God is Eternal
We’ve spent the past five weeks thinking together about systematic theology—what it is, why it’s important, and how to go about it. We spent our first week focusing on that, and defined systematic theology as combining what we can know from scripture with what we can know from nature, to build a system of thought about God and his creation. That, we’ve seen, involves proper handling of scripture, which builds on sound exegesis and biblical theology, which we’re all relatively familiar with. But we also saw that, because we’re trying to build a system of thought that looks at all of reality, not just what the Bible says on various subjects, we saw that we also needed to look at insights from nature—chiefly philosophy, which for most of us was less familiar, so we spent some time thinking about what that looks like, introducing some key concepts like actuality and potentiality, and essence and existence.
This was all in the first week. We then spent the next three weeks thinking together about God. We called this series “Know Thy Maker” because that’s what we want to do: to know God better, which should lead us to love him more and serve him better. Hopefully that has been your experience as we’ve been grappling together with some aspects of the doctrine of God.
Thinking about time is weird. If you’ve seen the latest Avengers movie, or if you read or watched the third Harry Potter movie, you’ll know that when characters start messing with time, things start getting trippy. Part of that, we’ll see, is because as creatures bound by time, we have a hard time thinking about time. But we’ll think more about that at a different time—namely, later in this talk. This evening we’re finishing off by thinking about time, and how God relates to it. We’re thinking about the fact that God is eternal, and what that means—and what that means for us. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
Divine eternity from scripture
In Deuteronomy we read: “The eternal God is your dwelling place” (33:27). In Isaiah we read: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth” (40:28). In the Psalms we read about the God whose years have no end (102:27), and that “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (90:2). And further on in Isaiah, God is described as the One who “inhabits eternity” (57:15).
In Romans 1, Paul talks about God’s “eternal power and divine nature” (v. 20), and in ch. 16 he talks about the mystery of the gospel, which “has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith” (v. 26). And in Revelation God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, … who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (1:8; cf. 21:6).
The idea of God’s eternity is frequently linked with ideas of creation. We see that in the verses we saw from Isaiah and the Psalms. In Paul, God’s eternal power is shown in his creation. And when in Revelation God is described as the Alpha and the Omega, it isn’t just talking about his always being there, but also that he is the source and the goal of creation. One of the key features that sets God apart as eternal is his standing over creation, not as a part of it, but as the one from whom it comes to be. “God is not part of this world, either in time … or space.”
We see this in Proverbs 8: “The Lord possessed me [i.e. wisdom] at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. 23 Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth” (vv. 22–23). That little phrase, “ages ago,” is what interests us for the moment. The Hebrew word there is עוֹלָם, which is often the word that gets translated “eternity” or “everlasting” or something like that. Truth be told, it’s not an easy word to translate. One scholar explains: “ עוֹלָם designates time of which the limit is not known, in the sense that the limit, though sure, cannot be fixed (Exodus 21:6, Isaiah 32:14–15) or that a limit is not to be envisaged (e.g. Psalm 89).” It gives us the impression of “as far as the eye can see,” but with regard to time. With that in mind, Proverbs 8:23 says: “[From עוֹלָם] I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.”
Also in the wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes 3:11 says: “He has … set eternity in the human heart”—“He has set עוֹלָם in the human heart.” One scholar explains it this way: “That context brings out that the עוֹלָם is the maximum of what is given to the human view. Human beings are aware that there is also a ‘beyond’, but this indeed is beyond their view: it is God’s domain.”
This, again, is how the ancient Israelites understood the world. The way we’ve been talking about this is in terms of the upper and lower registers: the upper register for more ethereal, other-wordly realities, and the lower register for the world where we are—concrete, material. The Hebrew word עוֹלָם points us in the direction of a limitlessness with regard to how we see time—a limitlessness that is most fully applied to God.
It’s worth noting that the idea of being eternal isn’t limited to God. In 2 Corinthians Paul says that: “the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (4:18). All through the NT are statements about eternal life and the eternal fire of punishment. Now, that’s something we’ll come back to at the end, but I just want to put that there, just as something for you to worry about in your spare time.
What we should say, though, is that, whatever God’s experience of time really amounts to (which we’ll spell out more below), clearly it is markedly different from ours. As created, transient beings, we are bound by time; everything we do is to be thought of in terms of time. As John Frame puts it, “It is a sort of box that we cannot get out of; it limits our knowledge and our choices.” God, on the other hand, is over and above time. “The dates of history are ‘times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority’ (Acts 1:7; cf. 17:26; Mark 13:32).”
There’s much more to be said, but this, I think gives us enough of an idea of how the Bible speaks about God’s eternality. It’s worth bearing in mind that what the biblical authors were not attempting was metaphysics. A few weeks ago, when we were thinking about divine providence, we saw that the biblical data is under-determinative—there’s more to be said than what the Bible gives us. And that’s just what we should expect: the biblical authors weren’t writing a philosophical manual. If we come to it expecting answers to those sorts of questions I think we’re likely to run into one of two problems. The one is we’ll be disappointed. We won’t find the answers we’re looking for. The second, though, I think is more dangerous. When we start trying to make the biblical authors answer questions they weren’t asking, what they did say will get twisted into ways they never meant it. And we don’t want that.
