How long has God been around?

Yahoo! I love that question because people ask me that question all the time! I could easily give them the standard Biblical answer of, “God has always been here and He has no beginning and no end and He will always be here because He is eternal.” But, I usually get that deer-in-the-headlights look when I say that.

So, here’s my way of trying to explain it in a different way: Imagine being able to go back in time to the days of the pilgrims as they were colonizing this country and trying to explain to them how a helicopter works or how an iPod works. Remember, there’s no such thing as electricity, gas engines, batteries, etc. So, how do you explain how those things work to a society that has never seen stuff like that? You see, we’ve grown up with so much technology that we just accept what is there without really trying to understand how they work. But trying to explain something that we casually accept to someone who’s never experienced it would be very hard.

So now let’s apply that thinking to the concept of our Lord God being eternal. How do you explain what eternity is to people who are stuck in the passage of time? We kind of know what eternity is but we don’t fully understand it. So, what do we do? We do what every person alive does…we try to redefine the incomprehensible into terms we can understand. Basically, we try to simplify the problem! The big problem with that is that people tend to oversimplify things!

God’s eternal power is clearly seen in our world but our brains have a hard time wrapping around the concept of God having the power to create an entire universe. So, we try to explain it in terms we can see and understand. We try and make God like us, forgetting that He’s not like us…we are like Him! We were created in His image! The problem is that that doesn’t even come close to explaining the eternal God.

If you look at a Biblical explanation, the Bible simply says God “is.” Remember Moses? When he asked the Lord God what His name was, do you remember what God said? He said, “Tell them I AM.” (Exodus 3:14) Revelation 1:8 and 4:8 says that God is, God was and God is to come.

So, to answer your question in the simplest of terms, God has been here for all eternity and will be here for all eternity.