God is not a static being. His very trinitarian nature implies a dynamism, an activity, which clothes His eternal and absolute being. God is not merely an adjective (omnipotent, omniscient), much less a noun (God, the Creator), but rather He is action, He is verb, He is activity, He is donation, He is love.
For God, being is not something that is possessed, but what He is.
In creatures, essence —what a thing is— is distinct from existence —the fact that it is—.
But in God this separation does not exist: His essence is His existence.
That is why Christian tradition calls Him ipsum esse subsistens: subsistent Being itself, the Being who exists by Himself, without receiving being from anyone and without being caused by anything.
This mystery is further illuminated when God reveals His name to Moses:
Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (Exodus 3:14).
The Hebrew expression does not describe a static noun, but an active verb, a Being always in act:
“I am who I am,” “I will be who I will be,” “I am the one who is being.”
Hence it is said that God is eternal verb, an eternal act of existing.
His verbal form ehyeh, linked to the causative root (nifal/hiphil in its semantic background), precisely expresses that God is the cause and foundation of all that exists.
As Colossians 1:17 states: “In Him all things hold together.”
Creation is not something God did once and set aside; it is something He sustains at every moment.
If God stopped “Being,” all created things would cease to exist. Certainly, God's creative will is faithful and does not desire the destruction of His creatures, but, on the contrary, that they may live in fullness. Therefore, He sustains them in existence, even in those moments when creatures forget their creator, doubt, and rebel.
Therefore we can affirm: everything exists, but only God causes to exist.
For man, being is a received gift.
If in God Being is identity —not something He possesses, but what He is—, in man the opposite is true: his being is not his own, it is received, participated. The creature cannot be explained from itself; its existence always points beyond itself, toward the One who originates it.
The human being discovers, in the light of revelation, that:
- he did not create himself: his existence is not self-originated, but granted by a free and loving act of God;
- he does not sustain himself: every moment is sustained by the Being who keeps him in existence;
- he cannot fulfill himself: meaning and fullness do not spring from a self-sufficient project, but from the recognition and encounter with the One who called him into existence.
Therefore, human existence —far from being an isolated effort to answer life's essential questions— is revealed as a living and continuous relationship with the Being who sustains it.
Our deepest identity is not born of introspection or self-affirmation, but of belonging and participation: we are because God is, and because He, in His freedom and love, chooses to communicate His Being and His gifts and graces to us.
Thus, human life is understood in terms of communion: being with Being.
We participate in the divine Being not as distant spectators, but as creatures called to live from Him, in Him, and toward Him. Human existence is called to a communion that can only exist if the free creature accepts to live this experience.
In this way, only when man places himself before the “I Am” can he discover the true “I am” that has been given to him.
His identity ceases to be a fragile construct and becomes a received truth; his life ceases to oscillate between empty searches and becomes rooted in an eternal Source.
In God, man not only discovers who he is, but why he is and for what purpose he is.
In the light of Being, all existence is illuminated.