Originally posted 9/16/25
I am a huge fan of the show “The Curse of Oak Island”. I have been sucked in and have watched every single episode. I can’t wait for the new season to start. They are digging at this very moment and I cannot wait until the newest finds are revealed. As soon as an artifact is found, there is a race to find out the age and purpose of each item. Everything that is found has a beginning. We measure everything.Things around us all have a unique way to be measured. Some are measured by weight or height. Researchers not only search for their size and purpose, but they also search for its origin including when the item was made.
God is not like the objects we find. God is self-existent. The simple definition is “existing independently of any cause or having an independent existence”. God has no beginning. He has always been. He didn’t create himself nor was he created. We see in Genesis 1:1 that
God existed before time. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” We see it again in John 1:1, “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
God existed before time. Do we fully understand what that actually means? God is not a created being. No one created God or caused him to come into being. John 5:26 tells us, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.” God has life in himself. He is not dependent on anyone.
In the book, Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer wrote, “To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for “where” has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made.” p.43
In Jen Wilkin’s book, None Like Him, she says, “Unlike everything God has made, he himself has no origin. No one gave him life. He did not begin to be; he has simply always been. Before he created everything we know (and billions of things beyond our capacity to know), he was, existing in completeness. He is self-existent depending on nothing or no one to imbue him with breath. Though “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), he require nothing or no one to have life. He “has life in himself” (John 5:26). He who has no origin is the origin of life for all.” p. 45
God is the creator of the universe and everything that is in it. He has always existed and was not created. Colossians 1:15-17 states, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
“Man is a created being, a derived and contingent self, who of himself possesses nothing but is dependent each moment for his existence upon the One who created him after His own likeness. The fact of God is necessary to the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence.” Tozer, p. 44
John says it best in Revelation 4:11, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”
Prayer
Father God,
Our limited brains cannot wrap our heads around something that was not created but has always existed. To put it simply, we don’t know how that works. We cannot fully understand how you have always existed. However, we do not have to fully understand the fact that you are self-existent. We can just faithfully accept it. Reveal additional knowledge of you as we need it. Help us to faithfully serve you until then.
In You Name,
Amen
Link to other Attributes of God articles:
Image from AI