“Daddy, how old is God?”
My daughter tossed that grenade as I was pulling the covers up to her chin after a long day. Turns out, she’s not the only one asking. According to the latest analytics, over 6,000 people are typing those exact words into Google each month.
“Ummm… really…old? Goodnight!”
It was a great question. And a really lame answer.
Turns out, asking about God’s age isn’t just an excuse for a kid to stay up past her bedtime. And it’s more important than mere mental gymnastics. That question, and the answer, actually matter.
When it comes to God, age is more than just a number. It says something profound about His character, with reverberations powerful enough to change your (and my) life today. (And, just to be clear, from this point on, when I refer to God, I’m talking about the Judeo-Christian God and his character as revealed in the Bible.)
HOW OLD IS GOD?
The short answer: God doesn’t have an age, because he isn’t bound by the limitations of time. He actually existed before time. He will exist after time. And right now, He exists above time. It sounds like Marvel cosmic mumbo-jumbo, but as I dove into my daughter’s question, I found each of these concepts woven through the story of Scripture.
To be honest, “How old is God?” is a great starting line, but it’s a bit like asking, “How does the color yellow smell?” There isn’t really an answer for that question. That’s because when we ask about age, we’re looking for a numerical answer. But numbers aren’t an adequate container for an eternal being. At least, not for the God we meet in the Bible.
Finding an answer to the question “How old is God” requires layers—and those layers, like the rings on a tree, have so much more to say than a mere number. But before we dive any deeper, a quick word on time is probably in order.
WHAT IS TIME?
Time is so intricately woven into our lives that it’s easy to forget that, at its core, time is an invention. It was, of course, influenced enormously by observing things from the natural world: seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the orbit of planets—but at the end of the day, humans had to put the pieces together. Like a house, a car, or a new episode of Bob’s Burgers, we all benefit when someone invents something that makes our lives better.
History suggests that the Egyptians were among the earliest to track time, using sundials as early as 1500 B.C. Mechanical ticking clocks didn’t hit the scene till Europe’s Middle Ages (it wasn’t all knights and holy hand grenades—that’s a Monty Python joke, mom, just keep reading). It was the influence of the railways that led to time being standardized beyond local municipalities, as the need for trains to leave and arrive on time forced cities to synchronize their watches. Incredibly, the world didn’t agree on universal time until 1884, when Greenwich Time was adopted. Meaning, the way we think about time today is less than 150 years old—younger than the telephone, the lightbulb, and the sewing machine.
ETERNAL ISN’T AN AGE
In order to accurately calculate the age of anything, we have to know when it was born, and how muchtime has passed since. The scriptures don’t say anything about the birth of God. Instead, it presents God as an eternal being with no beginning or end—one who always has been, and always will be.
God’s eternal nature is highlighted throughout the Bible (like here, here, and here), but one of the most profound instances happens in the ancient book of Exodus. Born to a Jewish mother but raised as the son of Pharaoh, the prophet Moses would most certainly have been familiar with the pantheon of gods worshipped by the ancient Egyptians. So when he had an unexpected encounter with the one true God, he asked God to identify Himself. God’s answer is a brain-bender:
“Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”
God said to Moses, “I AM who I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: I AM has sent me to you.”
When God self-identifies, he chooses the name I AM. One scholar described the name, in its original Hebrew, as an “awkward conflation of tenses” that encompasses both the past, present, and the future. I know, it kind of makes me feel like I’m in a Doctor Who episode, too. It’s because God isn’t like us.
The characteristic used most frequently in the Bible to describe God—over 900 times—is “holy.” In the original languages of Scripture, that word means “set apart” or “distinct.” God is holy because he is not like us. One of the primary ways that is true is because we are bound by the limitations of time, while God simply isn’t.
God is eternal, so he doesn’t have an age. But don’t take that to mean that he doesn’t interact with time. God intersects with our human constructions of clocks and calendars in three distinct ways, each one pointing to a different facet of holiness.
GOD AND TIME
BEFORE TIME
“In the beginning, God…” (Genesis 1:1)
The first four words of the entire Bible set us up for the first way God intersects with time.
Before creation, before prophets, before nations, and all life itself, God was there. The crossword puzzle word you’re looking for is self-existent. This means, as Scripture teaches, that God has always existed, needs no creator or sustainer, and is the beginning and source of all things that are or ever have been.
In fact, the main influence on how humans understand time—the sun—wasn’t even created by God until midway through the creation narrative recorded in the Bible—day four, to be precise. Suffice it to say, God existed before time.
