Who created God? Where did God come from?
The question "who created God?" sounds simple, but it carries a hidden assumption: that everything, including God, must have a starting point. Commentators answer by pressing that assumption until it breaks, and then by pointing to the only place an answer can come from — God's own testimony about Himself.
The Question Turned Back
The question was put plainly by one writer, who answered it not with argument but by pointing at the sky:
A. J. PollockSo where did God come from? Was there a time when He did not exist? Did He come from nowhere, from a vacuum, from nothing? These questions hardly need an answer in the face of the great lesson of creation. We cannot imagine a time when there was nothing. We cannot conjure up the idea of a vacuum. Creation with its million mouths loudly proclaims the Creator's "eternal power and Godhead."
Everything Made Has a Maker
Our instinct to ask "who made it?" is exactly what leads us to God — and it is the same instinct that cannot follow Him any further:
J. N. DarbyTake this world: there is evidence of skill, there must have been a designer, someone must have made it. So with a watch (the common illustration), someone must have made it... I am not capable of imagining such a thing existing without a cause; but if I see it there, I must find someone who formed it... But a cause that has no cause is above me! The very thing that proves He must exist proves I cannot tell what He is.
Self-Existent, Not Self-Made
A chain of causes has to stop somewhere. What it stops at is not a bigger creature but a different kind of being altogether:
G. V. WigramThere is, and in the very nature of things there can only be, one First Cause of everything. There is such a One — the living and true God. He is self-existent, never had a beginning, eternal; never ending, everlasting; the only One infinite in power... the one First Cause, the originating source of everything that was ever brought into created existence, the Sustainer of it in being, and the Controller here and elsewhere of everything.
Others put the same truth in three words, ruling out any source behind Him:
C. CrainHe was uncaused, underived and uncreated.
The Name He Gave Himself
When God told Moses what to call Him, the name itself was the answer to this question:
Walter ScottThe awesome and sacred name Jehovah means existence that comes from no one else, the Self-Existing One. To Israel the name was explained as "I AM WHO I AM" (Ex. 3:14); to the nations as "him who is and who was and who is to come" (Rev. 1:4; 4:8)... "Who is" implies independent, unchangeable existence. "Who was" points to Jehovah's relation to the past. "Who is to come" shows His connection with the future.
Why the Mind Resists It
If the idea still refuses to settle in your head, that reaction has been described honestly:
James BoydOur minds are finite, and from where we stand we cannot see things in connection with eternity; our own limits force us to tie everything to time. We are certain that everything we see had a beginning... If we think of God, we know that He cannot have had a beginning, and yet we find in our reasoning an underlying rebellion against this thought, for it is completely foreign to the way we think, and entirely beyond our understanding. And yet we are forced to the conviction that there must be a first cause of all things... But how could the creature understand the Creator?
Another writer names the mistake in method: we work upward from ourselves instead of starting where God has spoken.
William J. HockingThe reason men break down over it all is that they reason from man up to God, which is always false. You must reason down from God to man if you are to be in the truth; for who knows the truth but God? And who can reveal the truth but God, as He has done in Christ?
Where Certainty Comes From
Reasoning can carry you as far as "there must be" — no further. What changes everything is being told:
J. N. DarbyLogic says, if such-and-such is true, then such-and-such must be; but that does not say that it is, which is a very different thing to my soul. If I say "must be," that is only an inference. The moment I get a testimony that it is, how different! I get a divine testimony, and set my seal to it that God is true. This is faith, divine faith.
Summary
- Question — "Who made God?" assumes He is one more made thing; creation itself points past every made thing to a Maker who was already there.
- Cause — Everything we see needs a cause, so there must be a First Cause; but a First Cause, by definition, has none. He is uncaused, underived and uncreated.
- Name — He answered this question Himself in the name "I AM": existence that comes from no one else, reaching backward and forward over all time.
- Limit — Our minds are tied to time, so a Being without a beginning will always feel foreign. The creature cannot fully understand the Creator, and that is what we should expect.
- Testimony — Reason can only reach "there must be a God." Certainty comes when God speaks — reasoning down from God to man, as He has revealed Himself in Christ.