Eternality of God

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

— Psalm 90:2

The eternality of God is the teaching that God exists without beginning, without end, and without succession of moments: rather than living through an endless series of days the way a creature does, he possesses the whole of his existence at once, undivided by any past or future.¹ Scripture states this in several ways: God was already “our dwelling place” before the mountains were born (Ps. 90:1-2), he “inhabits eternity” (Isa. 57:15), and to him “a thousand years… are but as yesterday” (Ps. 90:4). Because eternality belongs to God’s own duration rather than to a very long stretch of time, it sets him apart from every creature, whose existence begins and passes moment by moment.²

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession names God’s eternity in a single word, among the properties it lists for him: he is “immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty.”³ The Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration state the same list, in the same words, in their own chapter 2, paragraph 1.⁴ The doctrine is not a Baptist distinctive but the wider Reformed confessional family’s shared inheritance, and none of the three confessions devotes a separate chapter to defending it; “eternal” simply takes its place alongside “immutable” and “immense” in the single sentence that opens each confession’s doctrine of God. A. A. Hodge’s catechetical gloss on the word fills out what the confession’s single adjective compresses: eternity is “infinite duration; duration discharged from all limits, without beginning, without succession, and without end,” what “the schoolmen phrase… punctum stans, an ever-abiding present.”⁵ To confess God eternal is, he explains, to affirm that “as to his existence, he never had any beginning, and never will have any end” and that “his thoughts, emotions, purposes, and acts are, without succession, one and inseparable, the same forever.”⁶

Biblical Basis

Moses grounds his prayer in Psalm 90 on the contrast between God’s duration and the creature’s: “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” (Ps. 90:1-2), while human life “in the morning… flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers” (90:5-6). The same Psalm states that to God “a thousand years… are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (90:4), a line Peter repeats almost verbatim: “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). Isaiah calls God “the everlasting God” (40:28) and the “One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity” (57:15). Jesus claims the same timeless existence for himself against his Jewish opponents: “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), echoing the name God gives Moses from the burning bush, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exod. 3:14). Paul addresses “the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God” (1 Tim. 1:17), and John’s opening greeting to the seven churches comes from him “who is and who was and who is to come” (Rev. 1:4, 8).

Historical Development

Patristic testimony

Irenaeus, writing against Gnostic teachers in the late second century, already states the doctrine as settled: God alone is “without beginning and without end, truly and always the same, keeping himself in the same mode,” Lord of all.⁷ Hilary of Poitiers, writing against the Arians in the mid-fourth century, makes the same point devotionally: “Run with your senses toward whatever seems ultimate to them, you will always be aimed at him… cycle through the centuries, you will always find him, and though you will run out of numbers to count his days, God will never run out.”⁸ Augustine, commenting on Psalm 102’s “your years are in the generation of generations,” draws the distinction later Reformed theology would build on: “God’s years are not one thing, and God’s self another, but God’s years are God’s eternity. Eternity is God’s very substance, which has nothing changeable. There, nothing is past, as if it now were not; nothing is future, as if it were not yet.”⁹ Boethius, writing in the early sixth century, supplied the definition later scholastic theology would repeat almost verbatim: eternity is “the possession, at once whole and perfect, of boundless life,” interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio.¹⁰

The Reformed answer to Vorstius and the Socinians

Reformed scholastic theology inherited this patristic consensus and sharpened it against a specific seventeenth-century rival. Conrad Vorstius and the Socinians, seeking room for a mutable God who could change his mind in response to creaturely choices, argued that eternity coexists with the same “succession and flow of moments” that time does, so that God “coexists with moments that are continually new” and changes along with them.¹¹ Van Mastricht answered at length in his own chapter on the doctrine: Scripture’s statement that a thousand years are to God as one day (Ps. 90:4) and that his years “have no end” (Ps. 102:24-27) means “that in eternity there is no past or future, but only present”; succession is “opposed to God’s immutability” (Mal. 3:6); and because God’s “duration is nothing but his existence, and his existence nothing but his essence,” a succession in his eternity would entail a succession in his very essence.¹² Where Scripture does speak of God’s “years and days,” Mastricht reads that language as divine condescension to human weakness, “so that it might more fittingly portray for itself the eternity of God,” not a literal ascription of temporal succession to God himself.¹³

