I’d like to try to put God’s relationship with time into a different light by proposing an analogous question: Did God create existence?
If we say that God has always existed, that there never was a point in which God did not exist, then we cannot possibly say that God created existence. Does this mean, then, that existence is a thing that God did not create, equally co-eternal with God, and, therefore, there is something in the universe independent of God’s creation?
Of course not. That’s because existence is not a “thing”, but merely a description of reality. (In the same vein, we could ask if God created reality.) It would be absurd to grapple with the question of whether God is subject to existence or existence is subject to God, because existence is not a force for God to subject or be subject to. When we coin the noun “existence”, we’re not speaking of something that (ironically) has an independent, well, existence.
Similarly, “time” is simply the consecutive nature of existence, the reality that existence is consecutive. Time is not a “thing” for God to have created or not to have created, or a force for God to subject or be subject to. When we coin the noun “time”, it is just like when we coin the noun “existence”.
I know that I could not pray to God if I thought that it would have no effect on Him. According to what you are saying, God is totally stagnant. He doesn’t ever have a new thought. He never decides to do something. Instead, everything is an eternal now. That would mean that He never responds to anything we ask in prayer. God never changes His mind. God doesn’t repent, or relent as determinists prefer, of anything even though the Bible says He does about 30 times. Because He has no emotion, He would never get angry over sin and He certainly wouldn’t say in Jer 15:6: “You have forsaken Me,” says the LORD, “You have gone backward. Therefore I will stretch out My hand against you and destroy you; I am weary of relenting!” (NKJV)
Moses tells us about a number of situations where Israel rebelled against God. God’s word tells us about them and his prayers to God for Israel. Each time Moses prayed to an angry God who had told Moses that He was going to destroy Israel. But each time Moses prayed and actually changed God’s stated purpose and rescued Israel. God, as described in these situations did not have any of that all encompassing knowledge which you attribute to Him as though being all outside of time.
I get tired of philosophers telling me that God is accommodating Himself to us by describing in anthropomorphisms experiences that really transcend human ability to understand. Who are these brilliant, god like men that understand so much that they can tell me things about God that are contrary to what He tells me in His word. Was/Is God incapable, but these men are capable to tell me? Are they better than God? Of course not.
There is no way that God would bring His to my understanding by telling me the directly opposite of the truth, and to repeat it time and again, in a these misleading ways.
Where does it say or intimate anywhere in Scripture that God is outside of time? No where.
In Christ,
Bob Hill
