In Psalm 90, Moses describes God as existing from everlasting to everlasting, without beginning or end. He places that truth beside the shortness of our own lives, then asks God to teach us how to use the days we have. I find that to be an encouraging way to pray, because the things I cannot control about tomorrow are already known to the God I am asking for help.
Psalm 90 and the Eternal God
The heading of Psalm 90 identifies it as a prayer of Moses, the man God used to lead Israel out of slavery in Egypt. After their deliverance, the Israelites heard God’s commands at Mount Sinai, and He provided food called manna to sustain them in the wilderness. Moses had seen the Lord care for them, but he had also seen how often they resisted Him.
At Kadesh Barnea, near the land God had promised to give them, the people refused to go in because they feared the people living there. They even talked about choosing another leader and returning to Egypt. God pronounced judgment on that rebellious generation: they would die in the wilderness, while their children would enter the land. Numbers 14 names Joshua and Caleb as exceptions. These two men had helped examine the land, and they had urged the people to trust the Lord instead of rebelling against Him.
Psalm 90 does not tell us the particular occasion on which Moses wrote it, so I would not claim that he composed it immediately after that rebellion. But knowing something about the people he led helps us hear his prayer. Moses led a people who moved their tents from place to place and buried members of their own generation. He began his prayer by telling the Lord what He had been to them:
Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.
Moses was speaking of the Lord as their refuge. Through all those changes, and even before Moses’ own lifetime, God had been the One His people could turn to. Their circumstances changed from one generation to the next, but the God who received them remained.
Moses then takes us further back than the generations of Israel. He speaks about the world itself coming into existence:
Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever You had formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.
A mountain can look permanent to us because it was there before we were born and will still be there after we die. Families may live beneath the same ridge for generations. Yet Moses says that even the mountains were brought forth and the earth was formed. They have an origin. When he speaks about God, he does not describe Him being formed or becoming God. God already was before anything in the world existed.
The Hebrew word translated everlasting is olam. It can refer to ancient time or an enduring future, with the extent understood from its context. That range is a reason to read the surrounding passage carefully rather than assume that one English definition settles every use of the word. Here the subject is God, and Moses has expressly placed Him before the world’s creation. I understand the phrase from everlasting to everlasting to mean that His existence has neither a beginning nor an ending. He is the uncreated Creator, so describing Him as merely the oldest being would still fall short of what Moses is saying.
To see why Moses begins there, let’s look at what he says about human life in the verses that follow. People return to dust, while a thousand years before God are like yesterday after it has passed. Moses also compares our lives to grass that grows in the morning and withers by evening. He is helping us see how brief our years are when we set them beside God’s enduring life.
He does not discuss death as though the only problem is that time goes by too quickly. In verses 7-11, Moses acknowledges God’s anger against sin, including sins people have tried to keep secret. The God who gives us life also sees how we use it. I cannot read those words honestly and treat my days as though they belong to me to spend without answering to Him.
Yet Moses keeps praying. Later in the psalm, Moses ends by asking for wisdom, compassion, gladness, and work God will establish. He asks God to teach His people to number their days so that they will gain wisdom, and he asks Him to establish the work of their hands. Their lives are short, but he still expects that their work can have value because God can give it a lasting purpose. I think that helps us understand the difference between recognizing our limits and deciding that nothing we do is worthwhile.
Before Creation and Above Time
Moses’ description of God before the mountains agrees with the way the Bible begins. Genesis introduces the creation of the world with God already present:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
There is no earlier account of someone bringing God into existence. He is the One creating the heavens and the earth, and His life does not depend on anything He makes. We depend on air, food, and the world around us, but God did not need to create those things in order to keep Himself alive.
That is why I distinguish God from the universe He made. If I describe Him as the soul of the universe, or as one powerful force inside it, I have made Him part of the creation instead of recognizing Him as its Creator. It also becomes possible to give created things the worship that belongs to Him. Psalm 33 directs our attention to the One whose command brought the heavens into being:
By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.
The host of the heavens refers here to the vast array of heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, and stars owe their existence to God’s word. They do not supply Him with power, and He did not need the help of someone greater to make them. The same dependence applies to us: every breath we take is possible because He sustains the life He has given.
Our dependence also helps explain why passing years affect us differently. We become tired, we discover things we did not know, and we need help to continue. God does not have to recover His strength or improve a wisdom that was once incomplete. His holiness does not become better with experience, because there was never anything deficient in it.
I experience life one moment at a time, and I can misunderstand even an event that has already happened. That makes tomorrow uncertain from my point of view. God, however, declares the end from the beginning, as Isaiah 46:9-10 says. Nothing that happens tomorrow will surprise Him or reveal a gap in His knowledge. I can trust that without pretending I have answered every philosophical question about how God relates to time.
But if He is so far beyond our limitations, does He concern Himself with people whose lives are brief? Isaiah speaks directly to that question by describing where the eternal God dwells:
For thus says the High and Lofty One Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, With him who has a contrite and humble spirit.”
