Did God Create Time?

Question 2105

God and time are bound together by one of the most far-reaching claims in all of theology, that time itself is a created thing which had a beginning when God made the heavens and the earth. To ask whether God created time is to ask something about the very nature of God, because the answer tells us whether the Almighty is shut up inside the same flow of moments that carries us along, or whether He stands over it as its Maker.

Ian affirms the full classical attributes of God while preferring to frame them in biblical rather than scholastic terms, and on the matter of God and time his conviction is plain. God’s eternity means that time is a created thing, alongside space and matter. God exists outside all of this and yet involves Himself within it. What follows unfolds that claim from Scripture and answers the puzzles it raises.

What Scripture says about God and time

The Bible opens with the words, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That little phrase, in the beginning, is the first thing Scripture tells us, and it marks the start not only of the physical universe but of the sequence of before and after that we call time. There was a beginning, and God was already there when it began. You can read the opening verse at Genesis 1:1 and feel the weight of how the whole of revelation rests on it.

When we come to the relationship between God and time elsewhere in Scripture, the same picture deepens. The psalmist says that before the mountains were brought forth, or ever God had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting He is God. God’s existence is bracketed by nothing. He has no beginning to look back to and no end to fear. The passage at Psalm 90:1-2 sets His everlasting being against the brief and fading span of human life.

Paul reaches even further back in his letters, speaking of grace given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began. The Greek phrase points to a giving that predates time itself. If God can purpose and give before the ages began, then the ages, the whole succession of times, are things He precedes. The question of God and time is answered in that single phrase, which you can weigh at 2 Timothy 1:9.

Did God create time along with space and matter?

The historic Christian answer, and Ian’s answer, is yes. Time is not an eternal backdrop against which God happens to exist. It is part of the created order, brought into being with space and matter when God made the world. Augustine saw this with great clarity centuries ago when he said that the world was made not in time but together with time. There was no ticking clock before creation that God had to wait through.

This matters because it tells us that God and time are not equals. Time is a creature. It serves God’s purposes and answers to Him, just as the stars and the seas do. He is not subject to it. He was not younger once and older now. The wear and tear that time works on everything within the world does not touch the One who made the world, because He does not live downstream of His own creation.

Modern reflection on the universe has, in its own way, circled back toward this ancient claim. The notion that space and time had a beginning, that they came into being together rather than stretching back forever, fits remarkably well with what Genesis said long before. Scripture never set out to teach physics, yet its first sentence has proved deeper than its early readers could have guessed.

God exists outside time yet acts within it

To say God is outside time is not to say He is distant or detached. The God of the Bible is intensely involved in the world He made. He speaks into history, He answers prayer, He sends His Son in the fullness of time, He works moment by moment in the lives of His people. The point is not that God is locked out of time but that He is not locked into it. He enters the stream freely, as the One who stands on the bank.

Think of an author and the story he writes. The author is not a character bound by the calendar of the tale. He stands outside it and yet is present to every page at once, able to enter the narrative, to speak within it, to bring about its turns. The picture is imperfect, as all pictures of God are, but it catches something true of how God and time relate. He is present to every moment of history at once because He is not carried along by any of them.

This is why God can be utterly faithful across the centuries and never change. His promises made to Abraham are as fresh to Him as the prayer you offered this morning. The future, which is hidden from us behind the veil of tomorrow, lies open before Him as a present thing. The way God relates to time is exactly why prophecy is possible at all, a point taken up in the study of how God’s relationship with time affects prophecy.

What about a ‘before’ before creation?

People naturally ask what God was doing before He created, and what filled the time before time. The honest answer is that the question contains a hidden mistake. If time is a creature that began with the world, then there was no before in the sense we mean, because before is itself a word about time. To ask what happened in the time before time is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. The words form a sentence, but they point to nothing real.

This is not a dodge but a recognition of what eternity is. God’s eternal existence is not an endless line of moments stretching backward without limit. It is a mode of being that is full and complete and does not depend on succession at all. We can scarcely imagine it, because every thought we have arrives in sequence, one after another. Yet the God who made the sequence is not himself a prisoner of it.

Where Scripture does speak of God acting before creation, as in the love the Father had for the Son before the foundation of the world, it is reaching past the boundary of our language to assure us that God’s life and purposes did not begin when the clock started. He was, in the fullness of His own being, before ever a moment passed.

Why the doctrine of God and time matters for faith

All of this could feel like cold speculation, yet it touches the warmest realities of the Christian life. Because God stands outside time, your salvation was not an afterthought He came to late. The grace given to you was His before the ages began. Your name was known and loved in His purpose before the first morning ever dawned, and nothing that happens in time can reach back and unsettle a decision He made beyond it.

Because God stands over time, His promises do not weaken with age. The covenant He swore to His people thousands of years ago has not faded in His memory or lost its force. He is as committed to it now as on the day He gave it, because to Him it is not a distant past event but an ever-present reality. The faithfulness of God across the long centuries flows directly from His relationship to time.

