“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”

Psalm 90:1-2.

EXEGETICAL

This begins a Psalm of Moses. In this Psalm is contained one of our family’s memory verses. “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (v. 12). The time that I introduced it to our children “seems like an eternity” ago. We speak figuratively about such things. And we have to do that. Our days are our starting point. But for Moses, here, the starting point is, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (v. 2). Calvin comments on the force of this passage, that, 

God is here contrasted with created beings, who, as all know, are subject to continual changes, so that there is nothing stable under heaven. As, in a particular manner, nothing is fuller of vicissitude than human life, that men may not judge the nature of God by their own fleeting condition, he is here placed in a state of settled and undisturbed tranquility.

Now if this biblical passage seems to talk only about “eternity past,” as we sometimes say, note that it says that “you ARE God,” and not simply that you were, nor even that you will be, which he could have added. But in the past, present, and future, there is only the God who IS. This will be crucial when we come to our fullest definition of eternity as it is in God. 

1. Some things are called “eternal” or “everlasting” in a secondary sense in Scripture. Most notably, there is that “eternal life” that God gives to those who are united to Christ by faith: “I give them eternal life” (Jn. 10:28); and “whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life” (Jn. 5:24). Then there was the covenant that first began to announce the promise of the gospel, to Abraham, was called “an everlasting covenant” (Gen. 17:7); but then again, there are aspects of the created world that are also called by names like “the everlasting hills” (Deut. 33:15). 

2. The serious theologian will learn to arrange these different ways of using the concept of “eternal” in a hierarchy from most real to less real, or, given our present subject, from that which is eternal in itself to that which is “eternal” or “everlasting” only so-called. Here are another few to get the sense of it: “Behold, God is great, and we know him not; the number of his years is unsearchable” (Job 36:26). This text is more enigmatic than literal. I think we can all agree that one kind of Being whose years are unsearchable is a Being who is not subject to years at all. Or elsewhere he poses this question, through the prophet: “Who has performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning? I, the Lord, the first, and with the last; I am he” (Isa. 41:4). 

3. Even when we grasp that God alone has eternity in the most proper sense, a further qualification is required. Is God “in eternity,” or is eternity “in God,” or is all that is in God eternal? We ask because of the straightforward language of Scripture: “My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass. But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever; you are remembered throughout all generations” (Ps. 102:11-12); or, in speaking of Christ, “whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days” (Mic. 5:2). And the book of Revelation uses an even more figurative way to speak of the eternality of Christ:

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8; cf. 21:16; 22:13).

4. When we take note of the way that the Bible speaks here, we might remember how often it does this in general. We might remember that literary device called “anthropomorphism”—God depicted in the form (morphe) of man (anthropos)—and that principle of language called “analogy.” God accommodates himself to a manner appropriate to our little minds. So it is with eternity. Thomas Aquinas put it in this way: “As we attain to the knowledge of simple things by way of compound things, so we must reach to the knowledge of eternity by means of time, which is nothing but the numbering of movement by before and after” (Summa Theologica, Pt. I. Q.10, Art. 1).

DOCTRINAL

1. Turretin and Mastricht both understood divine eternality to be his infinity in relation to duration (Turretin, Institutes, I.10.1; Mastricht, TPT, II:211). This can be misunderstood. We will recall that divine infinity is God’s limitlessness per se. To be limitless with respect to duration does not mean simply that one’s time is “forever.” Certainly that is a way in which eternality manifests itself to the created order. But to begin with duration, however infinite, is to start at what might seem to be a sequential relationship, and again, that is the way that the Bible accommodates its language to our capacities. So God is called “the Everlasting God” (Gen. 21:33). And that he is; but to endure is not simply to last, but to be. Consider for a moment, that to “last” is negative. It speaks of what one does not do. That is, an enduring thing is a thing which does not cease or die. Hence, eternity is related to life and being more than it is related to time. Negatively stated, it is immortality and much as it is atemporality. 

2. This means not only without beginning or end, but without sequence altogether. In fact, time is entirely created, as Augustine famously set forth in his Confessions. He asks, “What is time? Not past, nor present, nor future simply is.” He cuts “this year” into units in the manner of Zeno’s paradox, so that no one unit can really be said to be “present.” The cause of any of their being cannot cease to be without being one of them. Strictly speaking there are not three times (past, present, future) that are. But these three exist in the same way at least in the soul by which we know. So he says, “It is in you, mind of mine, that I measure the periods of time” (Confessions, XI.27.36). And so, to the famous question, What was God doing before he created the world? Augustine does not reply that it is a meaningless question, but nonetheless it is a confusion. There was no BEFORE. Time itself is entirely an effect and a creation of God. Now as stated, the Scriptures have to accommodate to our everyday language. So Jude rightly ascribes to God “glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever” (v. 25). Here, before just means “independent of” and “apart from.”

