The Eternality and Aseity of God

“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” Psalm 90:2

We believe that God is the Creator, who made the world and everything in it, but we rarely consider his everlasting, eternal nature. When considering eternity we think about the unending time that is to come. For those who are in Christ, we look forward to the new heavens, the new earth, and everlasting life (John 3:16; Rev 21:1).
 
But for God, eternity isn’t just the time to come, or the time that’s passed, or even (astoundingly) time at all. John Frame says that God’s eternality is the truth that he is, “Lord of time, existing above and apart from it, but free to enter it to accomplish his purposes.”

The eternality of God flows from the aseity of God.* This is the truth that, as Barry Cooper says, “God isn’t dependent on anyone or anything - but everyone and everything is dependent on him. He is the great unmade Maker, the great self-sustaining Sustainer. It’s what Jesus means when he says in John 5 that, ‘The Father has life in himself.’ It’s what Paul means when he says in Acts 17 that ‘The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.’”

While everything else was created, God has always existed. R.C. Sproul says that this one word, aseity, “captures all the glory of the perfection of God’s being. What makes God different from people, from the stars, from earthquakes, and from any other creaturely thing is that God - and God alone - exists by His own power. No one made him or caused him. He exists in and of himself.”
 
This is what is communicated through God’s statement to Moses in Exodus 3 when God reveals himself as, “I AM.”

More than just 5-dollar words, the eternality and aseity of God have vast implications for believers, but let’s focus on just one that John Frame points out:

“Though God does not need the world or anything in it, he freely enters his creation and freely
brings upon his creatures blessings and judgments. So when in Jesus Christ he saves his people 
from their sins, he is not seeking to meet some need in himself. When Scripture says that salvation 
is by grace alone (Eph 2:8-9), it testifies that God saves, not to meet a need in himself, but entirely 
to meet ours. In salvation we are desperate, and God is all-sufficient.”

Glory to our eternal, everlasting, self-existent God!

*Herman Bavinck, R.C. Sproul, and John Frame are academically and theologically sound places to begin a deeper study of these doctrines.