“All that He is is eternal” by Herman Bavinck
“As living, thinking beings in time, we stand before the mystery of eternal uncreated being and marvel.
On the one hand, it is certain that God is the Eternal One: in Him there is neither past or future, neither becoming or change.
All that He is is eternal: His thought, His will, His decree.
Eternal in Him is the idea of the world that He thinks and utters in the Son; eternal in Him is also the decision to create the world; eternal in Him is the will that created the world in time; eternal is also the act of creating as an act of God, an action both internal and immanent.
For God did not become Creator, so that first for a long time He did not create and then afterward He did create.
Rather, He is the eternal Creator, and as Creator He was the Eternal One, and as the Eternal One He created. The creation therefore brought about no change in God; it did not emanate from Him and is no part of His being.
He is unchangeably the same eternal God…
The world is subject to time, that is, to change. It is constantly becoming, in contrast with God, who is an eternal and unchangeable being.
Now these two, God and the world, eternity and time, are related in such a way that the world is sustained in all its parts by God’s omnipresent power, and time in all its moments is pervaded by the eternal being of our God.
Eternity and time are not two lines, the shorter of which for a time runs parallel to the infinitely extended one; the truth is that eternity is the immutable center that sends out its rays to the entire circumference of time.
To the limited eye of the creature it successively unfolds its infinite content in the breadth of space and the length of time, so that creature might understand something of the unsearchable greatness of God.
But for all that, eternity and time remain distinct. All we wish to confess is that God’s eternal willing can and does, without ceasing to be eternal, produce effects in time, just as His eternal thought can have temporal objects as its content.
The power of God’s will, which is eternally one, caused things to come into being that did not exist before, yet without bringing about any change in Him.
God eternally wills things that will only take place after centuries or took place centuries before. And the moment it takes place there is change in things but not in Him.”
–Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, Vol. 2 (Ed. John Bolt, and Trans. John Vriend; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 2: 429-430.
