R.C. Sproul

But if you do ever read serious theology, you'll see it again and again.

It's the simple little word aseity, A-S-E-I-T-Y.

It's one of my most favorite words in theology.

I can't read that word aseity, A-S-E-I-T-Y, without having chill bumps.

Because that one little word captures this magnificent, transcendent character of God.

Aseity means that which has its being in and of itself.

All of this, I believe, is clearly implied here.

by the proper name of God.

For above all things, the thing that is most transcendent about God, the thing that distinguishes God more than anything else about Him from us is His being.

For He alone has the power of being in Himself.

And it's only because of that power of being

that you and I can even sit around discussing the meaning of being.

Without that power of being, we wouldn't be here at all.

Let me ask you to think back to the days when you were in grammar school and you first had to go through those nasty exercises of learning the various parts of speech, the nouns and the verbs and the adjectives and the adverbs, and had to learn the difference between various kinds of verbs, linking verbs, transitive verbs, intransitive verbs, and it all gave us an excedrin headache.

But do you remember when you learned the verb to be?

What are various forms of the verb to be?

I am, you are, he, she, it, is.

Past tense forms were and was.

shall be, have been, has been.

All of those are various forms of the verb to be.