But having established that time cannot be self-sufficient as all that is God must be, the attribute of “timeless” cannot have being itself, so that one theologian suggests, “it is better to think of timelessness not as a separate attribute but as a mode of possessing attributes.”

3. The definition of sixth century Christian philosopher-theologian, Boethius, can help us here. His definition of eternity has been the one that Christian theologians have turned to for a most profound explanation:

ETERNITY IS “the simultaneous whole and perfect possession of interminable life.” Other translations will render Boethius as speaking of “boundless life.”

In other words, this limitless duration speaks not only to a duration of time, but more fundamentally of life and being. Time is created. It is not what endures in the life of God. Life and being are uncreated in God, and it is they that are conceived to be unceasing. To speak of DURATION seems to imply succession of “events” in the divine life. As we have seen, divine simplicity, divine immutability, his being pure act, and, truthfully, all of the incommunicable attributes we have studied thus far, rule this out. Nonetheless, we can speak analogically about God “enduring,” if what is meant is from the creature’s perspective. As Paul Helm wrote, “It makes sense to say that God endures all through my life and the history of the universe, but this does not mean that God has the property of eternal duration, or duration of some other kind” (Eternal God, 37).

4. All of this implies that neither the first sin of Adam and Eve, nor the crucifixion of Jesus, nor the day or your birth nor your death are either temporally nearer to God or temporally further from God than any other event in time. Being Lord of time entails that God’s absolute transcendence and immanence to time of time. So PERSONAL PRESENCE is central to our definition of eternity, as Augustine put it,

“In the eternal, nothing passes away, but is simultaneously present. The past and future are not. But both arise out of and participate in the eternally present” (Confessions, XI.11.13).

All of this means that God is above and beyond all time, and that he pervades and is more present to time than time is to itself. Boethius continued about God’s timelessness that, “nothing future is absent from it and nothing past has flowed away … and of this it is necessary, both, that being in full possession of itself, it be always present to itself, and that it have the infinity of mobile time present to it.”

5. Theistic philosophers utilize the notion of simultaneity to reconcile God’s knowledge of all times with the obvious differences there are between an event A at one time and another event B at another time. Now there is an objection relating eternality to omniscience, but we will wait for our section on omniscience to tackle that objection. However one hint will be useful here. Any “finite experience C” of “events A and B” are of a limited set of knowledge (not omniscience). That is a reflection of the fact that the finite experience per se is not identical to the being of knowledge per se, but only a participation (or analogy) of that knowledge of A and B and their many temporal differences. This will be more difficult than the objections we will field here about timelessness per se. Just be aware that to speak of God “having” all temporal knowledge simultaneously is still a misnomer in the same class as supposing that eternity means merely the full set of sequential experiences. Simultaneous means “same time,” so that, in one essay, “the great fire of Rome is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on.”

Such a characterization is much ado about nothing, because if God possesses (subjectively) “time-less” knowledge of the object of time, then he is bound by neither Event A nor Event B, nor (and here is what those philosophers miss) experience [of A and B] C. He could “be” no more simultaneous to either A or B than he could to C of (A and B).

POLEMICAL

Objection 1. “A timeless God is an idea inherited from Platonism, defying the language of Scripture.”

Reply to Objection 1. This, as we have seen about previous attributes, is guilty of the genetic fallacy. That is, merely claiming that x is the source of a truth claim is no sufficient argument against it. But about that actual data of Scripture, biblical scholar James Barr said that there is a, “very serious shortage within the Bible of the kind of actual statement about ‘time’ or ‘eternity’ which could form a sufficient basis for a Christian philosophical-theological view of time. It is the lack of actual statements about what time is like, more than anything else, that has forced exegetes into trying to get a view of time out of the words themselves” (Barr, in Helm, Eternal God, 5-6). In short, a simple lexical approach does not decide the metaphysical question. Both sides must appeal to reasoning beyond the text of Scripture itself. We ought to recall those words of the Westminster Confession of Faith telling us when a thing is biblical, that is, “either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (I.6). We maintain that divine atemporality may be deduced by good and necessary consequence.

Objection 2. “A timeless God and an act of creation (or any act upon it) are incoherent.” 

Reply to Objection 2. All changes that are spoken of about the relationship between the Creator and the creation are (as we have seen before) those Cambridge changes, such as when a son grows taller than his mother and thus the mother is now predicated of being “shorter” than him. In that section in the Confessions, Augustine touched on this as well: “If anything has arisen in the essence of God that was not there before, then that essence cannot truly be called eternal. But if it was the eternal will of God that the creation should come to be, why, then, is not the creation itself also from eternity?” (XI.10.12).

Objection 3. “A timeless God and the Incarnation are incoherent.” 

