How old is God?

(4) His Eternity. "The glory that I had with Thee before the world was" (John 17:5); "The same was in the beginning with God" (John 1:2), declare His eternity. There was never a time when God was not. At the beginning,with His Son, He was present. The glory of the divine Beings was but manifested in creation, a glory which had existed from all eternity.

God is called the Father of eternity, and the eternal God. He is said, too, to inhabit eternity. The word must be taken in its full unlimited bearing, as shewing the infinity of Deity in regard to what we call time. We are lost when we attempt to think of eternity. Time, to us, is what comes in between events which our minds can take account of, as space is what we conceive as the distance between bodies. There is no time with Him who is the First and the Last, who is, was, and is to come, nor are there measurements of space with Him who fills heaven and earth. "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting Thou art God."

8 I do not connect omnipresence and eternity as attributes with God, not because they may not, in an ordinary sense, be said to be so; and Scripture itself so speaks practically, and it always speaks practically, because truly; but that in our minds they are connected with time and space, which do not apply to God. There is no time when God is not; no place where His eye and hand, to use human language, are not. "I AM" is the proper expression of His existence. While time rolls on "I am" remains unchanged, and when time has rolled away "I am" subsists the same. It can hardly be called an attribute. This being understood, we may speak of eternal as a natural attribute of God.

The very nature of God demands such a thought. Things do not begin with God. Things do not occur to Him like they occur to us. His life is one eternal present, one eternal NOW. Time does not enter into His life. One day is with Him as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. When sin entered He did not have to turn round and enquire what should be done. He did not have to consider plans. And to suppose that He only began to be the Father less than 2000 years ago is not only contrary to all Scripture, but to all reason and to all right thoughts of the being and nature of God.

Everything in the Fathers world is eternal. In that world nothing had beginning, neither shall anything there have end. Believers were chosen in Christ before the foundation of this world (Eph. 1). God calls those things that be not as being (Rom. 4:17). Our minds are finite, and from our standpoint we cannot see things in connection with eternity, we are compelled by our own limitations to connect all things with time. We are certain that everything we see had a beginning. We can better understand a thing having no end, because this thought does not compel us to force our thoughts out of the stream of time. With us it is still time lengthened out indefinitely. If we think of God, we know that He cannot have had a beginning, and yet we find in our reason a substratum of rebellion against this thought, for it is utterly foreign to our mode of thinking, and entirely beyond our comprehension. And yet the conviction is forced upon us that there must be a first cause of all things, and here again our finite minds rise up against the Infinite, which we cannot understand. But how could the creature understand the Creator?

(vv. 2-6) Having stated the ground of his confidence in appealing to God, the psalmist draws a contrast between the eternal God and mortal man. God is the unchangeable God, the same before the world was as now. Creation may pass, yet God remains. The One who is our resource is everlasting and unchanging — “From eternity to eternity thou art God” (JND).

In contrast to God the psalmist sees the mortality of man and the passing of time. God is immortal, but man is mortal and returns to dust (JND). In the sight of God there is no time as men count time. A thousand years in the sight of God are as soon gone as yesterday, or as a watch in the night.

The only idea I have of time is bounded by events which are not "now." But as far as without, then I seek to know it. I have no idea of time but the principle of eternity, only contradicted by experience. "I am" - that is not time as having duration, but in a point, and with a notion excluding bounded time, and so leadirlg up to God Who is necessarily "I AM," the rearest approach to conceiving eternity; which in itself I cannot conceive. But I conceive God existing, and never doing anything but existing.

The passage begins with eternity (that is, begins by speaking of the past ages), passes right through time, and ends with eternity again, when the created firmament shall have been folded up as a vesture by Him who created it; but He remains the same.

We cannot imagine eternity; and He who never had a beginning, and who dwells in inaccessible light, is far beyond our ken. Though He has been pleased to reveal Himself to us as Father, as to the Deity itself it is far beyond us. God is God, whatever people may say, and we receive by faith the revelation of His eternal being. We remember the answer given by a poor preacher at Cambridge, at the beginning of this century, to some young mathematicians who asked him for a definition of eternity. He replied that he did not feel able to give one; but in return asked them, What would be the length of a pendulum which, instead of marking seconds, should vibrate only once in a century? This of course could be calculated, but we should be as far from apprehending eternity as ever.

Here the scoffers ask, Where is the promise of His coming? (2 Pet. 3:4). All things continue as our fathers have known them. Men have done as they have pleased with apparent impunity from the beginning. But the scoffers are ignorant of two things: (1) That God did once publicly take account of the ways of the world, when it was filled with violence, and, with the exception of one family, it was totally destroyed by a flood of waters. (2) That a thousand years are as one day in the reckoning of God. The former shows that God is not indifferent to the state of the world, the latter that His ways must not be judged by the ways of men. They live in hours, and days, and years, and must work feverishly lest they be too late to accomplish their purposes. He is the eternal God, whose being is outside the bounds of time, and so He can patiently await the development of all things until the moment is ripe for the manifestation of His glory.

To whom can this description apply? Not to mortal man, with whom life has both beginning and end, whose days are as a weaver’s shuttle, so quickly do they pass away (Job 7:6). Not to the life of the Christian, for eternal life has for him a beginning, when he first receives it as a gift from a gracious God; though, thank God, it will never have an end. To whom then can the two words, ETERNAL LIFE, apply? It is most obvious that they can only apply to Deity, with whom alone, life has neither beginning nor end.