Opposing Views

Modern discussion of God’s eternity divides less over whether God is everlasting, which nearly every theist affirms, than over whether he is timeless, existing outside of time altogether, or temporal, existing within time without beginning or end. Peter Sammons groups the temporalist alternatives into three positions. The Everlasting-Temporal view holds that God has always existed and always will, but that “He experiences temporal succession” the way creatures do, so that, for instance, “God experienced the Great Depression of 1929… while it was happening” but not simultaneously with events decades later.¹⁴ The Timeless-Turned-Temporal view holds that God existed timelessly before creation but entered into time at creation in order to relate to it.¹⁵ The Timeless-and-Temporal view, which Sammons calls “the most pervasive in modern evangelicalism,” holds that God has two modes of existence at once, remaining timeless in his own inner life while also being genuinely temporal in his relation to creation.¹⁶ Open theism is the most systematic form of full divine temporality, holding that God’s own knowledge and experience unfold in real time alongside his creatures’.¹⁷ Against all three, Sammons argues that texts describing God as making plans and choosing his people “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4; Rev. 13:8) only make sense if time itself, like everything else, was created rather than co-eternal with God, so that the world came to be cum tempore, “with time,” rather than in tempore, “in time.”¹⁸

Objections and Responses

If God is timeless, how could he act to create the world, or do anything else in time? Barrett answers by distinguishing a logical order from a temporal one. When a light switch is flipped, the switching and the room’s brightening happen simultaneously in time, yet the switch is logically prior to the light. In the same way, God’s decrees are ordered logically rather than temporally: he “wills immutably and eternally because the God who wills is immutable and eternal,” and his one timeless act of will is executed by his creatures in a temporal sequence.¹⁹ The order visible within a believer’s salvation, for instance, calling, justification, and glorification, is a sequence the creature experiences in time; the decree behind it is not a sequence at all but a single eternal act.¹⁹

Doesn’t a timeless God’s inability to experience the passage of time make his relationships with his time-bound creatures unreal? Sammons answers that human relationships already tolerate differences of time and place without becoming unreal, as when two people converse by a recording made and heard at different times, or when a parent’s relationship with an infant differs from the relationship with the same child grown. God’s relationship with his creatures is not diminished by his eternity but exceeded by it: because he “possesses all His life at once,” he has “all of your life with Him at once” rather than only the present instant a creature is limited to, so that he can “relate to us in fullness” in a way no time-bound relationship could match.²⁰

Doesn’t Scripture’s own language of God’s “years,” his “before” and “after,” contradict a timeless eternity? Mastricht answers that such language is a scriptural accommodation to human weakness, not a literal ascription of succession to God: it lets Scripture “portray for itself the eternity of God” in terms creatures can grasp, and “what is thus done in a way suitable to man is not to be received otherwise than in a way worthy of God.”¹³ The same principle applies to the texts that speak of God changing his mind or acting at a particular moment: they describe how God’s single, unchanging will and its effects appear to creatures inside time, not any change in God himself.

Related Doctrines

References

Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 11, “The Eternity of God,” 252-257. ↩
Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 6, “Eternality,” 115. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1; substantially the same wording appears in The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 2, para. 1. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 8, “Attributes of God,” 142. ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 143. ↩
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, bk. 2, ch. 34, sec. 2, quoted in Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:254. ↩
Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, bk. 2, ch. 6, quoted in Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:254-255. ↩
Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, on Ps. 102:24, quoted in Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:255. ↩
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, bk. 5, prose 6, quoted in Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:257. ↩
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:260. ↩
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:260-261. ↩
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:261. ↩ ↩²
Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God, 118. ↩
Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God, 119. ↩
Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God, 119-120. ↩
See Open theism for the fuller account of this position and the biblical texts it appeals to. ↩
Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God, 121. ↩
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 8, “Is God in Time? Timeless Eternity.” ↩ ↩²
Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God, 123-125. ↩