God and TIME

I believe God can work with time but is not bound by it. I think that he lives outside of time in a way we can not picture in our minds because it is out of our experiance.

The best I have heard it put is that we see things in progresion like a slide show one thing after another. God sees things like a picture, all at once. In other words God sees our birth, life death all at once in one picture. Where we have to wait untill tommorow to see what happens, God sees yesterdays, today and the tommorrows all together.

The idea of eternity destroys time. If there is no begining and no end there can be no time. No one day added to the next, it just is all at once. This is my understanding. Or at least the way I try to wrap my mind around the concept that I hope to one day understand, when my Lord explains it to me.

 

Jarthur, I just posted on this in our other thread. I think it can be said that God is outside of time and he is capable of seeing everything at once, but that he is also capable of seeing the events of history as a succession of moments. I think he sees both perspectives perfectly. I think it is clear that God acts and works within time, and that he is not static.

Ultimately, we cannot know fully how God relates to time, because our experience and being is finite and His is infinite.

 

Time is part of God's creation. Time was made for created beings. Creation is bound by time. God is Creator and not created.... therefore not bound by time. IMHO, it is as if He inhaled and thought, exhaled and it came to be. That of course is using the word (thought) as an anthropomorphic expression... I'm not so sure God reasons the way we think He does.... does He have to reason? Is He just perfection that requires no reasoning?

 

Omnipresence
OMNIPRES'ENCE, n. s as z. [L. omnis, and presens, present.]

Presence in every place at the same time; unbounded or universal presence; ubiquity (Existence in all places or every where at the same time) . Omnipresence is an attribute peculiar to God.

You can't use the argument that Andy uses "God is outside of time and he is capable of seeing everything at once, but that he is also capable of seeing the events of history as a succession of moments." If anything, you calvinists sound more arminian by the day

Being able to "see" everything does not solve the problem of God's omnipresence. This argument implies that God is in a stationary place in time...the present...and is able to "see" everything. This is binding God, again, to our time.

 

Webdog, it sounds like you have the Lord our God all figured out and how He relates to time. Congrats, because I haven't.

 

I don't either. I will not fit His omnipresence into my theological box to make it work, either.

I don't think I have read what your views of God's omnipresence are. Were you present yesterday in front of the computer...and present now in front of the computer? How can you exclude omnitemporalness from omnipresence?

 

God is everlasting to everlasting and is not bound by time. He does see all and is everywhere. He sees the elder serve the younger, why because He is there. He sees our death and we have wondered why God said He Glorified us? Well, God sees the end also and sees us Glorified. He is an all wise God. No wonder the Scripture says "who hath known the mind of God and who hath been His counselor? I have come to understand more about the Omnipresence of God through our discussions and I for one am glad we have had them.

 

Who's trying to fit into their theological box?

God is omnipresent - meaning He is present everywhere that ontologically exists. Now the past and future do not exist to you and I in the same way the present exists. The past and future certainly exist to God, but in what way? In the same way that the present exists? Is there another dimension called "future"? This is where I just shrug my shoulders and say, "I dunno."

But in all this, I can say three things about God that I believe are true and Biblical:

1. That He acts and works within time.
2. That He is not static, or inactive.
3. That He is not bound by His eternal nowness (whatever that may be; again, I shrug) in that He is unable to act or work within time.

So considering the above, where do we disagree on this issue?

 

"Foreknew" is referring to "relationship", not to "information". God did not "look forward" in time and learn something new (i.e. who would believe) and then "elect" them based on this new (to God) information.

peace to youraying:

 

I agree with you God didn't look forward in time. He was forward in time and just looked and saw who believed. He has no time. peace

 

You have just excluded "omni" with "that ontologically exists".

Agreed...as well as outside of it.

Agreed.

I never said He was unable to work within time. He does, as well as outside of it. You don't agree that God is omnitemporal, that's where we disagree.

 

"Eternal", which is only fount twice in the NT in the Greek, means without beginning or end or existing outside of time. If you picture someone holding a string, with a bead on it, the person holding it can view it at any point on the string; but if someone were on that bead, then they could only view it from the point of the bead. That's a rough analogy, but that's one way that I can picture existing outside of time.

 

Time is an element of creation. God created time. Time has it's existence in God. God encompasses time in the same way that he encompasses creation. God's thought and God's command is the source of every moment in time in the same way that God's thought and God's command is the source of every molecule in creation.

God doesn't take in info about event or actions that will occur in time. To do that, he would have to be limited to existing outside of time so that time would be a separate thing from God. Of course, he knows event and action that occurs in time, but he knows them not simply because he foresees them, but because he is the source of their existence.

 

When you quoted me, you left out some crucial stuff, like this:

"Now the past and future do not exist to you and I in the same way the present exists. The past and future certainly exist to God, but in what way? In the same way that the present exists? Is there another dimension called "future"? This is where I just shrug my shoulders and say, "I dunno.""

So I don't necessarily deny that God is omnitemporal. It's just that I do not know in what way the past and future "exist" to God. That's the part where I just shrug my shoulders.

 

I believe God works in time but that He is not a part of time nor subject to it.

 

I'm not sure there is so much an order here, as far as God concerns, regarding time. The text simply states those He foreknew were also called, justified and glorified. To us, God will someday glorify us, but your post, again, confines God to our present...within our time. I will not put that restriction on God.

 

He is the Ancient of Days.

(answers the "enigma")


All He foreknew are not in His will.

( address that, from the ENTIRE Bible)

Foreknowledge concerns Israel.

Learn something.raying:

 

Good Luck

JArthur:

I think you're leading this thread to where I headed a few years ago when I discovered John Feinberg's book "No One Like Him" (this book along with Vanhoozer's writings led me to Trinity). His case for God's sempiternity convinced me, and such thoughts were bolstered when I had a course with Keith Yandell on theism (trust me I'm not trying to namedrop, but those are two authors I like-even though one's a Calvinist and the other an Arminian they get along just fine).

I've gotten into threads on God and time before on this board and am usually the only one who supports this view. I wish you good luck convincing others because I have always failed in the past. I have feeling you may be better at it than me though. :thumbsup:

BJ