Once more, then, we must turn to philosophy to help us fill out the picture. As one scholar puts it: “There is ample biblical evidence that God is eternal, but what isn’t so clear biblically is how we should understand divine eternity.”
Divine eternity from philosophy
To understand more precisely what we mean when we say that God is eternal, it will help to start by thinking about what time is. Time is a tricky thing for us to wrap our minds around. It would seem that space and time are two different dimensions.
Leanne and I were talking with a friend about 4D pregnancy scans, and I couldn’t quite work out how that was meant to work—what was the fourth dimension? Time is. They show you the baby moving in real time. (We recently had that experience for ourselves, and let me tell you, there isn’t a feeling quite as surreal.)
Space and time are different dimensions; yet whenever we talk about time, we talk about in terms of space. Often we talk about it in terms of a journey: we say things like time marches on. Otherwise we talk about it as a possession: we saying things like, “I don’t have time,” or, “You’re wasting my time.” We aren’t really able to think about time without thinking about it in terms of space.
And there’s a good reason for that: space and time are very much linked. One scholar puts it this way: “Time is a measure of [change]: without [change] and a measure for it such as space, there could be no time.” This is based on how Aristotle understood time. Time, Aristotle said, is “a number of change with respect of before and after.” For Aristotle, time and change are inseparably linked. It’s not that time is change—we say that some things change fast, and other things slow, and when we say that, we’re appealing to time—but he does say it’s an aspect of change. Time, then, is adding a number to change—it’s a measurement of the rate of change.
From this understanding of time, it follows that God is eternal. Change, we’ve been saying, is the actualisation of a potential. The tea’s potential to be cold is actualised by the air around it, and this passing from hotness to coldness—its movement from potentiality to actuality—is measured by time. But God, we’ve been saying, is purely actual, devoid of any potential whatsoever. From this it follows that God is unchanging, or immutable. Since time is simply a measure of change, then, it must follow that time is not a measure that applies to God. We could thus say that he is outside of time, or eternal.
But before we get into what that means, we should first say a thing or two about what that doesn’t mean. When we say that God is eternal, we don’t just mean that God has just been around for a very, very long time—what we call sempiternity. This view of eternity would imply that God is changing, and thus is in time (though the ways different philosophers and theologians work that out will vary). Rather than existing for a very long, even limitless, amount of time, it would be more accurate to say that God is timeless—not within time, himself measured by time, even to an infinite (and in that sense, immeasurable) degree, but outside time, looking on time from without. One scholar puts it this way:
If I see a man crossing the street, I see the space he traverses but not the time. The time of his motion in crossing equates with the time of my motion in seeing. Consequently, I do not see time as an object like space but experience it as I experience an emotion. But an angel or God not merely apprehends the space as an object but also the time as an object.
But in understanding God in this way, we shouldn’t understand his being eternal to mean “analogous to an isolated, static instant”—which is the second thing we don’t mean by divine eternity. Although God is unchanging, we don’t mean that in the sense of not acting; we just mean that God’s actions are without potentiality. Eternity doesn’t make God less God, and if it does, it’s a bad definition of eternity.
A better definition of eternity comes from a famous dead guy named Boethius. He defines eternity thus:
Eternity is the complete possession all at once of illimitable life. This becomes clearer by comparison with temporal things. For whatever lives in time proceeds as something present from the past into the future, and there is nothing placed in time that can embrace the whole extent of its life equally. Indeed, on the contrary, it does not yet grasp tomorrow but yesterday it has already lost; and even in the life of today you live no more fully than in a mobile, transitory moment.
To us, the future doesn’t yet exist because it hasn’t yet come, and the past no longer exists because it has already passed. Where we live is in the present, where past and future meet. But where is the present? The present is just a sliver of a moment, an indivisible moment that joins past and future. It’s a “durationless instant, a present that cannot be extended without falling apart entirely into past and future intervals.” If you were to stretch the present out to anything more than instantaneous, it would mean that you’d have earlier and later parts of it, and would thus collapse into past and future. The present, then, is nothing more than that indivisible instant that divides the past from the future. It’s the now constantly moving forward as time goes on.
The present is all we have. Or, more accurately, we only have ourselves in the present. We no longer have our past selves, and we don’t yet have our future selves; all we have is now. Our lives, then, are made up of these indivisible moments stitched together.
But for God, this isn’t the case. Eternity is the complete possession all at once of illimitable life. An eternal being has life, not just moment by moment, stitched together like temporal beings have it; rather, and eternal being has all of its life present to himself. And he has this present to himself at once. There’s no succession in God—no before or after. In the words of Francis Turretin, eternity “ought to be conceived as a standing, but not flowing, now. The reason is because nothing flows away with time from the life of God as from ours. God has every moment at once whatever we have dividedly by succession of time.”
This also follows from divine simplicity. You’ll remember from last week that God’s essence is his existence, and from that we said that everything that is in God just is God. All of God’s life is present to him at one time in an undivided fashion. There is no before and after in God, not even in principle.