Because God holds the future, you can entrust tomorrow to Him without dread. The day you fear has already been seen by your Father, and He waits in it for you with the same love He shows you now. The doctrine of God and time, far from being abstract, is one of the deep grounds of Christian peace, and it touches the question of how we should think about God’s silence when He seems slow to act.

How Augustine and the early church understood God and time

The question of God and time is not new, and the church has thought about it carefully for many centuries. Augustine of Hippo gave the most famous early treatment in the eleventh book of his Confessions, where he faced the taunt of critics who asked what God was doing before He made heaven and earth. His answer was that there was no before, because God made the world together with time and not within an already running time. Time began when the creation began, and God, who made it, is not measured by it.

This became the settled understanding of historic Christianity, and it rests on the plain sense of Scripture rather than on philosophy alone. The God who is from everlasting to everlasting, who inhabits eternity, who acted before the ages, cannot be a being who simply happens to be very old. He is of another order altogether, the Maker of the very framework of past, present, and future. When the church confesses God’s eternity, this is what it means, that God and time stand in the relation of Maker and made.

Ian stands in this stream while preferring, as ever, to ground the teaching in the biblical text rather than in the categories of the philosophers. The Scriptures themselves press us toward it. A God who can promise and give before the ages began, who sees the end from the beginning, who calls things that are not as though they were, is plainly not a prisoner of the clock. The doctrine of God and time is the church reading these texts faithfully and refusing to shrink God to our size.

Some object that a timeless God could not act or relate at all, since acting seems to involve a before and after. The reply is that God’s acts in the world certainly produce effects in sequence, while the willing of them in God is one eternal act. He wills, in the single eternity of His being, all that unfolds across the long ages of history. We see the effects spread out in time. He sees, and wills, the whole at once, so that the relation of God and time leaves room both for His changeless eternity and for His living engagement with the world.

Does God experience succession?

A natural question follows. If God is outside time, does He experience one thing after another at all, or is the whole of His life present to Him at once? This is where careful believers have differed, and Ian is content to hold the matter with humility rather than to claim more than Scripture grants. The mainstream view has been that God’s eternity is not an endless succession of moments but a fullness of life in which all things are present to Him together.

On that understanding, God does not wait for the future to arrive or watch the past recede. Tomorrow is as present to Him as today, not because He has read ahead in a book that is still being written, but because He stands over the whole of time at once. This is what makes His foreknowledge so complete and His promises so secure. He is not guessing about what lies ahead. In His eternal present He is already there.

At the same time Scripture freely describes God acting in sequence, speaking, then waiting, then responding, and we should not flatten that language away as though it meant nothing. God genuinely relates to us within the flow of time He made. The honest position is to hold both, that God in His own being transcends succession, and that He truly meets His creatures moment by moment within it. The relation of God and time is one of those places where we are wise to say what Scripture says and to leave the rest in reverent reserve.

God and time in the coming of Jesus

The deepest meeting of God and time is the incarnation. Paul writes that when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son. The eternal Son, who was with the Father before the world began, stepped into the stream of history at a datable moment, under a named governor, in a particular town. The One who made time entered time, took a human life that grew and aged and could be counted by the calendar, and did so without ceasing to be the eternal God.

This is a wonder worth pausing over. The Maker of time submitted to time. He who had no beginning began to be counted in days and years. He kept appointments, He waited, He grew weary as evening came, and through it all He remained the Word who was in the beginning with God, by whom all things, time among them, were made. The coming of Jesus is the proof that God’s standing outside time does not make Him distant, for He was willing to come right inside it to save us.

It also assures us that our life in time is not despised by God. He has dignified the realm of days and hours by living in it Himself. The ordinary passage of your week, the waiting, the ageing, the slow unfolding of your story, is not beneath the notice of a God who entered all of it in His Son. The doctrine of God and time, which can seem so lofty, comes down to earth at Bethlehem and assures us that the eternal One is near.

So, now what?

Let the truth that God created time give you a steadier view of your own small span. Your days are numbered and they pass quickly, as the psalmist knew, yet they unfold in the hands of One whose years have no end. The brevity of life, which can frighten us, looks different when we remember that it is held within the unhurried eternity of God.

Let it also feed your worship. The God you pray to is not a larger version of yourself, ageing along with the universe. He is the Maker of time itself, present to every moment of your life at once, never hurried and never late. That is a God worth trusting with the part of your story you cannot yet see.

And let it anchor your hope. Because God stands outside the flow of time, the salvation He planned before the ages and the glory He has prepared for those who love Him are as certain as His own eternal being. What He purposed beyond time, He will most surely bring to pass within it.

“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

For Further Study

For careful evangelical reflection on God’s eternity and His relation to time, see Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, and Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology. Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology gives an accessible discussion of God’s eternity and timelessness, and the classic treatment in Augustine’s Confessions, Book XI, remains unmatched for its meditation on time and the Creator who made it.