From the Days of Eternity

Seven centuries before the angels sang over the shepherds’ fields, a prophet named the town. Not Jerusalem, the royal city, but a village so small it was hardly counted among the clans of Judah: Bethlehem. When the wise men came asking where the King of the Jews should be born, the scribes did not hesitate. They turned to Micah (Matthew 2:5–6). Even the crowds knew it: “Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh … out of the town of Bethlehem” (John 7:42)?

But the same verse that names the Messiah’s birthplace says something more, something about who He was before He was ever born. And that second half is now routinely used to prove the opposite of what it says. Its closing words, “from everlasting,” are taken to mean that the Son never had a beginning, and therefore that His Sonship cannot be real. A Son without origin is a Son in name only. This study reads the verse slowly, word by word, and lets Scripture explain its own phrase. What comes out is one of the most beautiful testimonies in the Old Testament to the true Son of God.

The verse

But thou, Beth-lehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.

Look at the bottom of that page in an older King James Bible and you will find the translators’ own note on the last word. Beside “everlasting” they wrote: “Heb. the days of eternity.” The Hebrew is not one word but two, and the first of them, days, dropped out of the English text. Restore it, and the verse reads as the translators knew it read:

Young’s Literal Translation, which tries to keep the Hebrew word order, renders it: “And his comings forth [are] of old, From the days of antiquity.” Two phrases decide everything: goings forth, and the days of eternity. We will take them in the order Micah wrote them.

Two comings forth

Before we reach the hard words, notice something the English hides. Micah uses the same Hebrew root twice in one breath. “Out of thee shall he come forth” is the verb yatsa, to go out. “Whose goings forth” is motsaah, a noun built from that very root. The prophet sets two comings-forth side by side:

The verse is guarding the reader against a mistake. Do not think, it says, that the existence of this Ruler begins in Bethlehem. The One Who comes out of Bethlehem had already come forth once before. The manger was not His first coming forth. It was His second.

“Goings forth”: an origin

What kind of word is motsaah? The lexicons are plain about it:

A going-out-from. A source. A family descent. This is the vocabulary of origin, the language you use when you ask where someone comes from and whose son he is. Young’s rendering, “his comings forth,” keeps the same sense. Micah is not describing a timeless state with no source. He is describing the Son’s origin, a coming out from Someone, and he tells us when it took place.

“The days of eternity”

Now the phrase everything hangs on. Does “from the days of eternity” mean no beginning at all, or a point so far back it is lost from human sight? Take the two words one at a time.

Honesty matters here, because olam is a real and solemn word. Elsewhere it can mean for ever. But its root meaning is the vanishing point: time so remote it passes out of sight, past or future, and the context must tell us which and how far. When it is joined to days, it describes a stretch of time. The question is not what olam could mean in the abstract. It is what the phrase the days of olam means when the Bible uses it. And on that, Scripture leaves no doubt.

How Scripture uses the phrase

The same two Hebrew words appear seven times in the Old Testament. Here is every one of them:

In every other place, the King James translators themselves rendered the phrase “the days of old.” And in every one of them it names a real time in the past: the generations of Israel, the wilderness, the days of Moses, the kingdom of David, the offerings of former years. Not once does it mean a time with no beginning.

The strongest witness is Micah himself. Only two chapters later he uses the identical phrase, and there no one could mistake it:

Feed thy people with thy rod, the flock of thine heritage, which dwell solitarily in the wood, in the midst of Carmel: let them feed in Bashan and Gilead, as in the days of old.

Micah is asking God to shepherd His people again as He once did, long ago. The prophet knew exactly what his own phrase meant. When he wrote that the Messiah’s goings forth were “from the days of eternity,” he was not saying that the Son had no origin. He was saying that the Son’s origin lies so far back, before anything was made, that it passes out of human sight. That is the vanishing point of olam: not the absence of a beginning, but a beginning beyond our reckoning.

Before the hills

Scripture does have language for a Being with no beginning at all, and it is worth setting beside Micah. Moses wrote of God:

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

The mountains were brought forth, but God simply is, from everlasting to everlasting. Now turn to Proverbs 8, where Wisdom speaks in the first person. The New Testament names Christ “the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and read in that light, this is the Son describing His own origin. Hear how differently He speaks:

When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth.

