Our Eternal GodEsimerkki

At its core, God’s eternity means that He is unbound and unlimited in relation to time. You and I are time-bound creatures, always living between an unchangeable past and an unknowable future. We are unlikely to often think about it, but it is essential to who we are. That is not so for God. Time is part of His creation, and as Maker of all things, He cannot be bound by time. Consider how the book of Genesis opens, “In the beginning God created . . .” It makes sense to assume that “the beginning” to which the writer refers is the beginning of time. It is, as it were, when the stopwatch starts rolling, and for that watch to move there needed to be the conditions that God established on the first day: > And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Gen. 1:3–5) It takes days and nights, light and darkness, and the rotation of the earth for time to be counted. Time, as we understand it, only began with the creation events recorded here. And so, if time itself is part of God’s creation, then His own existence as Creator must stand above and before the creation. His own eternal existence must be timeless itself. The idea of time is actually something we struggle to grasp. By that I do not mean that some people are bad at timekeeping or poor at punctuality, but rather that all of us struggle to understand the notion of time and to articulate what it means. But as time-bound creatures, we struggle all the more with the notion of eternity. We cannot really imagine any kind of experience or reality that is not defined by time. The very concept almost overwhelms our rational capacity. Yet that is exactly who God is: He is eternal. This is why God’s eternity is central to our understanding of Him and why it is at the heart of His revelation of Himself. When Moses asked God how he should refer to Him before Pharaoh, the Lord said to him, “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex. 3:14). God is the Great I AM. There is nothing to add, nothing to take away. He is the absolute existence; no development, no change, no growth, no reduction. There is nothing relative about God. He is in no sense constrained. He simply is. Therefore, when God came to earth and entered human history through the incarnation, Jesus the Son of God declared this same identity for Himself. John recorded it clearly in his gospel, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). Abraham had a beginning, but before him, says Jesus, “I am.” Absolute existence unbound by time.