Aionios: The Eternal God

Word of the Week

January 18, 2025

Aiōnios: The Eternal God

 

Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now is manifested, and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith.

Romans 16:25-26 NASB

 

Visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arlington National Cemetery and you can see the Eternal Flame that commemorates the sacrifices of those who died defending our country. It is a moving symbol that sobers onlookers.

But this Eternal Flame has only been burning since November 11, 1967.  Soldiers are on duty 24 hours a day to make sure it doesn’t go out, but it hasn’t been burning forever.

Obviously, eternal doesn’t always mean infinite duration of time.  So let’s ask the question: what do we mean when we say that God is eternal?

Theologians have plumbed the depths of this question at great length, but we can profit from a short look at one aspect of God’s eternity: the Greek word “eternal” that describes Him.

When Romans 16:26 speaks of “the eternal God,” it uses the Greek word aiōnios [eye-OH-nee-ahss].

Aiōnios traces back to the word aiōn, usually translated as “age.”  It normally means a long period of time.  When you read about something that happens “forever” in your Bible, you are very often seeing the rendering of a phrase that very literally means “into the ages.”  When the English says “forever and ever,” it probably matches the Greek phrase “into the ages of ages.”

When I read those phrase, I can’t help visualizing a time tunnel, one in which one millennium after another stretches off into the distance as far as the eye can see.  It depicts one long age after another going on and on with no end.

When something has that characteristic, the Greek would describe it as aiōnios.

You can find the word over 70 times in the New Testament.  By far the most frequent use is in the phrase “eternal life.”  Samples include:

• John 3:16 – whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life
• John 6:47 – Truly, truly, I say to you, the one who believes has eternal life.
• John 10:28 – I give them eternal life and they will never perish.
• Rom 6:23 – The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.

The grand promise of the Christian faith is that God bestows eternal life on those who place their faith in Jesus and His sacrifice for our sins.  In these verses, we are looking down the time tunnel into the future, rejoicing in the confidence that we are headed for a new home in heaven that will never end.

Heaven is not the only thing that the Bible describes as unending.  Scripture warns of “eternal judgment” (Matthew 25:41, 46) involving “eternal fire” (Jude 7) and “eternal destruction” (2 Thessalonians 1:9).  Hell, like heaven, has no expiration date.

Each of us has a beginning, but we have no end.

Aiōnios looks to the future, but it is occasionally used to look back to the past.  When it does, our English translations usually render it as “long ages ago” or something similar.  Romans 16:25, for instance, talks about “the mystery which has been kept secret fir long ages past.”  Titus 1:2 mentions the hope of eternal life “which God . . . promised long ages ago.”  In verses like these, we turn to see the time tunnel disappear into the distant past

And then there’s God.

When we say that God is eternal, we mean that he has no beginning or end.  Whether you look to the past or the future, He is endlessly there.  Romans 16:26 is the only verse that uses the precise phrase “the eternal God,” but we read elsewhere of His eternal power (1 Timothy 6:16), His eternal glory (1 Peter 5:10), His eternal glory (2 Timothy 2:10), His eternal covenant (Hebrews 9:15), and His eternal kingdom (2 Peter 1:11).

New Testament teaching on the eternal nature of God rests on the clear statements of the Old Testament.  All the way to the oldest Psalm, penned by Moses, we read, “Before the mountains were born Or You gave birth to the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God (Psalm 90:2).

The truth that God is eternal sets a framework that can guide my daily behavior and shape my priorities.  After all, most of the minutia that fill our days are time-bound, useful for the moment, but often irrelevant in the light of eternity.  Our disappointments and fears seem overwhelming, but we will view them differently when we remember the reality of eternity.

We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Study Hint:

This article focuses solely on uses of the word aiōnios  without delving into the many deeper discussions that we would have in a full discussion of theology.  Clearly, God is not limited by time in the way that we are.  After all, it would seem that He created time and He is above it.  Here is an explanation of God’s eternity by popular theologian Wayne Gruden:

God has no beginning , end, or succession of moments in his own being, and he sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees events in time and acts in time (Systematic Theology, p. 168).

 

For further meditations on the attributes of God, you can consult any systematic theology text, as well as books like:

1. I. Packer, Knowing God
2. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

 

Coming Up

We live in a world filled with invisible radio waves and microwave transmission, so we know that reality goes beyond our senses.  Next week we will look at the Greek word for “the invisible God.”

©Ezra Project 2025