Reply to Objection 3. This objection falls for the same reason as the previous. The only addition is that the changes outside of God are said to be united to God. It says, “The Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14). Here we have not merely a body and reasonable soul assumed by the Second Person of the Trinity, but we also have that word “became.” And yet for all of that, we are still dealing with accommodated language, as (metaphysically) John’s word “became” stands in for “assumed” and “united.” The whole of the human nature is created and this all change remains ad extra. 

Objection 4. “A timeless God and any Godward works of reconciliation are incoherent. Specifically, at what point did God declare us righteous? If we say, ‘It is when we believe,’ then it follows that God’s declarative action is at a point of time. Behind this, how is it that God can have wrath for us, and then have that wrath turned away either by the historic cross, or when we believe? As it says in John’s Gospel, ‘whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him’ (3:36). It remains on him, but conversely for the believer, what was wrath before that first faith is made propitious at a moment that Jesus died, and God loved the adopted son or daughter after that moment of faith. But each were moments of time. Therefore an appeased God in salvation and a timeless God in eternity cannot both be true.”

Reply to Objection 4. On the contrary, the Son, in his human nature, can satisfy God’s demands, through which God, in eternal act, determined to expiate the sins of his people. As Turretin said of appeasement: “He gives [satisfaction] as God-man … he receives it as the Word … he gives it as Mediator and receives it as a Judge.” In what sense does the relationship between God and sinner change? Paul says that even believers “were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:3). The classical position is not embarrassed to affirm this truth. The argument is not that divine wrath was never looming over the elect. Rather it is that the change affected by the cross was in the relationship between God and elect sinner and not a change in the divine essence or decree. Some of this will have to wait till we arrive at the divine decree; but to the extent that we can speak of plural decrees within the singular decree of God, the logical relationships between the higher and lower divine priorities are as real as the whole decree itself. The burden of proof is on anyone who would argue that these are mere abstractions. 

God loves all people in Adam (Jn. 3:16). God loves the elect in a more special way (1 Tim. 4:10). This special love is that which determines to satisfy the demands of divine justice. So Paul writes that, “God has not destined us for wrath” (1 Tim. 5:9). Jesus gives us the most crucial statement at this juncture, making divine love the cause of averting wrath and not the other way around: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13; cf. 1 Jn. 4:10). Propitiation of wrath does not initiate love. Love deals with wrath by propitiation. Propitiation exercises a ceasing influence on wrath, but it is not the case that God only began to love his people at that point.

Summary Positive Argument. Consider what would be lost if God were not eternal in this way. If God were subject to time, then God would be subject to change, because in each new moment, all that God experiences would be new to time. Hence the divine mind would learn what he did not know, and the divine will would be reacting to that same set of new experiences. Thus, both omniscience and the decree would be subject to change. But, as we will see, both of those are impossible. 

PRACTICAL

There are three practical uses of this doctrine to set before you: 1. This doctrine of divine eternality is an anchor for all personal relationships. 2. This doctrine is given to us for our stability in this life. 3. This doctrine is given to us for hope in the life that never dies.

Use. 1. This doctrine is an anchor in the foundation of all personal relationships. This may seem counterintuitive. “A timeless God as more relational?” Underneath those more philosophical objections is a very practical misgiving, namely, that a timeless God could have no personal relationship to we who are in time. But if God is both (1) triune—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and (2) boundless life, then all that we call “personal relationship” in this life is the shadow compared with the light. The analogy of Author to characters in his story has often been used to show how a Mind can see all presently and yet be “wrapped up in” the very same details and experiences as the characters that can only, for lack of a better phrase, “turn one page at a time.” Things could be reconciled even more if the Author gave the characters a copy of the book they were in. And then things really get interesting if the Author himself stepped into the heart of the story. If he did, he wouldn’t do so by taking a big step, or a dive, physically, into the book. Rather, his imagination would write it in by the same striking of the keyboard to page as he did in introducing any of the other characters. 

Use. 2. This doctrine is given to us for our stability in this life. Listen to the contrast of the Psalmist between God and what seem to be the most eternal things in the world:

Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end (Ps. 102:25-27).

Nations cease and other human beings that we have depended on die. God neither ceases to be, nor does he die. What we need for all that is good must be illimitable, but nothing in time is illimitable. Time is not simply a boundary. Time is the most fleeting of things. One cannot even point to it for a “split second,” quite literally! Anyone depending on time to stand still, or for time to heal wounds, or to turn back pain by turning back time, or to do all the work that must be done in time, all of this is a fool’s errand. Time always runs out, because things made for eternity were never made to fit into time. If we live for time, we will be anxious. So much to do, so little time.  

Use. 3. This doctrine is given to us for hope in the life that never dies. There is gospel in divine eternality, because, as we have seen, eternality is fundamentally about boundless life. Jesus said, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (Jn. 5:26). Eternal life (lowercase) rests on Eternal Life (uppercase). Or to put it in more of that accommodating speech of the prophets, “the Lord appeared to him from far away,” and what did he say? “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jer. 31:3).