Where did God come from?

God's Eternal Existence and the Limits of Human Concepts

Asking where God came from is a fair question, but it isn't so easy to answer. In a real sense we can only partially comprehend the notion of God's existence because we must use human concepts to speak of an infinite being.

Therefore, we say God is without beginning or end, that He is eternal and dwells outside of space and time. But this doesn't mean we can't adequately speak of God. So, the Bible says that God has always existed.

Psalm 90 verse 2 says, Even from everlasting to everlasting you are God. And Psalm 93 verse 2 says, Your throne is established from of old, you are from everlasting. So, biblically speaking God has no beginning and no end.

Why God Did Not Come From Anywhere

Therefore, when we ask where did God come from, the answer is that He didn't come from anywhere. He always was. This can be difficult for us because our time is linear and God is not. But anyway, one second for us, one second follows the next.

One minute is after another. We get older, not younger, and we cannot repeat the minutes that have passed us by. Also, physics has shown that basically time is a property that is the result of the existence of matter.

Time exists when matter exists. In fact, time has even been called the fourth dimension. But God is not matter. In fact, God created matter and He created the universe. He is outside of the universe. He is outside of time.

So, before the universe was, God existed. God was simply existing and time had no meaning and no relationship to Him. Therefore, to ask where God came from is to ask a question that really can't be applied to God in the first place.

The Domino Illustration and the Need for a First Cause

Perhaps that is a satisfactory answer for you and then again maybe it isn't. But let's just go a little further with this by looking at an illustration. Let's imagine a very long line of dominoes and we observe that the dominoes are falling one after another.

We want to find out where the first domino fell that started the whole sequence. We are looking essentially for the first cause. So, what we do is we walk towards the beginning of the line and eventually we find the first domino that started everything.

But let's change the illustration a little and say that the line of dominoes that is falling is infinitely long and we want to find the first one that fell. The problem is that this would be impossible because if the line is infinitely long, no matter how far back we looked, there would always be another domino further back in time.

This would go on for infinity. This would mean that there could be no first domino because there would always be one more before that one, and so on for infinity. This is important because it would mean that there could be no first domino.

But this presents us with a serious problem. If there is no first domino, then there can't be a second, or a third, or a fourth, etc. This is why it is necessary to have a single uncaused cause. In other words, it is necessary to have a single first domino, but you can't have that in an infinitely long line of dominoes going backwards in time because you would never find the first domino.

There cannot be an infinite series of causes because there would never be a first cause, and without a first cause there can't be a second, or a third, and so on. This is why it is logically necessary to say that God has always been, that God had no beginning, and that He is the first cause of everything, just as the Bible says in Psalm 90, verse 2, From everlasting to everlasting you are God.