My Time and God's Time

Today I begin what shall grow into a short series of entries related to our conception of time and heaven.  To lay before you the question up for consideration today, I ask, “Is God outside of time?”  To this question may be added those which necessarily arise from it and color it.  Did God create time?  What is God’s relationship to time?  Would not time, if God exist within it, thus become a constraining or limiting influence on God and wrest His sovereignty and omnipotence from Him?  I do suggest that the solution to these questions may be quite simple, and yet perhaps outside the scope of thinking to which we are currently accustomed.

My thesis shall be that God is indeed not outside of time, nor within it, but that God is Himself of such a nature that He may be said to be time.  How can this be?  Permit me the time to expound upon this assertion.  First, let it be said that God is identified to be those things which so characterize and proceed from Him that they are inherent to His Person.  As examples I refer you to those passages in Scripture which state that God is love (I John 4:8), just (Deut. 32:4), holy (Lev. 11:44), etc.  There is another attribute of God which is so simple and essential that it can be overlooked or under-estimated, that is the attribute which God Himself chose to represent Him before Pharaoh in Egypt.  God is the I Am.  God is.  He exists, He has always existed, and He always will.

Does this not mean that He is outside of time then?  No!  Much to the contrary, in my opinion, God is the existence by which all other existing things are measured and compared.  It is against His eternal progression of existing that we have our context (i.e. our concept of time) for existence.  God is time, and all other existing things are given the grace to co-exist for the amount of “time” and in the manner which He deems best.  Allow me to illustrate this.

The passage of every student through high school involves taking a class called World History.  It is the study of what has happened, in chronological order, upon this planet for the duration of recorded history.  The study is divided up evenly into basic units of measurement – the year and the day primarily – which can be used to define the existence and length of each significant event discussed.  The revolution of the earth around the sun, and of the earth about its axis, then, is the standard from which we extract the idea of “time” and apply it to the happenings of our lives.  It is at this point that some theologians interject, “Aha!  There it is as plain as can be.  The movement of the earth defines time, and the earth is created, therefore at the creation of the universe and the setting of it in motion was time born.”  This is a conclusion that occurs too soon.  Trace your thoughts further along the line and a different conclusion begins to take shape.  Our lives are defined chronologically by the movements of the earth, but what about the earth?  It has its definition of existence defined by the creation of the universe and its sustaining forces.  And what of the universe?  It has its existence defined by that which created it and sustains it – namely, God.  Just as our love is an echo of that attribute which exists truest and first in God, so the progression of our existence (what we call time) is an echo that issues from, is governed by, and finds its substance in the progression of God’s existence.

God, then, is time.  His existence is linear in the sense that His existence was, and is, and will be.  God undertakes tasks which occur, are completed, have consequences, and lead to further action.  Consider the story of Christ.  Christ, according to Scripture, was born at the fullness of time (Gal. 4:4).  His life was lived out until His crucifixion and resurrection were complete, at which time He returned to the Father having finished (John 19:30) what He came to do.  This interjection of God into the affairs of man is a tremendous burden to any theories placing God outside of time.  The theory which states that God is completely separate from “time” poses the question, how, then does He exist with a progression of purposes which are accomplished.  Do the angels and other heavenly beings also exist separate from time?  How then did they come to conspire, fall, and be judged?  The theory which supposed God to exist at all times equally (a time version of omnipresence) creates the horrid prospect that for eternity Christ hangs on the cross as truly as He reigns in heaven.

To conclude this lengthy meandering of thought, a few last words are appropriate.  This is a theory, and as such is not doctrine.  This is a supposition made more from logic than any other source.  Those who disagree are not to be labeled as heretics or simpletons, and I welcome any thoughtful rebuttal to this essay.  I do believe, however, that God is not diminished or limited in any way by saying that He is not outside of time, because I believe His control and authority over all things is affirmed by the notion that the progression of God’s existence is the essence of what we call time.  Perhaps there is more to be said, but I shall leave that up to my patient readers in their comments, for I am out of time.