Divine Eternality

Divine goodness is a communicable attribute of God inasmuch as human beings were created with the capacity to imitate the Lord in doing good. Sin, of course, has made it impossible for us to do what is truly and fully good apart from the grace of God (see Rom. 3:9–20). Nevertheless, as we are renewed by the Holy Spirit, we become capable of true God-pleasing goodness even if we are not perfected until we are glorified (Gal. 5:16). Having considered God’s communicable attribute of goodness and several other related attributes, we will look today at another incommunicable attribute of God—one that He does not share with us. That attribute is divine eternality.

Our Creator’s eternality, or eternity as it is sometimes called, concerns God’s relationship to time. Time is exceptionally difficult to wrap our minds around; we know what it is, but defining it is much harder. We can at least say that it involves a succession of moments and can mark the beginning and end of things in creation such as days, months, years, and lifespans. We know what it is like to experience change over time, to relate to the world in terms of yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows.

God’s relationship to time, however, is far different. He is, as today’s passage tells us, the “King of the ages,” or “King eternal,” as some translations put it (1 Tim. 1:17). This means that God has no beginning or end. There was never a time when the Lord did not exist, and there will never be a time when He will not exist. As we have noted in an earlier study, God is (Ex. 3:14). He has no beginning or end, but being eternal, He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (Rev. 1:8). Francis Turretin, the seventeenth-century Reformed theologian who worked in Geneva about a hundred years after John Calvin, writes that God “is the beginning without beginning because while he is the beginning of all things, he himself has no beginning. He is the end without end because (since he is the end to which all things are referred) he can have no end.”

God, in fact, is the Creator of time itself. To live in time, as we do, is to experience change, including growth and decline. Since the Lord cannot change (Mal. 3:6), He does not live in time. Every moment is always immediately present to Him. He sees all time and is Lord over all time at once.