The Eternal God

Hey Readers! 
       I am currently studying God's word at E.I. School of Biblical Training in Greenville, SC. One of the things that I am doing for school is writing weekly papers on one of God's attributes. I hope to be posting them on the weekends for you all to read. Keep seeking God, and He will reveal Himself to you.  
Thanks for reading,
Taylor

The Eternity of God

"Before the mountains were brought forth, 

or ever you had formed the earth and the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you are God." Psalm 90:2. 

  

     God is eternal. As Webster's dictionary defines it, God has "duration or continuance without beginning or end." Stephen Charnock uses this illustration of eternity, "Eternity and time differ as the sea and the rivers; the sea never changes place, and is always one water; but the rivers glide along, and are swallowed up in the sea; so is time by eternity." (p. 280) I keep trying to wrap my mind around the eternity of God, and I don't really know how to expand on something that simply IS. My thoughts are not even close to His thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8) Yet, here I am trying to use my mind to describe Him. I am inadequate to do this, but here I go.

A. God is without Beginning. “From everlasting” Psalm 90:2

      Something must have always existed. If something else besides God existed before Him, then He would not be the one that we should worship; because that would mean that something is more powerful than He is. “The pagan philosophers wretchedly blundered, and became vain in their imaginations,... asserting the world's eternity and self-existence,ascribing it to a fortuitous concourse of atoms"(Henry) I believe that it takes more faith to say that the world has always existed, than to say that God has always existed.

      Many atheists believe that we should only accept what we can prove. They say that they hold onto science as their only source of Fact. Yet, one of the laws of Physics says that matter decays. If that is true, why are we even alive? Evolution, commonly accepted as a "proven fact" in the scientific community, says that life evolved from non-life. MATTER DECAYS. That is proven science. This is a small scale example of what they believe: “Take a child's puzzle. Dump it on the ground. The puzzle, if given millions of years, will somehow become perfectly finished.” I have a few questions for them. Where did the puzzle come from? Where did the ground come from? What made the puzzle pieces move towards the ground, instead of floating in the air? But, the problem is that life as we know it is millions of times more complicated than even that small example. I do not think that scientists have proven evolution to be true. There is no way that I could believe such a silly thing as that.

      So, either Matter has always existed or God has always existed. I think I'll stick with God. He has given me a Book; written over thousands of years, completely inerrant, lacking in mistakes, a guide to Himself, His nature, works, commandments, wisdom, and truth. Someone like that deserves my worship.

B. God made Time.

The first Day, as we call it, only happened a few thousand years ago, before that, there was no such thing as time.“God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years,”(Gen 1:5, 14) We see here that our Lord invented Time.  

“The study of Physics tells us that matter and time and space must occur together: if there is no matter, there can be no space or time either. Thus, before God created the universe, there was no “time” at least not in the sense of a succession of moments occurring one after the other.” (Grudem, p. 169)

      God does not experience moments in time as we do. He is outside of time. “For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.” (Psalm 90:4) All of time is nothing in comparison to God's eternity, but,“He chose us in him before the foundation of the world,” (Ephesians 1:4) "There is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,”(Isaiah 46:9-10) How to comprehend the fact that there was no such thing as a year, and time was not able to be counted; that is beyond me. God is amazing and indescribable!

C. God will never end. “to everlasting” Psalm 90:2 

 In the last chapter of Revelation, we get a small peek at what heaven will be like.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal,

 flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb

through the middle of the street of the city; 

 also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, 

yielding its fruit each month." Rev 22:1-2a 

      There will be some sort of passage of time in Heaven. But not the same type of time that we experience here on earth. “Night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.” Rev 22:5 There will be no night, no darkness to hide God. We are future-eternal beings. God made our souls to last forever. Our eyes will be made new to see Him as we never have before. We will experience Him as the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. As the Catechism describes our chief end, we will get “to Glorify God, and Enjoy Him forever.”

Application

Forever starts now. Start worshiping this timeless God today. 

 Look forward to the day when you will be with Him, and not ever leave Him.

Because both He and we as humans are all eternal, you should seek to be used by Him to

 share the news of Christ, that other souls would get to enjoy Him forever.

 

Works Cited

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, New York: Good News Publishers, 2001. Print

Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994. Print

Charnock, Stephen. The Existence and Attributes of God, Ann Arbor, Malloy, Inc. 1976. Print

Henry, Matthew. Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible, e-Sword 10.4. Electronic

- From his commentary on Genesis 1:1