What is God Like?

Psalm 90:2, John 3:16

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What is God like? One thing that the Bible tells us concerning God is that He is eternal. We look to a passage such as Psalm 90, verse two, that says this

From eternity to eternity, you are God. (Psalm 90:2)

It’s hard for us to maybe fathom this truth that God is eternal. Now, maybe not so hard for us to think that God exists forever into the future. After all, we as human beings even come up with such imaginary things like vampires. Think about a vampire. It’s supposed to be someone who can’t die, right? They live forever. We can imagine that. And I think even for ourselves, too, we can’t even imagine us going out of existence. We imagine us existing forever into eternity. So that’s not hard when it comes to God. What’s really tough, though, is to think about this, that God has always existed, that he has existed from eternity having no beginning.

That seems like it hardly makes any sense at all, because everything we know of in this world had a start. It had a beginning. It came from something or from somewhere. I want you to think about this. Imagine there was a child who came up to you and they brought to you a piece of paper and they asked you, where did this paper come from? And you tell the child, Well, I went to the store and I bought a package of paper. And the child asks you, well, where did the store get it from? And you say, Well, it came from a manufacturing plant, a place that manufactures paper. And where did it come from before then? And you go on to explain the material for the paper. Well, came from wood, from trees. And the child asks you, Well, where did the trees come from? And go on to explain, Well, the tree started as a seed and the child keeps asking, Well, where did the seed come from? And eventually you probably tell the child, Well, God created the trees and their seeds and so forth. But the child persists and he asks, Well, where did God come from? And so you tell the child, well, God’s always existed.

I want you to imagine that that wasn’t the answer to the question. Imagine that you could tell the child that, well, there was this thing that created God. What would the child’s next question be? It’d probably be where did that thing that created God come from? Right? It’d be an unending cycle of questions and logically we would say that there has to be an end to all of this. There has to be something that has always existed. And the Bible tells us the thing that has always existed is God. That he is eternal, not just that he exists forever into the future, but he has always existed even before the beginning of the world, before the beginning of time.

What is even more incredible, though, about God isn’t just that he has always existed and will always exist into eternity, but that he desires us to live with him in eternity forever. And he has made a way for us to do exactly that. We think about that very familiar passage from John chapter three, verse 16, where Jesus says this

For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

It tells us in that passage that God sent Jesus so that we would not die forever in our sins and be destroyed in our sins, be punished forever because of our sin, but rather through belief, through trust in Jesus as the one who has forgiven our sins at the cross. We have life, eternal life. We live with God forever, in eternity because of what He has done for us through His Son. Amen.