“Let us a little also fix our minds towards some of the glorious, essential, incommunicable properties of God’s nature distinctly.
Consider His eternity. This Moses proposeth, to bring the souls of believers to submission, trust, and waiting: Ps. 90:1, “From everlasting to everlasting thou art God;”—“One that hath his being and subsistence not in a duration of time, but in eternity itself.”
So doth Habakkuk 1:12, “Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One?” and hence he draws his conclusion against making haste in any condition, and for tarrying and waiting for God.
The like consideration is managed by David also, Ps. 102:27.
How inconceivable is this glorious divine property unto the thoughts and minds of men! How weak are the ways and terms whereby they go about to express it!
One says it is a “perpetual duration.” He that says most, only signifies what he knows of what it is not.
We are of yesterday, change every moment, and are leaving our station tomorrow.
God is still the same, was so before the world was,—from eternity.
And now I cannot think what I have said, but only have intimated what I adore.
The whole duration of the world, from the beginning unto the end, takes up no space in this eternity of God: for how longsoever it hath continued or may yet continue, it will all amount but to so many thousand years, so long a time.
And time hath no place in eternity.”
–John Owen, “A Practical Exposition of Psalm 130,” The Works of John Owen, Volume 6 (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1684/2000), 6: 622.
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