Yahoo! I love that question because friends ask me that question all the time! I could easily give them the standard Biblical answer that “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 explaining it: 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 people that have 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 it works. But trying to explain something so difficult that we casually accept to someone who’s never experienced would be very challenging.
Let’s apply that thinking to the idea of God being eternal. Truth: God’s eternal power is clearly seen in the creation of our universe but our brains have a hard time wrapping around that idea. And we kind of know what eternity is but we don’t fully understand it. So, what do we do? We try to explain it in terms we can see and understand. But how do we explain eternity to people (all of us) who are stuck in the passage of time? We usually start by trying to simplify the idea!
The Bible is our place to start. 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.
We know tht time is a measurement of physical change. Time, though, has only existed since the creation of the universe. Genesis 1:1, the very first book and chapter of the Bible, says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God created everything, so time started at creation.
We also know from Genesis 1:1 that God was BEFORE the creation of the heavens and the earth becuse He was there to create it. That makes God timeless (eternal) because He created time! So, to answer your question in the simplest of terms, God has been here for all eternity and will be here for all eternity.
Thank you for a great and challenging question!
Showing posts with label beginning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beginning. Show all posts
Sunday, 10 July 2011
Sunday, 21 June 2009
Who made God? If God has no beginning, how can he exist?
This is an incredibly good question!
Here is the history that the Bible gives us about God: Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That’s all we know! When you read the whole Bible and put all the pieces together, basically it looks like God has always been and always will be. I know that’s difficult to understand especially because we think of everything in terms of time. The earth revolves, and we call it a day. The earth goes around the sun, and we call it a year.
But God is different: In the beginning God created everything. When the Bible says “heavens and the earth”, that was a way of saying “everything”, and everything includes … time! God even created time!
The Bible says that God does not have a beginning and an end. He is a spirit. No mom and pop. Just God. Revelation 22:13 says I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Wow!
So if God had no beginning, how can he exist? Your question is very good. The answer is not simple, but the answer the Bible gives us is that God does exists, and that he always did, and that he always will.
Here is the history that the Bible gives us about God: Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That’s all we know! When you read the whole Bible and put all the pieces together, basically it looks like God has always been and always will be. I know that’s difficult to understand especially because we think of everything in terms of time. The earth revolves, and we call it a day. The earth goes around the sun, and we call it a year.
But God is different: In the beginning God created everything. When the Bible says “heavens and the earth”, that was a way of saying “everything”, and everything includes … time! God even created time!
The Bible says that God does not have a beginning and an end. He is a spirit. No mom and pop. Just God. Revelation 22:13 says I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Wow!
So if God had no beginning, how can he exist? Your question is very good. The answer is not simple, but the answer the Bible gives us is that God does exists, and that he always did, and that he always will.
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