A friend recently asked, “Where did God come from? Who created God?” Those are great questions. Sometimes they come simply from curiosity, and sometimes they’re presented as slam-dunk “gotchas” to try to prove theism false. After all, everyone and everything around us had a beginning. So, where did God come from? Was He created too, or was He born, or something else entirely? Was there a time without God? How can He exist if He didn’t come from somewhere?
What if all of this confusion is not because we don’t know the answer, but because we are asking the wrong question? Before this study is over, you’ll see that not only does the Bible provide an adequate question, it may also completely change how we think about God’s existence.
The Very Beginning
If God had a beginning, then the beginning is where we should start. Naturally, there’s Genesis 1:1:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The heavens and the earth were created by God, but there’s no mention of where He came from, just that He is. Genesis 1 continues describing God’s work, how He spent six days creating light, the universe, and everything that we experience around us. After creating mankind, God stops creating and then rests. It completely glosses over where God came from. It assumes He was already there. Genesis is a little backwards compared to our original question. Genesis describes the origin of creation, not the Creator. We’ll have to keep looking.
Now, jump way forward to John 1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
John 1:1–5
Once again, we get elements of creation, but very differently. This “Word” was with God, and was God, and had a hand in creating everything. More importantly, He was the life of mankind. Life comes from Him because He made it, but also because He is life. That’s going to be important later, so hold onto that thought.
The Bible is clear: God doesn’t have a beginning; He precedes it. Moses says in Psalm 90:1–2:
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.
He is eternally before and eternally after creation. There has never been a time where something was there and God was not. He is constant, He is present, and He is not locked into time like we are.
God Is Not Created
The Bible does not show God as having a beginning, only that He is there at the beginning. It also claims that He is there from everlasting to everlasting, stretching out unendingly in both directions. All of this can be very confusing to us because we are trapped in time. Everything for us had a beginning, and everything has an end. So, clearly our initial question isn’t the right one to be asking. What if, instead, we ask the question, “Does God need to come from somewhere?”
We can let God’s own words answer that question. In the book of Exodus, Moses is out taking care of his father-in-law’s sheep when suddenly he sees something impossible. There’s a bush in the middle of the wilderness that has caught on fire, but is not burning up. There’s a powerful voice coming from it that tells Moses to get closer, remove his shoes and walk carefully, for the ground is holy. Moses knows immediately that he is encountering God, and God is giving him a task: “Go back to Egypt, rally My people, and tell Pharaoh to let them go.” As Moses argues with God, he eventually comes up with an excuse as to why he can’t do it: “People are going to ask who sent me. What should I say?” How can he identify the true God that sent him in a culture that worships many gods?
And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” Moreover God said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel: ‘The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is My name forever, and this is My memorial to all generations.’”
Exodus 3:14–15
The name used for God as His “proper” name, YHWH, comes from this verb (am or exist) in this moment, but God is claiming something bigger. It’s not just a command to “Tell them My name”; God is telling him to send them a message about who their God is. He is not the God of created things, or of human emotions, but He is the very essence of existence. He is being itself. God is THE I Am. Because He is, He doesn’t require an origin.
Aseity: “Life In and of Itself”
The issue with all of us coming from somewhere is that all of that “somewhere” had to come from… somewhere. That becomes this looping chain of causes, effects, and more causes that stretches on and on through history until eventually we’re met with a difficult question: Where did all this “something” come from? The issue of the true origin is one that every worldview that creates a framework for understanding our reality has to face, but there is only one with the right answer. God is the “I Am,” and that concept—that He is the eternal essence of life and existence,—rom everlasting to everlasting—has a name in theology: “Divine Aseity.” It sounds philosophical, but it’s quite simple, really. Author Matthew Barrett describes it like this: To say that God has Divine Aseity is to say that God is “life in and of itself.”1
Jesus describes it this way:
For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself.
John 5:26
He’s talking to the Pharisees about justice and punishment, and how God can delineate judgment that results in life or death. How can He control these things? Because He controls the concept of life—He has life in Himself. All life comes from Him.
This is the solution of that looping cause and effect chain. Something has to get it started. Something has to turn the key to get this existence car going. As Nate James says, “A Creator is not inside their creation. They must—by necessity—be outside of their creation.” God created matter, time, and space, all of which had a beginning. We’ve known that for centuries. Aristotle, writing 300 years before Christ, acknowledges that everything—from movement to thought to matter—must come from an “unmoved mover,” something beyond the normal laws of the universe. Today, physicists perform their calculations according to the Law of Conservation of Mass: Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Yet, even the most recent of discoveries can’t explain where that matter came from because of this law. The rocks cry out: something had to have put us here. God is the perfect response to this reality. He is the origin point of all things: He has life in Himself to be able to create life. He has put the universe together to operate. As we saw in John 1:4:
In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
Where did God come from? Have we answered our question? Not in the way you may have expected. Yes, the universe has to have come from something, but this isn’t proof that God also has to have an origin. Rather it points towards God as the origin. He is the unmoved mover, the uncreated creator, the main source of all there is around us. He doesn’t require things like we do because He is not like us, and we are better off for it.
Speaking of the Creator and creation, the book of Genesis claims that God created the universe in six days. Was that six literal days, or is the Bible being figurative? Could those six days actually represent eons and eons of time? Let’s study that question here.
- Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2019), 56–57. ↩︎