Posted on 07/09/2021 6:54:30 AM PDT by HarleyD
It’s just going to take some time. Time will heal. Or simply: with time my dear, with time.
Time is powerful. It heals, transforms, renews, dulls, and decays. It raises rulers and silences them. It turns infants into the aged. It chisels the face of mountains and then turns them to dust. And as humans, we are all its subjects. We feel its effects and are subject to its demands.
One of the most tangible tolls of time is the manner in which it weighs upon our relationships. I don’t relate to my parents the way I did when I was in elementary school. In the same way, I won’t be able to relate to my one-year-old daughter the same way I do today in several months from now. Time demands relationships to change—the change being characterized less by goods and bads and more by difference.
Thus, the question needs to be asked: How does God relate to time? In what ways does time affect our relationship to Him?
One of the loftiest and, admittedly, most puzzling doctrines for us as temporal creatures is the timeless and eternal nature of God. We often assume that the eternality of God refers to God’s immortality, but this fringes on over-simplicity. Stephen Charnock defined eternity as “a permanent and immutable state . . . a perfect possession of life without any variation; it comprehends in itself all years, all ages, all periods of ages; it never begins; it endures after every duration of time, and never ceaseth; it doth as much outrun time, as it went before the beginning of it: time supposeth something before it; but there can be nothing before eternity.”
Jonathan Edwards masterfully explains, “The eternity of God’s existence is nothing else but his immediate, perfect, and invariable possession of the whole of his unlimited life, together and at once.” In other words, in respect to time, there is no change in God whatsoever—no growth, no diminishment, not a trace of alteration. He remains untouched by the winds of time. He is without beginning or end, and He has no temporal succession—that is, He doesn’t move through time as we do. The eternality of God is simply the infinitude of God applied to time. By His eternal essence, God is the only being completely unaffected by the passage of time—He gains and loses nothing through the span history.
God even sees time in a unique manner. While the creature understands time sequentially—present slipping into past just as future slips into present—the eternal God views past, present, and future in a single, divine instant. He sees past and future with equal vividness, as if all of time were at once before Him: “For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (Ps. 90:4). In the New Testament, Peter aptly explains, “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8).
GOD’S ACTIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS
We, who are tethered and bound to time in every conceivable manner, are often confused and disoriented by this lofty view of God. God is categorically other in His relationship to time. As a result, many have questioned the ability of an eternal, timeless God to have meaningful relationships with His creatures. If God is timeless, how can He hear, let alone answer, the cries of His time-bound creation?
The concern is that a genuine relationship is nullified between a time-bound creature and a timeless God. But this is simply not true. God acts in time—He is the author of time, is the governor of time, and has relationships with His creatures who are bound by time. The Lord executes His decrees in time. But God does not undergo temporal succession—He does not in Himself experience the passage of time—even though the works of His hands are very much in time and space. The actions and relationships of the Lord are a product of His eternal will—His eternal will exists outside of time, and then it breathes numerous temporal effects into being.
The actions and relationships of the Lord are a product of His eternal will—His eternal will exists outside of time.
Those who claim that God’s relationships are less real because He is atemporal simply do not understand the depth of God’s relationships as an eternal being. As mentioned earlier, human relationships evolve based on the various temporal seasons of earthly life. Your relationships are limited by and subject to change. They grow stronger and weaker in intimacy with the passage of time, distance, and communication. They wane and are complicated by years and moves.
So when we consider God’s relationship with temporal creatures, remember that He at once possesses all of time. Thus, God has all of your life before Him every time you kneel in prayer. He can relate to you in a more real manner than you can even relate to yourself—He can relate in complete fullness. He can be closer and more intimate with a temporal creature than a time-bound creature could ever hope to be. Your spouse can relate only to who you are in this moment, but God looks behind and before you and can love you in the entirety of your being. Because His relationships are not determined, affected, or limited by fleeting moments, He does not possess the limitations in relationships humans experience.
IMPLICATIONS OF DIVINE TIMELESSNESS
But eternity is not withheld from mankind. Christians are said to have eternal life: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life” (John 5:24). This eternal life is a reflection of the eternal will of God for His elect, accomplished by Christ in the dust and tears of the temporal realm, producing ongoing results for believers—namely, life eternal that has a beginning but no end. It is eternity enjoyed with the Eternal Being—a relationship more genuine, constant, and informed than time could ever promise.
This is not, however, the only promise in the hand of the eternal, timeless God. Hell is the other (Matt. 25:46). It is no coincidence that Scripture speaks of an eternal God and an eternal hell. An offense against a temporal being can rest with time-bound consequences. But an offense against a timeless, eternal God necessitates an eternally drawn-out consequence. This is why hell is said to contain eternal fire (Matt. 25:41; Jude 7), reserved for those who offend Him forever (Jude 13), why their punishment is never quenched (Mark 9:48), and why they will be tortured day and night forever and ever (Rev. 20:10). Thomas Goodwin writes, the “wretched soul in hell . . . finds that it shall not outlive that misery, nor yet can it find one space or moment of time of freedom and intermission, having forever to do with him who is the living God.” Hell simply is to bear the wrath of the One who sees the moments and years of your rebellion and treason before Him as if they were all now.
