As human beings, we never seem to have enough time. God, however, has all the time in the world: he is eternal! But what does that mean, and what difference does it make to our faith?
Find out more about the Firm Foundations course by watching the Introduction. The previous session is here.
In the second part of our “Get to know God” series, we’re going to think about how God is everlasting or eternal. The Bible teaches that God has always existed, and will always exist. He doesn’t have a beginning or an end. He is not bound by time in the way that we human beings are. Let’s think about what the Bible has to say about God’s eternity, and then think about how it makes a difference in our lives.
Before the mountains were born
Psalm 90:2
or you brought forth the whole world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
One of the most important things to grasp about God is that he never had a beginning. He has always existed. I know that’s hard to get your head around! We human beings are so used to thinking of things in terms of beginning and ending, that it’s very difficult – if not impossible – to really understand how God could be different. But – that is what the Bible teaches.
This is fundamental to who God is. The universe needs to have a “first cause”. In Stephen Hawking’s famous book A Brief History of Time, he tells this story:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
If you think about it for a moment, there has to come something at the bottom of the pile. It’s the same thing with creation. If you ask, ‘who created God?’ then you have to ask ‘Who created the person who created God?’ and so on.
Someone or something had to come first.
Continue reading “God is… Everlasting”
