Creation Corner: What Was Before God?

What was before God?

This question is important for a Christian to be able to answer. Why? It’s a question that the secular world often uses against our faith. We ask atheists, “what was before the Big Bang?” This is a question they cannot answer. So, they reply by asking what was before God as if this was the same question. In actuality, we do sort of have an answer to this question. Let’s explore.

First, we have to understand something about the nature of God.

God is creator.

Therefore, God cannot be contained by his own creation. A creation is never greater than the Creator. This is a self-evident truth. There are no examples of things in the world that are more complex, more improved than the one who created it. It is the order of all things we know. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton placed this into his scientific laws. The 2nd law of thermodynamics states,

“..in a closed system, the total entropy (disorder and randomness) will either increase or remain constant in any natural process, but never decrease.”

I know what you are thinking. Adam, what is this science talk? Well, to paraphrase it basically means this:

Unless something else is acting on it, everything breaks down and gets worse over time.

The best we can hope for is to stay the same for a while. Mountains erode, rivers dry up, living things die, and stars eventually burn out. There is nothing truly permanent given enough time all things have an end. All created things that is.

God is not created and not limited.

We see this in how God appears to us. We are finite beings unable to be in more than one place at the same time. However,

God is omnipresent – He is in all places.

As Christians, we accept this. These realities of physics are not strange to us. Likewise, for the human being, time is a concept that we dwell in. We have a beginning, a middle and an end. This is inescapable. Ours is a linear existence. This is because we are limited, created beings. We have no escape from the process of time. God is much, much bigger than this.

The answer to what was here before God is…unanswerable. This is because it is a null question. There is no before God because the concept of before requires time.

God is not limited by time or affected by it

Therefore, God has no before and no after. He exists outside of the concept of time. Time is a creation of God and He is not limited by the things that he has created. Since God is timeless, there was no “time” before God.

Think of it this way: A fisherman is standing on the shore of a stream. In the stream are many fish. Some are upstream,

some are downstream, and some are swimming right in front of the fisherman. The fish live their entire lives in water.

They breathe it, eat in it, sleep in it and die if they leave it. This is like time. We live here and die here within the stream of time. Some lived years and years ago, upstream. Some have yet to be born and are like the fish downstream. But God is

the fisherman outside of the stream. He sees upstream and downstream and knows the whole of the stream’s course.

We as fish cannot understand the whole of the stream and we certainly do not know what it is like to be dry. Asking what

was before God, the Great Fisherman, is like asking how wet God is in the stream. The reality is he is quite dry, existing outside of our boundaries because He created them.

In short, the main thing to remember is that God has no limitations, and that includes the boundaries that we have upon us. Time, physics and space were made for the created by the Creator God. Let’s look at the scripture: Genesis 1:1 says,

“In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

In the beginning. This in and of itself proves God is outside of time because He started time in “the beginning.” God existed before the beginning because he always was and is. David praised God for this nature in the Psalms writing,

“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)

and

“But you are the same, and your years have no end,” (Psalm 102:27).

It’s so easy to let questions like this trouble us or sidetrack our faith, but if we understand even a little bit about the nature of our God, He will continue to amaze us. God is so much bigger than we can fathom and certainly much bigger than we give him credit for. Let us praise him for His great power and goodness.

Until next time, let your soul wonder,

-Adam