God's Self-Sufficiency

Another philosophical idea is the self-sufficiency of God. Tozer, as usual, explains it perfectly: “Whatever God is, and all that God is, He is in Himself;” and “To admit the existence of a need in God is to admit incompleteness in the divine Being;” and “The word ‘necessary’ is wholly foreign to God.’ We must admit that all life and being comes from God, but that is not to say that God is complete in and of Himself, nor is it to say that God has no needs to meet.

The philosophical idea of a conceptually perfect being is beautiful and full of symmetry, but, again, it is not necessary to apply it to the God of Scripture, nor is it necessarily helpful to do so. It is a theological distraction from the true nature of God, that which He wants to reveal to us. To focus on the perfect conceptual being is to distract us away from the Person who is “merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness and truth” as God revealed Himself.

Tozer promotes the idea of God’s self-sufficiency from Jesus’ saying, “The Father has life in Himself.” In the context, Jesus is speaking of the Father containing life, and thus passing that life onto the Son, so that he also may contain life so that the life can be passed on to others on judgment day. It is not so much speaking of the self-sufficiency of God as God as the storehouse of life.

And to argue philosophically with the idea of God having no need: The being that has no need does no action. Action is borne out of need, as one’s deep desire cannot truly be separated from need. Thus, if God had no need, he would not have created the world. Nor would He have revealed Himself to humanity. Nor would He answer humanity’s call for salvation. To say that God acts is to say that He has need. To say that He acts dramatically and sacrificially is to say that He has a truly deep need. The philosophical concept of God paints God without emotion, without similarity to humanity. But God describes himself as jealous, angry, loving, compassionate—and these are all emotions of need, the need of love and the need to give love. To deny God’s need is to deny His self-description.