Our Eternal GodChikamu

The second implication is that the eternity of God gives us confidence in God and His Word. For many of us, one of the most high-trust relationships in our lives is the relationship we have with our dentist. We need to trust and believe that the person who is allowed to wield needles and drills within our open mouth is competent, knowledgeable, and trustworthy. When my family moved to a new community some years ago, one priority for us was to find a good dentist. It just happened that the dentist closest to our house was someone with whom we had a family connection going back many years. He was well respected in the community and everyone was jostling to get on his list. He invited us in and we had our checkups. We were quickly persuaded he was the best dentist we had ever encountered. However, we had only been there a little more than a year when he told us that he was planning to retire. For the time he was our dentist we had a high trust relationship, but it was a transient one.

Believers have no greater relationship of trust than our relationship with the Lord Himself. We take Him at His word, we stake our future on His promises, we entrust our very selves to Him for this life and the life to come. At the core of our willingness to do that is the belief that the One whom we trust can never cease to be. The One whom we trust has power over the future, so that His promises and His plans can never be frustrated.

All this is true, yet it is important to see that our confidence is not simply that God is everlasting, so that He will be around as long as time endures. No, our confidence goes further: it is that our God is the eternal God, the God who exists beyond time and holds time in His hand. You see, God’s eternal nature teaches us that His plans are in no way subject to change or variation. He is the God who simply is. So, for instance, when He promises to save us on a final day, He sees that day already. That final day is, in some sense, present to Him now, and so His saving work is as good as complete.

Or, to look at it from another angle, when God accepts you into His family—when He sets His love upon you—His eternal nature means that His acceptance is in no way dependent upon your future performance. It is not as though He might change His mind if, down the road, you fail Him. No, when He saves you, He sees your life as a whole. He knows what you will do and what you will become. And despite all the future failings and sin that He knows are yet to come, He sets His love upon you. The present and future work of God are part of the coherent activity and reality of the eternal God who simply is. Later, in chapter 3, I will give more detail to the idea of God’s unchanging nature (His immutability), which is closely linked to this theme of God’s eternal nature. But the glorious truth to meditate on for now is, as Hebrews says, that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

I recently came across a news article with the reassuring heading, “Why the Canada Pension Plan Will Still Be Solvent When You Retire.” In a world of depressing news stories, it was a very nice headline to read and, no doubt, many of the article’s readers will take comfort in it. We can all have those niggling doubts that our future financial plans will fail us. Plenty of company pension pots have been raided; plenty of retirement plans have run out of money; and the truth is that anything can happen. But when we trust ourselves to the eternal God who does not change—who is the same God now who holds the end of time in His hand—we know that the future is secure and we can stake everything on His promises. Scripture proclaims the supremely comforting truth that “the eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut. 33:27). Here is our security for time and for eternity; here is our refuge in the storms of life, our sure and steadfast hope: we know One who is eternal and whose arms beneath us are everlasting. The eternity of God gives us confidence.