Christians believe that God is eternal—He had no beginning and will have no end. Scripture also describes God as knowing what has happened, what is happening, and what is yet to come.
But what does that actually mean? Does God experience time the way we do, moving from one moment to the next?
How does God’s relationship with time affect the way you think about His knowledge of our lives and our future?
I’m unable to provide a coherent answer. But I’ll do my best;
Im of the belief that there is a Creator. One Creator of all that exists.
In other words all that is material and immaterial. I think, time is material.
Or it’s as material as gravity. Neither of which we can observe. Other then by it’s effects.
Or it’s math.
I do believe time is a creation. Of The Creator.
This is a stumper of a question. I can understand the challenge to unbelievers - it’s a challenge to believers as well.
Here’s the problem.
If we suppose that God’s existence tracks backwards on a timed track, what in the world prompted God to suddenly create the world, come to the earth, die on a cross, etc. etc. it just seems that if it’s important to God to begin His creative and expositional flow chart, why didn’t He do it billions and billions of years ago?
Well, weirdly, if asking that question, an honest answer might be, “how would we know that He didn’t?” Right, we wouldn’t. And, it doesn’t seem rational or feasible that God would exist through an infinite set of moments of time, each one following the previous one, before He suddenly began to create the world.
Time can be reduced to a measure of change. If the sun is moving, time is passing. If molecules are spinning, or thoughts are occurring - time is passing. So for God to exist timelessly, the entailment is that God is utterly changeless in that existence. God accesses His every thought continuously, and takes no actions, because if He acted, necessarily, time is passing. There is a before and after He acted. Any more than that, we don’t know.
Dr W. L. Craig wrote “Time and Eternity, God’s Relationship to Time”. It’s an area of specific interest that he has done a lot of work on. His view is that God existed timelessly in the absence of creation, (we can’t say “before” time existed since “before” describes a timed relationship and time didn’t exist - one of those ironical dilemmas), but then in the creation event and after, God voluntarily entered into a temporal state of affairs.
A phrase like “God exists outside of time” seems, therefore, like it could be not precisely accurate. So there are a lot of theories out there about God and time.
Classic Christian Theism maintains that God is atemporal, not bound to time. To put it another way, we often talk about God’s omnipresence, God is everywhere, simultaneously, all at once. In the same way, then, that God is every-where, God is also every-when.
I think the unintelligibility of that is what prompted the question. What does that mean, God is every-when?
You would probably agree that God is not “every-who”, or God is not “every-what” .
Time is a fundamental property of God’s created context, both natural and supernatural. Its passage gives opportunity for any action. He is pleased to dwell within it, as it also gives opportunity for any interaction, including relationships.
Whether it’s a day or a thousand years, it’s still time. It is God’s will that we exist in relationship with Him for eternity, which entails that time is unending.
I tend toward the idea that time’s ontology is unique, but I’m not a physicist. It only exists when change exists. It seems to me that actions go at their pace, ungoverned by any temporal constraint or force. So time would simply be the measurement of the frequency of actions, and it comes into existence upon God’s creation of things that undergo any change. Like the spin rate of an electron, or some such thing as that.
Friends/
First, let me say I certainly do not believe I have “The answer”, (or any answer) as it relates to ellenvera’s provocation, “What does it mean that God is outside of time?” I have read some interesting, and some fantastic ideas that attempt to shed some light on this question, so allow me to cast my own ideas into the plasmatic soup.
Moses relates what The Lord told him about initializing “creation” with the well-known phrase, “Let there be light”. Moses must have had a fairly rudimentary understanding of light, and probably could never entertain any idea of what we now know to be an electromagnetic spectrum. Modern scientific study has moved the concepts of the existence of subatomic particles like quarks and leptons into the fact category. At the quantum level, subatomic “particles” have no mass, and appear to be “light”. So, even though Moses couldn’t imagine all of time, space, and matter are actually expressions of “light”, modern science now assures us they are. Time, as our friend has pointed out, is an expression of movement of matter (think E = mc²) measured in the speed of light. So, “let there be light” is the most accurate way to express the creation of both time and matter, or the four dimensions in which we were placed. We, and everything around us is “light” at it’s basis.
Four dimensions are our human frame of reference, everything we experience in the natural world has height, depth, width, and duration. We have never experienced anything outside of these 4 dimensions, in the natural world, so we “naturally” project the confines of our natural world onto the supernatural realm. This projection compels us to say things like “God existed before time”, which, as our friend pointed out, is a logical impossibility.
I suspect, (am quite sure of) the supernatural realm is not confined to four dimensions, even though the four dimensions we are familiar with fit quite nicely within the multidimensional spiritual realm. That is, our four dimensions, including time, are a subset of the complete spiritual realm; a “slowness” to the unimaginable velocity of spirit (if “spirtual velocity” is even close to reality, we don’t know). The confines of “speed”, “size”, and “change” are a comfortable home for creatures designed to thrive in that environment (us). I suspect we will never not experience them, I suspect we will always enjoy the goodness of a world in which we were designed to be a part of. To us, 4D “light” has a physical light-source, but in The Celestial City, there is no temple (local dwelling for God)…
“for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb ARE its temple. The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb IS its light. And the nations of those who are saved shall walk in its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it.
(Revelation 21:22-24).
The source of all reation is The Eternal Light. Like an artist’s painting may depict on a 2D canvas some 3D reality, creation itself, complete with with its solar light, is a beautiful art piece, depicting a multi-dimensional reality in a 4D image. Time, as we know it, is a component of God’s art.
Perhaps we are hanging in some museum in the spiritual realm.
Much love
KP
I will give it a shot. People assume time is a strict progression of cause and effect, but from a non‑linear, non‑subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly‑wobbly… timey‑wimey… stuff. Just kidding.
Think about it like this. God authored a play. He wrote the beginning, middle, and end. He is in the play. No. He is outside the play, with the ability to change something, add something, subtract, etc. He is in the beginning, middle, and end at all times because He created it. Do we know what is next? No. We are forced to follow along with the way God laid it out.
Now that I wrote that out, it sounded better in my head.
Sorry, be blessed.
Peter
I like to think of God and his relationship to time like this:
At the very beginning of time, the big bang, God places every atom, putting them into motion, etc. From their motion and other properties God is effortlessly calculating our evolution, and our being here, knowing every question and every thought we ever have since the beginning of time, and yet he is also present at the same time, he is boundless, existing eternally (The spiritual world probably isn’t confined to our laws of physics)
We unironically tend to place limits on God without realizing it when trying to tie him to something like time, we tend to think in our own dimension, which is why this never seems to make any sense to us. We literally cannot comprehend God.
And I think we should stop trying to.
Very solid way of looking at it
I don’t know that any of us can truly understand it because we are born into time and live in time and are governed by time. God created time and His creation is not who He is but what He has done.
Someone shared an analogy with me that helps. Suppose you are in a room of a very tall building, looking out the window. A parade is going by and from your great height, you can see the parade that’s passed, the parade that’s to come and the parade that’s in front. Those on the street see mostly what is right in front of them and perhaps just a little of what’s gone and what’s to come, but you can see far more of the parade. Think of it like that.
Another thought is that we can go forward in time, but we can’t go back. And we can look back, but we can’t look forward. God doesn’t have that limitation. He can both look forward and go back.