The same God who inhabits eternity says that He dwells with the person who has a contrite and humble spirit. Contrite means being grieved by sin and willing to acknowledge it. Isaiah was addressing people who had turned to idols and persisted in disobedience, so humility here involves admitting what they had done and returning to God.
The passage speaks of His judgment and His willingness to heal and revive. If we continue reading after the words quoted above, God says that He revives the humble and contrite. The passage also warns that there is no peace for the wicked. His willingness to receive someone who comes humbly does not mean that He approves of the sin that person needs to confess.
I find that to be a reason to approach Him honestly. I do not have to make myself impressive enough for the God of eternity to notice me. He already knows my weakness and what I have done. If I claim to honor Him while defending the sin He has exposed, I am refusing the humility He describes. His offer to heal gives me reason to seek mercy instead.
We can also see His care in what He has done across generations. God called Abraham to leave his country and promised to make a nation from him. When that nation, Israel, was enslaved in Egypt, God delivered them through Moses. Later He sent prophets to tell His people what He required and to call them back when they departed from Him. These were actions affecting real people at particular times.
At the appointed time, He sent His Son into the world. Wicked men killed Jesus, but God raised Him bodily, and the Holy Spirit now lives within believers as they await Christ’s return. God’s eternal existence has never meant that He watches His creation with indifference. He acts within the world He made, and the years that pass do not prevent Him from completing His purposes.
The God Who Does Not Change
As we follow those events, God’s dealings with people take different forms, but His character remains dependable. I may change my mind because I learn something I did not know or because I realize that I was wrong. I can also grow tired of a responsibility or fail to keep a promise. God has no ignorance to overcome and no moral failure to correct, so we do not have to wonder whether time will make Him less faithful.
The prophet Malachi spoke to Israelites who had departed from God’s commands. God exposed their wrongdoing and warned of judgment, but He also explained why He had not destroyed them completely:
“For I am the LORD, I do not change; Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.”
The sons of Jacob are the people of Israel, whose ancestor Jacob also received the name Israel. God had made covenant promises to that family, and its descendants’ disobedience had not made Him forget what He had promised. In the next verse, He calls them to return to Him. The invitation comes from the same God who has just told them the truth about their conduct.
Among their offenses, Malachi names the tithes, meaning tenths, and the offerings they had withheld. Those were portions and gifts God had commanded Israel to bring for the service of His temple, including food in its storehouse. They could not dismiss His requirements simply because He had shown them patience. His faithfulness preserved an opportunity to repent; it did not make their refusal to obey harmless.
I need to receive God’s patience that way too. If I rely on His mercy while deliberately ignoring His warning, I am treating His goodness as permission to continue doing wrong. Because He does not change, I can trust what He promises, and I also need to take seriously what He tells me to leave behind.
In his letter, James makes a related point about God’s goodness. Before describing the gifts God gives, he explains that temptation to evil arises when a person is drawn away by his own desires. We should not blame God for enticing us to sin. James then identifies the One from whom good comes:
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.
The title Father of lights points to God as the Creator of the heavenly lights. Their appearance changes as the days pass, and the shadows we see move and lengthen. God does not undergo a corresponding change in goodness. He is not generous one day and morally corrupt the next, and His willingness to give what is good does not depend on a favorable mood.
That allows me to bring my needs before Him without wondering whether He has become a different God since I last prayed. It also gives me confidence in His word. Public opinion can shift, and a culture can begin approving something it once condemned, but those changes do not make God’s judgment mistaken. He will not discover later that He was wrong about what He told us or that He can no longer keep His promise.
The Eternal Son
The New Testament applies this understanding of God’s eternal existence to Jesus Himself. The Son did not begin to exist when He was born, and He did not start as a creature who eventually became divine. To show you why I say that, we can compare the beginning of John’s Gospel with the beginning of Genesis. John introduces Jesus as the Word:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Genesis tells us what God created in the beginning. John tells us that the Word already was in the beginning. He was with God, which distinguishes Him from the Father, and He was God, which tells us that He shares the divine nature. John 1:3 then says that everything made was made through Him. If all created things came into being through the Word, I cannot place Him among those created things.
This agrees with the doctrine of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct Persons, and there is one God. The Son is fully God and co-eternal with the Father and the Spirit. He is not the Father, and His distinction from the Father does not make Him a lesser god.
John 1:14 explains how this eternal Word came among us: He became flesh. We call this the incarnation, meaning that the Son took on true humanity without ceasing to be God. His birth at Bethlehem was the birth of One who already existed before the world He entered. The apostle Paul identifies Him as Creator in his letter to the believers at Colossae:
For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible… All things were created through Him and for Him.
