Who created God?

Short answer

No one created God. The Bible teaches that He has no beginning and no end: He is the eternal Creator, and everything else was made by Him. The question assumes God is one of the things that were made, but Scripture places Him on the other side, as the One who made them.

Everything we see has a beginning and a cause: a child has parents, a house has a builder. So it is natural to ask who made God. It is a fair question, and the Bible does answer it, though not by naming a maker. It answers by showing that God is a different kind of being from everything that was made.

God has no beginning

A psalm ascribed to Moses opens with a prayer about God’s eternity.

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
Ps 90:2 · King James Version (1769)

Matthew Henry comments on this psalm that a thousand years are nothing to God, and that between a minute and a million years there is some proportion, but “between time and eternity there is none.” God does not live inside time as we do. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown draw one more conclusion: God was not only there before the mountains, He was their Creator, because things that came into being after Him could not have started themselves.

The Bible begins in the same way. It never argues that God exists or asks where He came from (Genesis 1:1). John MacArthur notes that “in the beginning” marks the start of the universe in time and space, while God Himself exists from eternity, and that Moses takes the existence of God for granted rather than defending it.

There is no god before Him or beside Him

Centuries later God speaks through Isaiah to Israelites who were tempted by the gods of their neighbors.

Thus saith the LORD the King of Israel, and his redeemer the LORD of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.
Isa 44:6 · King James Version (1769)

Albert Barnes explains that “the first and the last” means that God existed before all things and will exist forever. MacArthur adds that the Lord names Himself here as Israel’s King, Redeemer and the eternally existing One, and that Jesus uses the same words of Himself (Revelation 1:17). Right after this verse Isaiah mocks the idols, which are made by human hands (Isaiah 44:9). The contrast is the point: a god that someone made is not God, and the true God is the one nobody made.

Everything that was made was made through Christ

John opens his Gospel with the same words as Genesis and then says who stood at the beginning.

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 · King James Version (1769)

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown observe that here “in the beginning” is lifted from the first moment of time to the time before all time. Since everything created is credited to the Word, He Himself cannot be created. William MacDonald says the same in his own words: Christ was not made, He is the Maker of everything, visible and invisible, and the phrase “without Him nothing was made” allows no exceptions. So when someone asks who created God, the New Testament says that the Son, through whom all things were made, is Himself God.

The last book of the Bible gives the same picture in one sentence.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.
Rev 1:8 · King James Version (1769)

The New Geneva Study Bible explains Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, as God being the Beginner and the Completer of creation, the Lord of past, present and future. He stands before and after everything else.

What this means for us

The Bible does not explain how God can exist without a beginning. It simply declares it, and we cannot fully grasp it. That is not an evasion. If God were a part of the world, He would need an explanation like everything else in it. Because He made the world, He is its starting point and the end of the chain of causes.

This is also good news. Moses begins his psalm by calling God the home of His people in every generation (Psalm 90:1). The God who never began and never ends is the One we can trust with our short lives. If you are asking whether He exists at all, read Does God exist?, and for how the Son and the Father are one God, What is the Trinity?.