn about me, you learn about human beings in general, males more specifically, married men and fathers of young children even more specifically, and so on. We fit within categories and are comparable to like kinds within those categories. But God cannot name his essence by locating himself in a broad category that he fits within. He’s not an object within the universe on which we can fit our attention. For God to be “I am” means he is absolute, incomprehensible, unbounded Being.

The Fountain of Life

Samuel G. Parkison, Matthew Barrett

As part of the Contemplating God series, author Samuel G. Parkison offers an accessible and engaging exploration of divine aseity—God’s complete independence as the eternal plentitude of life—inviting readers to marvel at the wonders of the living God.

He never became, nor is he becoming—he simply is. This sets him over against every other kind of being since every other kind of being derives its being from another. I am— because I was begotten by my parents in 1991. Before that, I didn’t exist—I didn’t have being. And even now, I don’t own my being. I am—because I am receiving life (ultimately from God but also from oxygen, food, water, sleep, etc.). I cannot declare myself independent from all else. But the God who spoke with Moses that day on Mount Horeb is utterly independent: He does not receive life, light, love, or being; he is light, life, love, and being. Everything else that exists, exists according to his will. He is not becoming—he is. Petrus van Mastricht, the great German-born seventeenth-century Reformed theologian, referred to aseity as “the highest and chief perfection of God,” which “therefore must be located in the first place, because from it the rest of his perfections flow.”²

But this is still positive revelation. In Exodus 3, God does not simply delete content from how we think about him; he’s not simply telling us what he is by telling us what is not true of him. Rather, he truly does name himself positively when he puts this name on Moses’s lips. He is, in other words, utterly sufficient in and of himself. He is, as the old theologians would say, the infinite plentitude of life, love, and holiness. And this means that he is perfect—in need of nothing and no one to make him more alive, more powerful, more happy, more knowledgeable.³ Every other thing that exists gets all its life, power, happiness, and knowledge from him.

This means, practically, that God does not need us. God did not need Israel. He did not deliver the people by the hand of Moses because he desired to somehow be enriched by their worship. The one who is—whose existence transcends all earthly consideration—is, by definition, everlastingly happy in himself. More can be said about how this happiness burns in a uniquely Trinitarian way, but at this point I merely bring up this eternal self-happiness—or blessedness or beatitude—to disabuse us of the presumption that God’s happiness depends on us.

Now, this may be a shock to those of us who are accustomed to flattering ourselves with certain contemporary praise songs or ill-considered children’s Bibles, some of which can give the impression that God cannot be happy until heaven is populated by us. But this is simply not true. We don’t make up for any deficiency in God. We don’t fill an emotional hole in his heart. Our praise, although glorifying him and pleasing him in a sense, does not enrich him in his infinite joy. How could it? All the praise we offer—all the good we render to him—originates from him (cf. 1 Chron. 29:14; 1 Cor. 4:7). “For from him,” says Paul, “and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). He who is infinite in his perfection is, therefore, infinite in his blessedness and, therefore, cannot be enriched by another in any way.

Just consider how Herman Bavinck portrays this doctrine:

By this perfection he is at once essentially and absolutely distinct from all creatures. Creatures, after all, do not derive their existence from themselves but from others and so have nothing from themselves; both in their origin and hence in their further development and life, they are absolutely dependent. But . . . God is exclusively from himself, not in the sense of being self-caused but being from eternity to eternity who he is, being, not becoming. God is absolute being, the fullness of being, and therefore also eternally and absolutely independent in his existence, in his perfections, in all his works, the first and the last, the sole cause and final goal of all things. In this aseity of God, conceived not only as having being from himself but also as the fullness of being, all the other perfections are included.⁴

This is a marvelous truth. Why? Why should we be pleased when God disabuses us of our self-flattering perspective that we benefit him? Because if God does not need us, then he has created and redeemed us out of his pure, undiluted, gratuitous, unconstrained, and noncompulsory love.

Question: If God does not need us and is not enriched by us, why then does he create and redeem us? Answer: Simply out of a free expression of his infinitely overflowing love! This means that the love of God manifested in creating and redeeming his people is preeminently trustworthy. Since its foundation and goal is a creaturely participation in God’s own eternal beatitude, nothing creaturely can alter it. If the source of our eternal life is the a se eternal love of God, then we can bank all our security on it.

Do you see how this might be a consolation to Moses? “How will this God’s presence help me?” Moses may have asked himself. “Who is this one who will be with me as I go to Pharoah?” Answer: the one who is. He is the infinite source and giver of all life and being. Moses could not appeal categorically higher than to this Being for help in his task to deliver Israel from slavery. Who could help Moses more on this mission? Sure, Pharoah was the king of the greatest earthly superpower—Moses had seen that up close. Sure, no living man was more powerful than he. Sure, Moses was a jaded, humiliated, failed deliverer coming to this people with a deficit of credibility to lead them. But the Being who commissioned Moses in Exodus 3 is the one who gives life and breath and being to everyone, including Pharoah. Moses had the help of the infinite Maker of heaven and earth behind him: He should almost feel bad for Pharoah! No competition against “I am” is even fair.

So we can derive the doctrine of aseity from the Scriptures in several ways. We can discern it in God’s creation of the cosmos from nothing—that is, God is independent of the created world because his being precedes, transcends, and causes the created world by definition. Or we can derive the doctrine of aseity by contrasting God to other gods—that is, God differs from idols precisely in the sense that they depend on their worshipers while God does not depend on us. But in this passage in Exodus 3 we learn that God positively teaches us of his aseity, simply by naming himself as he who is who he is. The God of the Christian Scriptures, alone, is.

Notes:

R. Michael Allen, “Exodus 3,” in Theological Commentary: Evangelical Perspectives, ed. R. Michael Allen (T&T Clark, 2011), 32.
Petrus van Mastricht, “Faith in the Triune God,” vol. 2 of Theoretical-Practical Theology, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Reformation Heritage, 2019), 90.
For this reason, the great theologians called God pure act.
Herman Bavinck, God and Creation, vol. 2 of Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Baker Academic, 2004), 152.

This article is adapted from The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God by Samuel G. Parkison.

Samuel G. Parkison (PhD, Midwestern Seminary) is associate professor of theology at the Gulf Theological Seminary in the United Arab Emirates. He is the author of several books, including Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ and To Gaze Upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice.

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To talk about the aseity of God, then, is to say that God is from and of himself. He is completely self-originating and dependent on nothing other than himself.

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