How Old Is God? Psalm 90 and the Eternal God
Short answer: God has no age. Asking how old God is assumes He began to exist at some point and has been accumulating years ever since, but Scripture never presents Him that way. In Psalm 90:1-2, Moses writes, "Lord, you have been our dwelling place for all generations," and immediately adds that before the mountains were brought forth, from everlasting to everlasting, God is. That is not a very large number of years; it is a different category altogether. Other passages say the same: 1 Timothy 1:17 calls Him the King eternal, and Revelation 1:8 records God saying, "I am the Alpha and the Omega." God is the one who is and who was and who is to come, which means time runs through His hands rather than He through time.
Why the question is worth asking carefully
People often ask how old God is because they are trying to fit Him into a category they already understand. We know how old our parents are, how old the earth is estimated to be, how old the universe is. So we naturally assume that if God exists, He must have a birthday too, just a very distant one. The question sounds innocent, even devotional, but it smuggles in an assumption the Bible never grants. It assumes God is a creature inside time rather than the Creator of time.
Moses prays in Psalm 90 from a particular vantage point: he is a man who has watched a whole generation die in the wilderness. He knows what it is to count years. That makes his opening words striking. "Lord, you have been our dwelling place for all generations" (Psalm 90:1). He does not say God has been our dwelling place for a very long time. He says for all generations, which is a way of placing God above the sequence of generations rather than somewhere inside it.
If we simply answer that God is billions of years old, or trillions, we have not really answered the question. We have made God into the oldest thing in the universe instead of the one who made the universe. That is a pastoral problem as much as a theological one, because a merely ancient God is still a God we must reach across an enormous distance. The God of Psalm 90 is not distant; He is a dwelling place, which is language of nearness and safety.
So the question is worth asking, but it needs to be answered by redefining terms rather than supplying a number. When we ask how old someone is, we usually mean how long they have existed. The moment we ask that of God, we are treating His existence as something measured by a clock that runs independently of Him. Scripture instead presents God as the one whose existence grounds the clock. He is not older than time; He is the maker of it.
Moses contrasts God's eternity with human frailty
Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses, and its whole structure depends on a contrast. God is a dwelling place for all generations, while human beings are like grass that sprouts in the morning and withers by evening. Moses does not say this to be gloomy; he says it because it is true, and because only when we feel the weight of our own shortness do we begin to see how different God's life is from ours. The psalm earns its comfort by first telling the truth about us.
This is why verse 2 matters so much for the topic. Before the mountains were brought forth, before the earth and the world were formed, God was already God. Psalm 102:25-27 echoes this: "Of old, you laid the foundation of the earth. The heavens are the work of your hands." Those verses put the heavens and the earth in the category of things made, which means they had a beginning. God did not. The maker is not the same as the made thing.
Notice also the shape of the comfort. Moses does not say, God is so old that our problems are small to Him. He says God is our dwelling place. The eternity of God is meant to function in prayer as a shelter, not as a spectacle. When your life is a brief passing shadow, where do you hide? You hide in the one whose years never end. That is the pastoral logic of the psalm, and it is the logic that makes the doctrine of God's eternity usable on an ordinary Tuesday.
This contrast also protects us from a common mistake. If we think of God as simply a very old man who has seen a lot, we will relate to Him as a distant veteran. If we think of Him as the eternal one who is also our dwelling place, we will relate to Him as a home. The psalm is not an abstract meditation on time. It is a prayer, and it teaches us to pray to the God whose life is not measured by our calendars but whose arms hold us across every generation.
The Bible's word for this is eternal, not ancient
Scripture uses a specific word for God's relationship to time, and it is not old. It is eternal. First Timothy 1:17 says, as 1 Timothy 1:17 says, "Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen." Each of those words is deliberate. Eternal means without beginning or end. Immortal means not subject to death or decay. Invisible means not available to the senses as an object among objects. Together they describe a being who is not simply long-lived but of a different order.
Isaiah 40:28 makes the same point in a different register. The prophet asks, as Isaiah 40:28 says, "Haven't you known? Haven't you heard? The everlasting God, Yahweh, the Creator of the ends of the earth, doesn't faint. He isn't weary. His understanding is unsearchable." The everlasting God is set over against weary people. We tire because we are creatures running on finite resources. He does not tire because His life is not drawn from a supply that can be exhausted.
That is why the word ancient is misleading when applied to God. An ancient thing is still a thing, still located somewhere along a timeline, still older than some things and younger than none, but still within time. God's eternity is not length of days. It is the absence of the category of days as a measure of His being. He does not have more time than us; He stands outside the whole business of time as its author.
Deuteronomy 33:27 puts it beautifully: "The eternal God is your dwelling place. Underneath are the everlasting arms." Notice how the two images work together. He is a dwelling place, and He has arms. The eternal one is not a cold abstraction. He holds His people up. Moses, the same man who wrote Psalm 90, uses the same dwelling-place language here, which shows how deeply this picture of God shaped Israel's faith and should shape ours.
He is the Alpha and the Omega
Revelation 1:8 gives us God's own self-description: "I am the Alpha and the Omega," says the Lord God, as Revelation 1:8 says, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty." Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. The point is not that God is very old or very well established, but that He is the beginning and the end, the one who encompasses the whole story of which we see only a sliver.
This is where the question how old is God quietly collapses. Age requires a before and an after. It requires that something came before you and something will come after you, and that you are located at a particular point between them. But if God is the Alpha and the Omega, there is no before and no after for Him in that sense. Everything before and after is held by Him. He is not on the line; He is the one who draws it.