The word is chûwl (H2342), the word Scripture uses for travail and childbirth. Before the mountains, the Father is. Before the hills, the Son was brought forth. Both stand before all creation. But the Father is the One without beginning, and the Son is the One Who came forth from Him. That is precisely what Micah’s goings forth … from the days of eternity says in other words. The very next line in Proverbs shows what followed: “Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight” (Proverbs 8:30). A Son, at His Father’s side, before the world began.

Two births, both real

So Micah 5:2 holds two births of the Son, not one. His birth from the Father in the days of eternity, and His birth from Mary in Bethlehem. Neither is a figure of speech. The second is no more real than the first, and the first is the reason for the second.

Paul read Micah exactly this way. He did not say that God made a Son at Bethlehem. He said that God sent the Son He already had:

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.

The order is unmistakable. First his Son, then made of a woman. You cannot send a son who does not yet exist. That is why the angel could say that the child of Mary would be “called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35): the One being born was already God’s Son, now taking our flesh. (The Scriptures also speak of a third begetting, His resurrection, when the Father brought Him again from the dead as “the first begotten of the dead”; Acts 13:33; Revelation 1:5. In each of the three, the Father is the source of the Son’s life.)

In His own words

Did Jesus Himself teach that He came forth from God before He came into the world? Again and again. The sharpest moment came when His enemies attacked His birth. “We be not born of fornication,” they said, a slur against the circumstances of His conception, “we have one Father, even God” (John 8:41). Jesus answered by pointing past Mary altogether, to His true origin:

Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.

Proceeded forth is exérchomai (G1831), from ek, “out of,” and érchomai, “to come”: to come out of, to issue. It is the Greek counterpart of Micah’s motsaah. And notice the two steps, exactly as in Micah: I proceeded forth and came from God, and then, he sent me. First the coming forth, then the sending. He said it repeatedly:

It is no accident that these sayings cluster in John’s Gospel. John told us why he wrote it: “that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31). The Gospel written to prove that Jesus is the Son of God is the Gospel in which He says, over and over, that He came out from the Father.

The divine inheritance

Here we must be clear, because the point is easily twisted. To say the Son came forth from the Father is not to say He was created. A creature is made from nothing into a nature unlike its Maker’s. A son comes out of his father and shares his father’s nature. Christ is not a creature brought forth from nothing, an angel, or a lesser being. He is the Son, and everything He is, He has from His Father:

For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.

The Son has life in himself: the same self-existent, divine life the Father has. But He does not have it independently, as if He too were without origin. He has it because the Father gave it to Him. When? When He came forth from the Father in the days of eternity. “I live by the Father,” He said (John 6:57). This is the divine inheritance, and it is the very ground of His divinity. He is “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), and “by inheritance” He has obtained a name more excellent than the angels (Hebrews 1:4). That is why the Father commands, “let all the angels of God worship him” (Hebrews 1:6), and why He alone, besides the Father, is worthy of that worship.

And because He came forth before anything was made, everything that was made was made through Him. God “made the worlds” by His Son (Hebrews 1:2). “All things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things” (Colossians 1:16–17). The days of eternity come first; then, by the Son, creation.

Why it matters

Why does this one phrase deserve so much care? Because the creeds of later centuries made the Son co-eternal with the Father, without any origin from Him, and then had to explain His Sonship as an eternal relation that never actually began. Read that way, “from everlasting” becomes a proof that the Son was never truly begotten, and the word Son is left as a title with nothing behind it. But Micah, read in his own words, says the reverse. The Son had goings forth, a coming out from a source, and they took place in the days of old, before the hills.

Everything the gospel promises rests on that. If there is no real Son, there is no real gift:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

A Father who gives a title gives nothing. A Father who gives His own Son, the One Who came forth from Him before the world was, the One He loved “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24), gives what is most His own. “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). That is the love Micah’s little verse quietly contains. The Ruler born in Bethlehem was the Son Who had already come forth from His Father, from the days of eternity, and Who was sent, at the fulness of the time, to be born for us.

A note on what is being critiqued

Further reading

The Son’s origin, divinity, and Sonship, from the rest of the institute’s studies. For quick answers to the common objections, see the Answering Common Heresies Cheat Sheet.