What Existed Before Creation? The Bible's View on What Came Before Genesis

Before creation, the Bible says, there was God, and only God. "From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God" (Psalm 90:2). The New Testament adds that the Word, the Son of God, was with God and was God, that the Father and the Son shared glory and love "before the world was," and that God's plan of grace in Christ was already given "before the world began." What Scripture does not give is a history of events before Genesis 1:1.

Genesis Begins With God

The Bible's first sentence does not explain where God came from. It assumes him:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Genesis 1:1–2 (KJV)

Everything else in the verse has a beginning: the heaven, the earth, the deep. God does not. That is the first and most basic thing the Bible says about "before creation."

God Alone Is From Everlasting

Moses' prayer in Psalm 90 says it directly:

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Psalm 90:2 (KJV)

In Revelation, God calls himself "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending… which is, and which was, and which is to come" (Revelation 1:8). He is not the oldest thing in the universe; he is outside it, the one by whom it exists.

People sometimes ask, "Then who made God?" The Bible's answer is that the question applies only to things that begin. God has no beginning; everything else does.

The Word Was There "In the Beginning"

John's Gospel opens by echoing Genesis on purpose:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

John 1:1–3 (KJV)

Genesis says that in the beginning God created. John says that in the beginning the Word already was. The Word, whom John soon identifies as Jesus (John 1:14), was not made with the world; the world was made through him.

Glory and Love Before the World

On the night before his death, Jesus prayed:

And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

John 17:5 (KJV)

A few lines later:

Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.

John 17:24 (KJV)

These two verses give the warmest answer to our question. Before there was anything else, there was not empty silence but love: the Father loving the Son. Christians have long seen this as one reason God created at all. He did not need the world; he made it out of love that was already overflowing.

Some readers also hear this in Proverbs 8, where Wisdom says, "The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way… I was set up from everlasting" (Proverbs 8:22–23). Many Christian writers have read Wisdom there as a picture of Christ, though the passage is first a poem about God's wisdom.

God's Plan Was Already in Place

The New Testament says repeatedly that God's purpose of saving his people was not an afterthought:

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love:

Ephesians 1:4 (KJV)

Paul tells Timothy the same thing: God's "purpose and grace" were "given us in Christ Jesus before the world began" (2 Timothy 1:9). Before the first day of creation, God's plan already included the cross and the people he would call.

What About Angels?

The Bible says angels were created, not eternal:

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

Colossians 1:16–17 (KJV)

It does not say exactly when. One clue comes in God's answer to Job:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Job 38:4–7 (KJV)

Many readers take "the sons of God" here as angels, who were present and rejoicing as the earth was founded. That suggests angels were made before or at the start of creation, but Scripture leaves the details unspoken.

The Gap Theory: A View, Not the Text

Some readers have proposed a long "gap" between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, with an earlier creation that was ruined, often linked to Satan's fall, before God remade the world. This Gap Theory became popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially through the Scofield Reference Bible.

Most Hebrew scholars and theologians today do not accept it. They read Genesis 1:2 as describing the earth's unformed state at the start of God's work, not a ruin after a first world was destroyed. Whatever one thinks of the theory, it is an interpretation; the text itself says nothing about an earlier world.

Was There Time Before Time?

Augustine, writing in the fifth century, argued that time was created along with the world, so there was no "before" in the ordinary sense; God's eternity is not a very long stretch of time but a different kind of life altogether. Hebrews puts the mystery simply: "the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (Hebrews 11:3).

What This Means for Us

The Bible does not satisfy our curiosity about the cosmos before Genesis. It answers a more important question: who was there? The answer is the eternal God, Father, Son and Spirit, living in love, already purposing to make a world and to save a people. Before anything was made, you were already in his plan, "chosen… before the foundation of the world."

For a related question about the angel who rebelled, see why God created Satan if he knew he would rebel.