Who Made God?
“Where did God come from? Who made him?”
This is a frequently asked question, and it may be addressed in two basic ways.
The most direct answer is the one supplied by the Scriptures themselves. And that will settle the issue for those who have confidence in the credibility of the sacred Book.
Secondly, however, one may pursue the inquiry by means of the process of logical reasoning.
The Biblical View
The view regarding God that is set forth consistently in the Bible is this: He did not come from anywhere.
No one made the Creator of the universe. He had no beginning, and will have no ending. He is the eternal, self-existing Being.
Here is what the Bible says about who made God:
God is eternal
God is everlasting in nature (Isa. 40:28), which is to say, he is eternal as to his very essence (Rom. 16:26; 1 Tim. 1:17). His existence is “from everlasting to everlasting.”
Before the material creation was spoken into existence, he always was (Psa. 90:2).
God is self-existing
The Lord revealed himself to Moses as the “I AM THAT I AM” (Ex. 3:14). The “I AM” expression is related to the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh (LORD — KJV, or Jehovah — see ASV footnote). This was the most sacred name for God.
The term Yahweh occurs more than 6,800 times in the Old Testament. The word is believed to be a form of the verb hayah, which signifies “to be,” ultimately meaning “the eternal One” or “self-existing One.”
God’s existence is underived; no one made him. He simply always was.
The Logical View
The eternality of the Creator may be argued in another way as well. Consider the following logical line of argument.
The universe must have been created by something
If there ever was a time when nothing at all existed, then there would be absolutely nothing today.
It is an axiomatic truth that if nothing exists, then “nothing” will be the case — always, for nothing simply remains nothing — forever! Nothing plus nothing equals nothing.
If there is absolutely nothing but nothing, there cannot ever be something. “Nothing” and “something” — applied to the same object, at the same time — are mutually exclusive terms.
Something has always existed
Since it is the case that something does now exist, one must logically conclude that something has existed always.
Let us state the matter again: If nothing cannot produce something, and yet something exists, then it follows necessarily that something has existed always.
The question then becomes this. What is the “something” that has been in existence always?
An eternal non-material spirit being
In logic, the “law of the excluded middle” states that a thing either is, or it is not. A line either is straight, or it is not straight.
Let us apply this principle to the matter at hand.
Something has existed forever. That “something” must be either material in nature or non-material.
If it can be demonstrated that the eternal “something” is not material in nature, then it must follow that the eternal “something” is non-material in nature.
Another term for the “non-material” would be “spirit.”
The question now becomes — what does the available evidence reveal? Is it the case that “matter” has existed forever, or does the evidence argue that the eternal “something” is non-matter, i.e., spirit?
Matter is not eternal
The most reputable scientists in the world concede that matter is not eternal. In his book, Until the Sun Dies, Dr. Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professed agnostic, describes his perception of the initial creation of the universe.
He speaks of that moment when “the first particles of matter appear” (21, emphasis added), thus, prior to that moment, matter did not exist. Subsequently, he declares emphatically that “modern science denies an eternal existence to the Universe?” (30).
There is not a particle of evidence that the universe has existed forever. The very fact that scientists attempt to assign an “age” to the universe is revealing within itself.
A non-material, spirit must have always existed
In view of the foregoing — namely that something has always existed, and yet that “something” is not of a material nature — the student of logic is irresistibly forced to the conclusion that the “something” that is eternal is non-material.
That non-material eternal something must be spirit in its essence.
The Scriptures identify that spirit Being as God. “God is spirit?” (Jn. 4:24) — an uncreated, eternal Spirit Being.
Both Scripture and logic, then, in marvelous concert, testify to the fact that God is eternal. He had no origin. He is the everlasting I AM. No one “made” him. He simply IS.
- Jastrow, Robert. 1977. Until the Sun Dies. New York: W. W. Norton.