The Eternity of God

The eternity of God is the foundation of the stability of the covenant, the great comfort of a Christian. Stephen Charnock

God has no beginning, no end, no succession. What does that mean, and why does it matter?

We say God is eternal so easily that the word has stopped meaning much. We picture a very long time, a line running back further than we can see and forward past the horizon. But that is not eternity. That is just more time. God does not live in time the way we do. There was never a moment He began. There will never be a moment He ends. He does not move from one now to the next, losing the past and waiting on the future. He simply is.

Where the book starts, with the only psalm Moses wrote:

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. Psalm 90:1-2

Nine short chapters follow that thread, one careful step at a time. What it means that God has no beginning and no end. Why the name He gave Moses at the burning bush was not a description but a state of being. What it does to the weight of sin when the God sinned against is endless. Why eternity is the reason His promises cannot fail, and why the eternal Son is the proof that He came near. It closes where every reader lives, in a life that is short, and full, and hard.

The book is adapted from one of the clearest things ever written on the subject, Stephen Charnock's discourse on the eternity of God, brought into plain modern words with his own lines kept where they are too good to lose. You can finish it in an evening or two.