God

I thought that God just was.

Man only knows manly stuff, so we of course are concerned with time and beginnings of creation. Those rules do not apply to God, for He created them.

 

God created existance. God is infinatly more than we will ever be able to understand. Glory to God!

 

Finite studying the Infinite!!!

 

There was never a time when God did not exist, our limited minds can not comprehend something that has no beginning or end, that is limitless, God and His existence are bigger then we can conceive of.

 

Define existance.

 

God is "I Am".

God is continuously present. Everything else finds its existence in the God Who is always present.

Those who have been brought into time-bound existence by this present God often have a hard time understanding the nature of the One Who is the Source and Sustainer of all existence.

 

And Man is "I have to think before I Am"

 

Ben, God always existed. He does not have a beginning. That is why he is the only true eternal being (this is the Trinitarian God, so it is also true of Jesus and the Holy Spirit).

Eternal in this case means no beginning. All creatures, angels and man, have a beginning.

 

well.. here is at least one way to look at it, and a bit of an answer as to why God does not have a beginning....

God's eternal existence is called His aseity, which is the property by which a being exists of and from itself.... Wikpedia puts it like this: "Aseity is a theological term, a characteristic of being self-derived in contrast to being derived from or dependent on another, hence (apriori) predicable only of God in classical theology. Ideally, this term means that God necessarily exists as opposed to it happens to be the case that God exists."

What it means to say that God "necessarily" exists is that it is impossible for it to be the case that God does not exist.. this argument for God's existence says that since something exists (all of the natural world, creation), something must exist necessarily, it must have within itself the very power of existence or being... since all of creation has it's being and came into existence in a contingent way, based on the existence of something else prior to it's own existence, something had to exist which itself does not have a beginning since it is the case that the universe could not have "popped" into existence by itself, as it is sometimes said ex nihil, nihil fit... out of nothing, nothing comes.... so that if it was ever the case that nothing at all existed, then it would still be the case that nothing existed, because "nothing" cannot "do" anything to cause anything else to exist... so something eternal, something not contingent or dependent on something else for it's own being had to have brought into existence all that exists.... whew!!! lol.... this is part of the Kalaaam Cosmological argument for the existence of God....


This is what God seems to be saying of Himself when Moses asks Him His name...
Exo 3:13-14 esv Then Moses said to God, If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, What is his name? what shall I say to them?
(14) God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, Say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you."

Gill comments on this verse:
"Exo 3:14 - And God said unto Moses, I am that I am,.... This signifies the real being of God, his self-existence, and that he is the Being of beings; as also it denotes his eternity and immutability, and his constancy and faithfulness in fulfilling his promises, for it includes all time, past, present, and to come; and the sense is, not only I am what I am at present, but I am what I have been, and I am what I shall be, and shall be what I am."

And Barnes Exo 3:14 -
I am that I am - That is, “I am what I am.” The words express absolute, and therefore unchanging and eternal Being. The name, which Moses was thus commissioned to use, was at once new and old; old in its connection with previous revelations; new in its full interpretation, and in its bearing upon the covenant of which Moses was the destined mediator.


blessings,
Ken

 

In Revelation (somewhere, my Bible program isn't working) it says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega; the begining and the ending, first and the last." God was, is, and is to come. If God did not always exist then where did He come from? Who created Him?

 

That settles it, actually. It's a rhetorical question, so I'll just modify it:

If God did not always exist, then WHO or WHAT could have created Him? Wouldn't the guy or the force that created Him be God? Wouldn't the created God be subservient to HIS creator? Then we have to ask, who or what created the guy or the force that created the guy or the force that created God? See the point? It's an endless question, unless one simply accepts the fact that the great I AM ---- is. Always.

 

Nuff Said.

 

Nuff Said. </font>[/QUOTE]I can understand the "first", but I always could never figure out what God meant by "the last".
Any ideas? If we have eternal life, and will live forever with God, what will He be the "last" of?

 

So, what was God doing for eternity past, which is just as long as eternity future. What happened that at some point he decided "I'm going to create something"? Interesting to ponder, is it not?

 

After that last post, the screen said, "Sit tight... we are taking you back to God."

But, I am still here!

 

lol.....

 

so a person that denies eternal security would have to keep posting here over and over again?

 

There was no such thing as "time" before God created it. So God existed (and exists) and always will exist outside of our space-time continuum. He is so awesome and eternal that we could not even begin to comprehend what He did and does outside of our petty little space-time.

 

That settles it, actually. It's a rhetorical question, so I'll just modify it:

If God did not always exist, then WHO or WHAT could have created Him? Wouldn't the guy or the force that created Him be God? Wouldn't the created God be subservient to HIS creator? Then we have to ask, who or what created the guy or the force that created the guy or the force that created God? See the point? It's an endless question, unless one simply accepts the fact that the great I AM ---- is. Always. </font>[/QUOTE]

And this is why in traditional philosophy God is called the "First Cause."