Eternal

The everlastingness of God is a concept so interwoven with the nature of God throughout the sacred Scriptures, that without it God would not be the God of the Bible. The Psalmist wrote of it in exalting terms:

Blessed be the LORD God of Israel
From everlasting to everlasting!
Amen and Amen. (Psalm 41:13)

Before the mountains were brought forth,
Or ever You had formed the earth and the world,
Even from everlasting to everlasting,
You are God. (Psalm 90:2)

Your throne is established from of old;
You are from everlasting. (Psalm 93:2)

God is "from everlasting to everlasting" proclaimed the Psalmist. The concept staggers us. We push our mind back into the dim recesses of the past, trying to force our thoughts, our imagination, beyond the vanishing point where no human thoughts can go. And though we lengthen the horizon of our imagination, everlasting remains hidden behind the veil of unknowable. Searching still, we turn and peer into the everlasting future and try to pierce the veil that shadows there, also; only to stagger back, mind and imagination exhausted. And all we discovered is that God is at both points and beyond, unaffected by our inability to probe thought the mist of the veil.

But perhaps in the attempt we discovered something else, too. We look in the wrong direction when we try to look through time to find the everlastingness of God, to find His eternality. Time measures the change of created matter and delineates its beginning and end. Time has to do with creation, not with God. God, being uncreated, is not affected by time. Indeed, He who created time cannot be affected by that which He created. God does not exist in time; time exists in God.

No age can heap its outward years on Thee;
Dear God! Thou art, Thyself,
Thine own eternity. (Frederick W. Faber)

Common thought thinks of God as dwelling in eternity. But such thinking shallows God. For God to dwell in something would make that something to coexist with God, or pre-exist, or God creating it so that He would have something in which He could dwell. The idea is as complicated as the sentence. God does not dwell in eternity. God is eternity. Eternity exists because God exists.

The thought
Of Forever
Teased my mind,
Like a mountain
Through a thickly
Misted view.

But today the
Veil dissolved
To show—
Eternity
Is You!
(Carol Lynn Pearson, from "Beginnings.")

To think rightly of the eternality of God we must think of a state of no-time. Time is a created measurement, created by God to measure change in our temporal universe. But in God Himself, time does not exist, only a state of no-time: eternity. Therefore, in God there is neither beginning nor end, for beginning and end have to with time and not with God. God is the Eternal Now. He always was and always will be. Within His eternality He created our time/space universe and fixed the span of its existence. "Declaring the end from the beginning" (Isaiah 46:9-10), and seeing both in one view.

Before time was, God knew all that you and I would be and do. And in full knowledge of it, He gave us to His Son, and received us into His kingdom and made us His children. There is nothing in our past nor in our yet unknown—to us—future that God did not know before He ignited the fire of our sun. And knowing, He made us His in Christ Jesus. Understanding this should bring us great comfort! For God did not translate us into the kingdom of His beloved Son with the intent of expelling us later for something we do in our future that He has always known about. (John 17:6, 9, 11, 24; 1 John 3:1; Colossians 1:13)

     And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.
     For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
     Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.
     What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:28-31)

"All that the Father gives to me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out." (John 3:37)

We are temporal, God is eternal, and it is for an eternal purpose that He has chosen us in Christ His Son. We are eternally secure in the Eternal! What God thought of us when He first thought of us before time began, He will think of us when time is no more. Though our life flies through time on fleeting wings, and often distresses us with its swiftness, in Him who is eternal we also are eternal now: "Your life is hid with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3).

What God thought of me
When He first thought of me,
He thinks of me still,
And always will!

Home • Up • God Is Almighty • Eternal • Immutable • Infinite • Perfect • Self-Existing • Self-Sufficient • Sovereign