A couple of young men in my life have recently expressed difficulty understanding and believing that God is eternal, essentially, that He is not created, without beginning or end. I care very much for both of these gentlemen, so I want to lay out what the Bible teaches about the Lord’s eternal nature and how He relates to time.

Genesis 1 teaches that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” leading us to understand that before anything else existed, God was. At the end of each day, the Bible says: “So the evening and the morning were the _______ day,” letting us know that time was established as soon as the world was created, not on day four, when God created the heavenly bodies to mark time.

In Exodus 3:14 we can read the first instance in the Bible where the Lord is referred to (in this case by Himself) as “I Am.” In context, He spoke in answer to Moses’ question as to whom he should tell the Israelites had sent him. God answered: “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” And, in John 8:58, Jesus infuriated the Jews when He said to them: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham came into being, I Am.” And three times in the book of Revelation (1:8, 21:6, and 22:13), the Lord is called “the Alpha and the Omega.”

What all of these scriptures teach us is that God exists outside of time. He created time as a constraint for us and our universe. We are bound to it, unable to see beyond it, but time is all laid out before His eyes. When time is over, our souls will live in eternity, either in heaven or in hell. That being the case, God has put eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Understanding our need for redemption, we can put our complete faith in the only God. If we will acknowledge and repent of our sin, and call on Him, entrusting ourselves to Him, then we will be saved. He is not created. He is not bound by time. There will not come a day when He will die. He Is.