By Jason V
Infinite, Eternal and Unchangeable in His Being
Thinking About the Unimaginable: God's Self-Existence
My kids have a hard time with the whole "Who made God?" question. We've been over and over it, but my oldest son, Andrew (age seven) is still wrestling with how it can be possible that no one made God. The Bible does not explain or defend the self-existence of God. It simple begins, "In the beginning, God..." So, at the very beginning, when creation first began, God already was. Of course He was, because He made everything. How else would He be able to make everything if He did not already exist before everything else?
God is- absolutely! Properly speaking, we cannot say that God exists. We have to say that He self-exists. Why? Well, to further blow our minds, to "exist" literally means to emerge, to come out of, to appear, to come into being. I exist. I have appeared and have come into being. God, however, always was and always will be. He did not appear or come out of anything, so He does not exist. He ALONE is self-existing, needing no cause and no origin. He IS. Isn't that what He told Moses in Exodus 3- "I AM"?
Everything in the universe comes from somewhere, from something. Everything in the universe is thus dependent on something else for its existence. Trees come from seeds, which came from other trees. People come from their mothers and fathers. Planets come from gathered space debris. Computers come from some evil conspiracy. And so on. Everything has its point of origin. Everything exists because everything comes into being, emerges, from something else.
Scientists and philosophers have a Latin expression to explain this: "Ex nihilo, nihil fet." It means, "Out of nothing, nothing comes." Pastor R.C. Sproul puts it this way: "If ever there was a time when there was absolutely nothing, then absolutely nothing is all there would ever be." Without a self-existing, self-sufficient Creator, we are left with a chain of cause-and-effect that goes back in time to nothing and so we would be left with nothing. That original nothing would be able to produce nothing and we would have a whole universe of absolutely nothing.
God must be. Put simply: Either He must be or else nothing can be. He is what philosophers call a "necessary being." All of the atheists in the world must face this inevitable conclusion: You can have an eternal, self-existing God without a universe, but you cannot have a universe without an eternal, self-existing God. Take away the Creator and you have taken away the whole of reality.
Of course, some people don't like this and so they say the most absurd things. Atheist scientist Stephen Hawking, one of "smartest" people in the world, said recently, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist." Now, aside from the fact that this statement makes no sense whatsoever, even here Hawking is starting with something that pre-exists the universe- the Law of Gravity.
Well, where did the Law of Gravity come from? Without gravity, we certainly would have no universe, but without God we would have neither gravity nor a universe. Hawking desperately wants an orderly, predictable universe without God and so he makes gravity his God. But gravity is not a being capable of creating matter and energy- it is just a law of how matter and energy behave. So gravity, in the end, is not a thing- it is nothing, and so from it, nothing can come.
So, we're back to where we started, which is where God starts: "In he beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." You either start with Him or else you're starting and ending with NOTHING!
Jason is blessed to be married to a wonderful woman and to have three children (two boys, aged seven and four and a one year old baby girl). He serves as the Pastor of Faith Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Cheraw, SC. He enjoys strong coffee, good books and nature walks with his family.