For me, the self-existent nature of God points directly at one of the core attributes of his holiness—his all-knowing omniscience.
For humans, knowledge comes from experience. We learn by doing or watching; by reading or being taught. When I have a problem I can’t solve with my car, I go to YouTube, and someone else’s experience gets me back on the road again. If God existed before time, and is the source of everything outside of himself, then all experience (and therefore all learning and knowledge and wisdom) finds its original source in him.
God existed before time, and there is nothing that exists now (or in the past or future) that he cannot know. He is omniscient, all-knowing, of all things at all times—even the future. How so? That takes us to point #2.
AFTER TIME
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Revelation 22:13)
The beginning of the Scriptures makes a powerful declaration about God and time. To which the end of the Bible says, “Hold my beer.”
The Bible’s final book concerns itself with the end of time, as God brings his kingdom to earth and sets all wrongs right again. In many ways, it is a return to life as originally intended and portrayed on the first pages of the Bible—God living with humanity, without the complications of sin, death, and sickness.
Scripture teaches that Jesus and God are one. Meaning, whatever is true of Jesus is also true of God (and vice versa). So when Jesus speaks the words above, declaring himself “the first and the last, the beginning and the end,” he is pointing to another way God interacts with time. Namely, that He will outlast it. The same God that existed before time, and brought forth the entire created order, will exist beyond the final ticking of the doomsday clock. When time is no more, God will still be.
For me, this shines a light on another characteristic of God’s holiness—his all-powerful omnipotence. What do Plato, Frederick Douglass, and Mother Teresa all have in common? Their time ran out. Time is the limiting factor for all of us. Death puts a lid on what we can get done, where we can go, and what we can know. It is more powerful than every living thing. But not God. He wasn’t born, and he can’t die. Not even the end of time can put an end to God. Scripture says He has conquered all things—including death—so that everything will be subject to him (1 Corinthians 15:24-28).
Outlasting and defeating death is just one example of God’s omnipotent power… but I’ll be honest, it’s a big one. When I start to doubt that God can bring order to our broken world, my overstretched budget, or my friend fighting for his marriage, I remember: God’s power isn’t limited by anything—even time.
ABOVE TIME
“Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Peter 3:8)
Turns out, God and time aren’t even playing on the same field. That’s actually a very good thing.
Peter, a man who spent three years with Jesus, and then gave the rest of his life to the movement before being martyred by Roman Emperor Nero, casually mentions this time-God-disparity in a letter he wrote to some of those early churches. While we experience time as a continual movement in one direction, God’s experience just isn’t like that.
This is just my opinion, but I picture all of human history as a timeline, drawn in two dimensions on a piece of paper. God is sitting at the desk above it, in three dimensions, able to experience, access, and adjust the past, present, and future. He exists in a different plane altogether, unlimited by dimensions, or hours, or sequential experience. God isn’t confined by anything, especially the ticking of the clock.
While it’s hard to wrap my earth-bound brain around it, this is very good news. God existing on a different plane than my alarm clock and Google calendar points to one final aspect of his holiness—his all-places-at-all-times omnipresence.
God can hear my prayers in Ohio, a child’s in Nigeria, and an old man’s in China, all at the same time. God can keep track of my worries and fears, your hopes and dreams, and whatever the heck is going on inside Nick Cage’s head without getting it jumbled.
God can be attentive and engaged with all people, at all times, because he isn’t limited by time or space. Insert mind-blown emoji.
HOW OLD IS GOD? WELL, GOD IS…
I understand, all this time talk can get overwhelming. But at the end of the day, it merely reinforces that God and I aren’t peers. That might be the best news of all.
I don’t have to worry about my limited knowledge and experiences because the God who calls me his son is all-knowing. I can lay my deepest worries and fears down because the God that knows my name is all-powerful. I don’t have to try to be all things to all people, because the God that holds time in his hand is available to all people, all the time—and he is good.
God is omni-all-the-things. And that means, I don’t have to be.
Disclaimer: This article is 100% human-generated.
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At Crossroads, we major on the majors and minor on the minors. We welcome a diverse community of people who all agree that Jesus is Lord and Savior, even if they view minor theological and faith topics in different ways based on their unique experiences. Our various authors embody that principle, and we approach you, our reader, in the same fashion. You don’t have to agree with every detail of any article you see here to be part of this community or pursue faith. Chances are even our whole staff doesn’t even agree with every detail of what you just read. We are okay with that tension. And we think God is okay with that, too. The foundation of everything we do is a conviction that the Bible is true and that accepting Jesus is who he said he is leads to a healthy life of purpose and adventure—and eternal life with God.