The knowledge of a timeless, eternal God should elevate our love for Him, and it should infuse desperation into our pleas to those wandering from Him. This attribute is no small quarrel or a bit of academic minutiae. Tampering with timelessness triggers a ripple effect through many of the other forgotten attributes of God. Evangelicals who deny timelessness must account for the implications that denial has for immutability, simplicity, and God’s eternality. If you change, redefine, or alter these doctrines of God, you have created a different God. This is why Herman Bavinck writes, “One who says ‘time’ says motion, change, measurability, computability, limitation, finiteness, creature.” So if we serve a temporal God, we serve a creature of our own imagination, created after our own likeness—a God who will be changed and weathered by time. This is not the God of the Christian faith.
I think “time” has meaning to God (after all, He created it), but that God clearly reckons time much differently than we do ... which helps me deal with some of the things we face in this life. Cheers!
A thousand years is as a day and a day as a thousand years..................
The thought that someone born in a remote Chinese village who never heard the word of God, lived a decent life committing a few minor sins throughout his life will end up tortured in Hell for eternity is a thought that shakes many peoples’ faith.
Time is a creation/construct of Man. There is no “time” to a true God making the notion and concept of “time” irrelevant. A true God is not restricted, entwined, or constrained by the construct of “time.”
The thought that God is a merciful and kind God is a comforting one.
Life and Time are like a roll of toilet paper.
The closer you get to the end the faster it goes!
We do not know what happens with those people. It is my belief knowing my Father that everyone will have the chance to say yay or nay to Gods plan of salvation. Meanwhile it is our job to reach as many with the good news of the gospel as we can
We see time relevant to the speed of light. There are formulas for time dilation related to velocity.
If you could fly into space faster than light, you could look back at earth and see yourself being born, at the right point.
The key to that question is the idea that your remote Chinese person ‘lived a decent life committing a few minor sins.’
God is the one who sets the standard for ‘decent,’ ‘few,’ and ‘minor.’
God judges according to how each of us responds to the revelation we’ve been given.
‘But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.’
Time is a function of the frequency of consciousness from which you view it.
You’re referring to: 2 Peter 3:8 (KJV) “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Time collapses as individual consciousness expands to be “One with God.”
C.S. Lewis addresses this in various writings. Among other things, he talks about the idea of Jesus saving such people in other ways.
I believe time is a 4th dimension: it's existence as a dimension is what it is regardless of how we perceive it.
I also believe God is omnipresent across all dimensions, including time. That may also explain His miraculous intervention across time, such as knowing what we pray for before we pray them, or giving prophecies about the future.
It's possible He's able to do those things because He's really smart (omniscient) and can predict the future perfectly. But it's possible He knows the future intimately because He's in the future "right now" just like He's in the present and the past.
I personally believe that no person can come to God without knowing Christ. That said, by the very limitations of our humanity, no person is capable of knowing Christ perfectly or completely. Hence, it becomes a matter of what the threshold is for our imperfect knowledge.
TIME...
The kingdom of Heaven is seed, time, and harvest. Everything has a time and a reckoning. Then time will be no more, only eternity. Choose wisely.
To whom much is given much is required has logical a flip side. How much that matters in spiritual things is up for discussion though.
Also, the idea of the LoF as punishment for deeds done rather than being a response to what the finally lost are maybe should be addressed. No one is going to be cast into the LoF because of what was written in the books, but only those whose name isn’t written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
We are told that Christ came to destroy the works of the devil and sin is the work of the devil. We are also told by Christ Himself of two aspects of the estate of the lost: the worm and the fire.
Clearly on account of the first no sinning can remain even if the consequences for having sin may.
The implications of the second require some speculation as to the nature of the worm and the fire.
If the fire, wrath, is logically external to the damned then would the worm be internal?
Consider the earthly sensation of an itch that you just cannot scratch and the frustration it may cause directly in proportion to the strength of the itch.
Speculation: the worm is the sin nature of the finally damned, or rather the frustration they experience because an external force, wrath (the fire) is being applied to restrain the sin nature from ever again being expressed.
A person such as you describe would have difficulty having a strong sin nature since they never knew much about the Father or Christ and only had ordinary morality of their culture to rebel against. Even in the worst case scenario for such a person a weak sin nature would be relatively easy to restrain, not much wrath needed, not much of a worm as a result.
Which is to say that wrath can be exacting, remedial, and not punishment and torture.
The BENEFIT, yes “benefit’, is that the restrained sin nature cannot grow worse and the damned become as bad as bad can possibly be.
There is a possible sort of continuity between this speculation and what might be inferred for the state of the redeemed. With the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, no matter their old body of death, once that body of death is removed the saints will have a nature with a god-itch of its own, one that they will be free to scratch till they are as righteous as righteous can be as created beings.
Recall that the Lord is called a raging fire … the intense stuff is not necessarily where the damned are but where the redeemed are and they have a nature to both endure and enjoy it.
… and as a side note the construction of the New Jerusalem includes all that gold like glass … gold has some very interesting properties when it comes to light and heat … did you know we use gold to make glass face shields to protect men from intense fires even now?
The created physical universe consists of space-time and matter. Thus time is
part of God’s creation.
“ Thus, God has all of your life before Him every time you kneel in prayer. He can relate to you in a more real manner than you can even relate to yourself”
I have some questions about his timing I hope to ask about one day but things have managed to work out and must be for the better due to His foreknowledge.
I have always had this speculation that when Christians die and go to spend eternity in glory that the concept of time will have no meaning. On earth, we are aware of time and our limited allocation of it. Awareness of time is part of our innate sense of coming judgment, along with our awareness that time here is limited.
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