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Where was God before He created the universe?

This is a question I hear frequently and it stems from our natural desire to understand God. The problem with answering it is the way the question itself is phrased. We humans live in space and time and we think according to their limits. Look at the question itself. Two words in it require space and time. We can only answer “where” in terms of space. And the word “before” implies time in which things happen before and after one another.

In creation, however, God made both space and time as well as all the things which fill them. He himself is outside of space and time. We use the word “infinite” (literally: “without limits”) to describe this concept of God.

It is a weakness of the way we think that we imagine God moving through time with us, remembering the past and anticipating the future. We say He “knows the future,” imagining that He is looking ahead to a future which has not yet happened for Him as it has not happened for us. Or, “He remembers the past,” thinking the past no longer exists for Him as it is but a memory for us.

However, being outside time, God does not move through time like we do. Peter puts it this way, “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” 2 Peter 3:8.

C. S. Lewis used an illustration which may help us understand as much as possible. Think of space/time as a line on a piece of paper. We are limited to that line and move along it from one moment to another. In fact, the only part of reality we experience is the little bit of the line we call “the present.” Everything behind us is the past and can only be remembered. Everything ahead is the future and can not yet be experienced.

Now, think of God as the piece of paper. It is larger than the line and contains the line. It does not experience that line only in little bits and pieces we call “moments” but rather contains the whole line at once. In much the same way it seems likely that God, being greater than either time or space, experiences all time and space as a whole. There would be no present, past or future from His viewpoint. He sees and experiences the whole thing all together and more.

Just as the answer to the question, “Where does the paper fit on the line?” would be, “It’s not. It’s the other way around. The line fits on the paper.” The answer to the question, “where was God before creation?” is “You’ve got it backwards. God doesn’t fit in time and space. If anything, it’s the other way around. They exist in Him, or rather, because of Him.”

As Paul said in Acts 17:28 “For in him we live and move and have our being.”

Which bring us to two concluding thoughts:

1: Our God truly is so big we can not possibly comprehend Him, for which we should give Him glory.

2: It was a tremendous miracle of love that God willing and able to join us in our limit existence in time and space by becoming a human in the person of Jesus Christ. For this we should give Him thanks.