“The temporal present is a durationless instant, a present that cannot be extended without falling apart entirely into past and future intervals. The eternal present, on the other hand, is by definition an infinitely extended, pastless, futureless duration.” It might seem a bit strange talking about eternity in terms of duration. Duration in this sense would have to be atemporal duration—duration that isn’t measured by, or limited by, time. Whereas temporal duration “does not yet grasp tomorrow but yesterday it has already lost,” existing today only “in a mobile, transitory moment,” atemporal duration is a duration for which the past hasn’t flowed away, and already has the future, all in its own present—this is what we mean when we say that eternity is the complete possession all at once of illimitable life.
Of course, when we talk about temporal duration and atemporal duration we don’t mean “duration” in exactly the same sense—to use last week’s terminology, we aren’t using the word univocally, but analogically: we’re using the word to talk about the same reality in a different mode of existence.
How an eternal God interacts with a temporal world
When God interacts with beings in time, then, he does so in the fullness of his being—there is no part of him that he doesn’t have, no before, no after, because God is not composed of parts, not even temporal ones.
That wouldn’t be the case if we thought of God’s eternity in a sempiternal sort of way. Sempiternity, we said, would mean that God’s eternity isn’t something qualitatively different; it’s simply that he’s been around longer. We could think of it like two lines running parallel. On this view, the various moments that God acts are the same moments for us in time as they are for God. But if God’s eternity were just that he’s been around longer than his creation, even to an infinite degree, it would still mean that he doesn’t possess what comes before him, and doesn’t yet possess what is still to come. We’d also have to answer the question of in what sense God is said to know the future, since sempiternity would mean that it’s the future to God as well.
On the other hand, on Boethius’ definition of eternity, the eternal God in relation to creatures is more like the centre point and circumference of a circle. This isn’t to say that time is circular (although maybe there’s something to that—the writer of Ecclesiastes says there’s nothing new under the sun); that would be where the analogy breaks down. But what it does show quite well is how God, whose duration can’t be divided into moments like ours, interacts in his fullness with temporal beings.
The centrepoint coexists with, and is present to, each point along the circumference equally. But each point along the circumference does not coexist with each other point, nor is it equally present to each other point along the circumference. Aquinas puts it this way: “Something can be present to what is eternal only by being present to the whole of it, since the eternal does not have the duration of succession. The divine intellect, therefore, sees in the whole of its eternity, as being present to it, whatever takes place through the whole course of time.”
We could think of this like the relationship between an author and the book she’s writing. From the perspective of the author, all the events of the book are in her head simultaneously. In the same mental moment, Harry is finding out that he’s a wizard, and he’s having a face off with Voldemort. In the mind of the author, these can be thought of together in the same moment. For the characters, however, these are very much not the same moment. At the moment Harry is finding out that he’s a wizard, he doesn’t even know that Voldemort exists, much less that he will have a face-off with him within the next year. This is one way we could think about God’s relation to time.
Or we could think of it like a movie. We could watch the movie, seeing each frame as it rolls past, moment by moment, the movie unfolding in front of us. But if we look at the actual film stretched out, we could see “all frames at once, and therefore all ‘times’ in the film.”
“God’s vision is measured by eternity, which is all at once; consequently, all times and everything done in them is subject to his sight.”
Eternity applied to creatures
Now, all this is good and well when applied to God, but what does it mean what it’s applied to us? In John 3:16 we read: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And in Matthew 18:8 Jesus says: “It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire.” But that doesn’t sound like the eternity we just described a moment ago.
When scripture talks about created things being eternal, we should think of it more like being sempiternal. God’s eternity and ours are qualitatively different. As material beings in this life we’re changeable, and since we’ve already seen that time and change are very much interlinked, we’re temporal beings. In the new creation that won’t change, because although we’ll be made new, we read in places like 1 Corinthians 15 that what “made new” looks like is a new physical body. Though we’ll last forever, since we’re still going to be material, we’re still going to be bound by time.
Eternity of the order the God experiences is more absolute than any eternity we will experience. Although we’ll enjoy a fullness of never ceasing to exist, God’s eternity stretches further than that to encompass all of his life. Our experience of eternity, then, is not the same as God’s. And nor should we expect it to be. As we’ve seen already, what we know about God we know analogically.
Reflection
What it comes down to is in what way we possess life. For us as temporal beings, we only have life moment by moment, a string of connected instants that together make up our lives. God, on the other hand, is properly said to have life in himself—he has all of himself all at once.
What that means is that I don’t truly have very much of myself at any given moment—just a sliver of my existence, which gives way to the next as each second passes out of existence and the next comes into existence. But God? He has all of me. God has every part of me, every moment that makes up my existence, from birth until death, present to him all at once. God has much more than me than I ever could. He doesn’t know any part of us as a memory—as something that happened in the past, but that he, being an all knowing God, couldn’t forget. God knows it presently—present to him now, even more so than now is present to us.
That means he knows me better than I could ever know myself—even the parts that I’d rather he didn’t know.
But he loves me anyway.