This should make us humble and glad at the same time. Humble, because we cannot get our minds around it, and God is not obligated to fit into our categories. Glad, because the God who cannot be contained is also the God who says He is the Almighty, which means His eternity is not weakness or indifference but power dedicated to His people. The eternal one is not a security risk. He is the safest thing there is.
What God's eternity does not mean
It is easy to take a true doctrine and draw a wrong conclusion from it. Because God is eternal and we are not, some conclude that God is remote, unfeeling, or unconcerned with the small scale of our lives. That is the opposite of what Scripture says. Psalm 90 does not use God's eternity to push people away. It uses it to give them a place to live: Psalm 90:1-4 says, "Lord, you have been our dwelling place for all generations."
Others conclude that if God is outside time, then prayer, history, and human decisions do not matter. But the Bible holds both together without embarrassment. God is eternal, and He acts in history. He hears prayer. He enters covenants. He sends His Son in the fullness of time. His eternity does not cancel His involvement; it is precisely what makes His involvement reliable. A God who changed with the times would be no shelter at all.
Still others assume that God's timelessness means He does not truly know what it is to wait, to suffer, to grieve. But we must let Scripture speak. God is not a creature, and yet He is not absent. He knows our frame. He is not surprised by our frailty. The very psalm that exalts His eternity ends by asking Him to establish the work of our hands, which assumes He cares about our days. Honest Christians have debated exactly how to describe God's relationship to time, and we should not pretend the debate does not exist. What is clear is that He is eternal and He is near.
The practical result is this: the doctrine of God's eternity is not given to us to satisfy curiosity but to steady us. When your life feels like a brief shadow, the answer is not to calculate God's age. The answer is to take refuge in the one whose years have no end and whose arms are underneath you. That is what Moses did, and it is what we are invited to do.
What this means for how you live today
Psalm 90 ends with a request that fits its opening. Moses asks God to teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom. The eternity of God is meant to make us honest about our brevity, not to make us endlessly curious about His duration. If we truly believe God has no beginning and no end while our days are numbered, we will stop wasting them on things that do not last.
It also reshapes how we face death. If God is the everlasting God and our dwelling place, then death is not the end of our story any more than it was the end of His faithfulness. The generations come and go, but the dwelling place remains. That is why the psalm can speak of God's compassion and steadfast love in the same breath as His eternity. He is not a landlord who will evict us when the lease runs out. He is a home.
And it reshapes our worship. First Timothy 1:17 ends in doxology, not speculation: "be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen." The right response to an eternal God is not a spreadsheet of years but praise. When we gather with God's people and sing, we are doing what Moses did, and what every generation before us has done, taking refuge in the one who was there before the mountains and will be there after they are gone.
So the next time someone asks how old God is, the kindest answer may be to gently correct the question. He is not old; He is eternal. He has not been around for a long time; He is the one who is and who was and who is to come. And the best part is not the size of His age but the nearness of His presence. He is our dwelling place for all generations, which means there is room in Him for you.
Biblical fidelity check
What these passages establish is that God is eternal, without beginning or end, and that this eternity is never presented in Scripture as a mere number. Psalm 90:1-2 places God before the mountains and above the generations. First Timothy 1:17 calls Him the King eternal. Revelation 1:8 gives Him the title Alpha and Omega. Deuteronomy 33:27 calls Him the eternal God and, at the same time, the dwelling place of His people. The consistent witness is that God's life is not measured by time as ours is.
What these passages do not establish is a precise philosophical account of how God relates to time, and they do not give us an age. A common misreading is to treat God as simply the oldest being in the universe, a very ancient creature whose birthday is just further back than everything else's. That is wrong because it keeps God inside the very category of measured time that these texts place Him above. Another misreading treats God's eternity as cold remoteness, as if being beyond time meant being beyond care. Psalm 90 answers that by calling Him a dwelling place. Faithful Christians have differed over how to describe God's relation to time in technical terms, and we can hold the clear teaching without pretending the details are simple.
Other passages that speak to Psalm 90:1-4
The themes of God's eternity and His faithful care run through the whole New Testament as well. Paul's testimony about God's mercy to sinners shows the same confidence in a God who acts in time to save: What Does 1 Timothy 1:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The opening of that same letter grounds grace, mercy, and sound doctrine in the God who is eternal: 1 Timothy 1: Grace, Mercy, and Sound Doctrine. Paul goes on to describe how God's household is ordered under this same God: 1 Timothy 3: Overseers and Servants in God's House. And he calls believers to guard the faith once delivered to a generation that will not last forever: 1 Timothy 4: Guarding Faith and Godliness.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Bible say how old God is?
No. Scripture never assigns God an age, because age implies a beginning, and the Bible presents God as having no beginning. Psalm 90:2 places Him before the mountains were brought forth. First Timothy 1:17 calls Him the King eternal. Revelation 1:8 records Him saying, "I am the Alpha and the Omega." The Bible gives us the category of eternity, not a number of years. Asking how old God is is a bit like asking what color the number seven is; the question does not fit the subject.
Is God older than the universe?
God is not older than the universe in the way one thing is older than another, because older assumes both things are measured by the same clock. Scripture says God made the heavens and the earth, and that He existed before they were formed. So in one sense, yes, He precedes everything. But it is more accurate to say He is the Creator of time rather than the oldest inhabitant of it. He is not inside the timeline looking back; He is the one who made the timeline.
If God is eternal, does He still care about my short life?
Yes, and Psalm 90 is written to persuade you of exactly that. The same prayer that calls God eternal also calls Him our dwelling place for all generations, and it ends by asking Him to establish the work of our hands. Deuteronomy 33:27 says, "The eternal God is your dwelling place. Underneath are the everlasting arms." Far from making God distant, His eternity makes Him a reliable refuge. He is not too big to notice your days; He is big enough to hold them all.
