What is God like? Eternal!

“Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD, the LORD himself, is the Rock eternal.” (Isaiah 26:4)

So far we’ve seen some absolutely stunning truths about how God is utterly unlike us: He is transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent, incomprehensible, immutable and impassable. And there’s one last “incommunicable” attribute of God (a way God is unlike us) that I’d like to focus on: He is eternal. From everlasting to everlasting is our God!


Only God is eternal...

This one’s super easy to find in the Bible. It’s there in Genesis (“In the beginning God…”). It’s there in Revelation (“I am the Alpha and the Omega, who was, and is, and is to come…”).  It’s all through the middle, like when Isaiah declares, “Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD, the LORD himself, is the Rock eternal.” (Isaiah 26:4). See the implication Isaiah calls us to draw? God’s eternal nature is an integral part of what makes Him infinitely trustworthy. It’s easy to see why when you put Him next to other people and things we might find ourselves needing to trust. Do we trust the bank with our money? Not any more, because we know that banks go bust every week! I remember once buying a mattress from a company that went bust before it was delivered. Thankfully I got my money back on that occasion, but I haven’t always been so lucky with backing things on Kickstarter… God will never go bust, never disappear, never stop being God. And that’s such great news!

This great news is the basis of one of my favourite Psalms, Psalm 103. In this Psalm David meditates on the difference between God and humanity: we are dust; we’re like the grass of the field that is there one day and gone the next. “But from everlasting to everlasting the LORD’s love is with those who fear him…” The eternal God treats mortal humans with great compassion because we’re mortal and He is not.

...and yet...

And yet He also invites us to consider, and even long for, immortality. As the teacher writes in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” There’s an element of frustration expressed here: we’re mortal but we crave immortality. And the reason we crave immortality is because God has put that inside us. Because (spoiler alert!) we’re actually made for immortality. As we read on in the Bible we realise that, although being eternal is a way that God is unlike us, He offers us a way to share in His eternal life through Jesus’ death and resurrection. So later on John pens one of the most famous verses in the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This is incredible! We have been blown away by how stunningly, gloriously different God is to us: He is so immeasurably above and beyond us that it blows our minds. And yet God wants to share something of that indescribably wonderful greatness with us – He wants to invite us into His eternal life!