The Eternality of God

Day 2

God is Eternal


Psalm 90:2

2 Before the mountains were brought forth,

    or ever you had formed the earth and the world,

    from everlasting to everlasting you are God.


God’s eternality is His aseity with respect to time. This sentence may appear complex initially, but it's a simple concept when we break it down. God being eternal means He is without beginning or end. As Moses writes in the verse above, “from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” Moses states that God has always been, is, and will always be God; He is outside of time. 


This makes sense because God created time (Genesis 1:1). As Peter writes in 2 Peter 3:8, “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” The Lord is not restricted by time as we are. In other words, He does not need time. He is not bound by time. He is entirely self-existent and self-sufficient, which extends to His relationship with time. Theologians call this God’s “eternality.” Our days are finite, and our life on earth is but a vapor (Job 14:5, Psalm 144:4, James 4:14), but the Lord is eternal, from everlasting to everlasting. 


Reflect: How does the concept of eternity make you feel? Does it lead to anxious or joyful thoughts? 


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The concept of eternity can be daunting to think about. Our finite minds that only exist within the bounds of time cannot fully comprehend eternity, yet in Ecclesiastes 3:11, Solomon writes, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” 


To have eternity written on our hearts means that while we can’t truly understand eternity, we long for it. This is strongly connected to the ideas of perfect goodness, infinite wisdom, and boundless love and is described as man’s “capacity for the infinite.”  Though our understanding of such concepts is somewhat vague, we long for them. 


Where are these concepts found? In God alone. We will spend more time on each of them in future days of this devotional. For now, we will wrap up our devotion on the eternality of God. 


God being eternal is one of the biggest blessings for Christians, seeing that we can experience His perfect splendor, beauty, and holiness forever. However, for the nonbeliever, God being eternal is one of His most terrifying attributes. 


Of course, this would not matter if God were not holy (another attribute for a future day). Since God is holy and eternal, He must punish sin, and this punishment is eternal. While the glory of heaven is eternal, so is the torment of hell. This further emphasizes our need to share the gospel with the world! Thinking through the doctrine of God’s eternity should cause us to praise Him and to heed the call to go into the world and make disciples (Matthew 28:18-20). 


Today’s big words:


Day 3 link here!