Paul continues in the next verse by saying that Christ is before all things and that all things consist in Him. In other words, creation continues to depend on Him to hold it together. Becoming man did not mean that He stopped sustaining the world or that He returned to a creation He had neglected. The One who came to save us is the One on whom our existence has always depended.
Revelation uses the title Alpha and Omega to express divine authority over the beginning and the end. Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, and Omega is the last. Near the opening of the book, we read:
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
At the end of Revelation, Jesus also calls Himself the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, and the First and the Last. He is speaking as the One who will return and bring His reward with Him. I understand these titles to affirm His shared divine nature and His authority over the whole course of history. His return is a promise He has the power to fulfill.
His authority also helps us understand the security of the salvation He provides. I understand Paul to be the author of Hebrews, and in the opening of Hebrews he brings the Son’s work as Creator together with His work in cleansing us from sin. God made the worlds through the Son, and the Son upholds all things by His powerful word. Then the passage speaks of Him having purged our sins and sitting down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.
The One who sustains our lives came to deal with sin we could not remove ourselves. Jesus was sinless, and He willingly gave Himself to be slain as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Wicked men tortured His body and crucified Him, and through His shed blood and death He completed that sacrifice. He was then buried, and He rose bodily from the dead.
I do not understand the cross as the Father punishing or cursing His Son. The Father did not abandon Him, strike or bruise Him, or pour His wrath upon Him. Father and Son were united in providing our salvation. The sufficiency of the sacrifice rests in the perfection of the Son who willingly gave His life for us.
After His resurrection, the Son took His place at the Father’s right hand, the position of divine honor and authority described in Hebrews. He had accomplished the sacrifice and does not need to offer Himself again. The assurance later in the letter concerns this same Savior:
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
The words occur beside an encouragement to remember faithful teachers and a warning not to be carried away by strange doctrines. The Christ they had been taught to trust had not become someone else. The Savior who received sinners during His earthly ministry has not grown reluctant to receive them now, and the mercy shown in His saving work has not worn out.
He remains the Mediator who brings us to God. When Jesus describes His people as His sheep, He is speaking about His care for those who hear His voice and follow Him. In John 10:27-30, He promises them eternal life and says that no one can snatch them from His hand. The Shepherd who keeps His people is also the King who will return. His promises rest on who He continues to be.
Everlasting Life in Christ
There is a difference between the eternal life Christ gives us and God’s own eternal existence. God never began to exist and does not receive life from anyone else. We had a beginning, and even when we receive everlasting life, we remain creatures who depend on Him. Being joined to Christ does not make us divine or give us an independent source of life.
Paul describes eternal life as God’s gift in Christ Jesus in Romans 6:23. I think that helps explain why our confidence belongs in the Giver. A savior who might eventually cease to exist could not provide a secure promise of endless life. Jesus can make that promise because He is eternal, His sacrifice is sufficient, and He faithfully keeps those who belong to Him.
That security does not rest on the strength of my feelings or my ability to keep holding on without ever becoming weak. When a person is born again, the Holy Spirit gives that person new life in Christ. Obedience grows from that life, but it does not earn salvation, and it is not the means by which salvation is kept. The Savior’s faithfulness is the reason I can trust His promise even when my circumstances or feelings change.
The promise of everlasting life also should not be confused with a claim that every human being possesses an inherently immortal soul. Those who remain lost in their sins do not receive the life Christ gives. Revelation 20 describes the dead being raised to stand before God at the Great White Throne, where their works are judged. Those not found in the Book of Life are cast into the Lake of Fire, which the passage calls the second death.
I understand that second death to be the final and irreversible destruction of human body and soul, rather than everlasting conscious torment as the final fate of unbelieving people. Jesus warns in Matthew 10:28 of the One able to destroy both soul and body in hell. I take that warning seriously alongside the promise of life in Christ. Eternal life is a gift received by grace as we turn in repentance and faith to the Son who was crucified and rose again. It is not something all people possess by nature.
That gives urgency to the prayer Moses offered about our days. I cannot assume that I will always have another opportunity to address a sin I am excusing now. God’s enduring life does not give me an endless supply of time in which to postpone responding to Him.
At the same time, a short life does not make the responsibilities before me unimportant. Moses asked God to establish the work of His servants’ hands. I can ask Him to guide what I do today, including work that seems ordinary, and trust Him with what I will not live long enough to see. I do not have to control all the years ahead in order to obey Him in the day He has given me.
My Final Thoughts
From everlasting to everlasting means that God has no beginning and will have no end. Psalm 90 places our brief lives before that God, but Moses’ response is to ask for mercy and wisdom rather than give up on the days he has. The One who existed before the mountains remains a refuge for His people, and His unchanging character gives us reason to trust what He says.
The eternal Son entered the world He made and accomplished the sacrifice through which sinners can receive everlasting life. I can rely on Him for a future I could never secure for myself. That assurance also calls for an honest response in the present. I want to bring Him the sin I need to confess and the work He has given me to do, asking Him to teach me how to use this day well.