I have written before about God’s timelesness. However I have some new thoughts, which of course are not original. I have EBC’s pastor in training Matt Hauck to thank for these musings. We were talking about the Impassibility of God and boiled down the issue to God’s relation to Time. (there are two historical notions of time, the immeasurable fundamental intellectual structure coined by Immanuel Kant as opposed to the measurable sequence of events coined by Newton. However since the Bible speaks of time being measured from Genesis 1 than we are here considering Newtonian Time)
To begin, I have one simple question. Did God create Time? The way you answer this question leads one of two paths.
- If God created Time, than it is rubbish that God existed in infinity past because there is no such thing as infinity past only infinity future. In this case God has absolute control over time since it falls under His sovereign rule.
- If God did not create Time. Time existed with God and gave a sphere for his being to interact with (not necessarily meaning that He existed in Time but that Time existed alongside him) In this case, God does not necessarily control time absolutely but simply relates to it differently than those constrained by it.
I have always assumed that God created time. And yet I also assumed that He existed in infinity past. But I am starting to think those two concepts are mutually exclusive. You either have a God who created all things and is Himself the only pre-existent being. Or you have a God who has always existed and who’s existence can be measured (to a degree) by the infinite stream of time behind Him.
I haven’t made any conclusions but if you get a chance, search the Scriptures, you may have trouble finding the words that God expicitly created Time. He created a measure in the days and the heavens, but not necessarily the concept of Time itself. But maybe these things are not for us to know.
