It's About Time
After years of prayer, deep thought and research, I've come to an amazing realization about time as we've been conditioned and programmed to imagine it. It simply doesn't exist. Yes, I know it sounds absurd on the surface, and I even used the term "years" in the previous sentence, but I think if you give me the opportunity to explain myself, and if you put on your thinking cap, I believe you can understand this for yourself.
As one who declares that God doesn't know or see the future exhaustively, I want to put forth one of the major reasons why I say He doesn't. God doesn't know the future simply because there is no future to know. There only exists the present, the "now" if you prefer. God hints strongly at this by telling Moses that He is the "I AM WHO I AM" in Exodus 3:14. All of us, God included, live only in the present. We always have lived in the present and always will. We will never leave it. Only our condition, situation, or location will change. All activities in heaven and on the earth only take place now.
Although popularly taught today, the ideas that God dwells outside of time or that He somehow dwells simultaneously in the past, present and future are simply superstitious myths, not anything originating from the Bible. All reality exists only in the present. The past is at best a memory or a recording of the thoughts, activities, and events that occur in the ever-enduring present. It can only be remembered, observed, or accessed on some type recording media, like a photo or an audio-video recording, or imperfectly within our brains. We can only see representations of the past, not the past itself. The past is gone. It is not a real place that can be visited or altered, even by God. It literally does not exist. What happened in the past did actually happen, though, unlike the future.
The future is a totally different concept. It is simply a figment of our imagination. This is why we say we "imagine" what the future will be like. However, because mankind has talked about the future constantly for thousands of years, it's left us with the mistaken idea that it is a real place where other people not yet born are living out their lives, and if they ever invent a time-machine, they may someday come back to our time and tell us what is going on there. Pure nonsense. There is nobody and nothing living or existing in the future. This popular concept of time, along with the theory of evolution, are two of the most widely held myths embraced on planet earth today, fit only for science-fiction books and movies, and I stress the word "fiction".
Time is really just our way of comparing the motion of one thing against the motion of something else. It's a convenient way of measuring various activities that makes our lives more organized and helps us to plan and prepare in order to survive. Time is not some "thing" that God created. God experienced what we call time long before He created anything. How else could He think and plan out what He was going to create? Perhaps a better word for what we normally refer to as "time" would be "duration", endless duration in God's case, since He is eternal with no beginning or end. Time is simply a perception, something we all experience as duration in the present. It has no substance, visible or invisible.
God's creation consists of all of the visible and invisible stuff that moves around us in the present. Time does not go by, move, slow down, speed up, or anything else. Matter, however, and all other created things do move around us, and the varying speeds by which they move around us and around each another is what we have measured and labeled pieces of time. God has done some of this labeling for us back in the Genesis account, describing days and weeks to start us off.
As you are aware, a day is simply one full 360 degree rotation of the earth as it faces the sun. Likewise, a year is what we call one complete trip of the earth orbiting around the sun. Further, because the earth's axis is tilted 23.5 degrees facing the North Star, the northern hemisphere is tilted more toward the sun for half the year, which we call spring and summer, and we call the other, cooler, darker half of the year fall and winter. The opposite is true in the southern hemisphere. To keep track of all these movements mankind has devised clever architectural structures like Stonehenge in England and pyramids elsewhere to tell us what season of the year we are in, as well as sundials and modern clocks that give us even more details such as what particular day of the year we are in, and further dividing days into hours, seconds, and so forth. Today, computers can slice up movements even further into micro-seconds.
So then, time itself is not really a "thing" we can observe or manipulate, but merely a way of comparing and describing the relative motion and position of things. Similarly, aging, or getting old, is really not about time going by, but about friction and deterioration taking it's toll as we move around on this planet, walking, running, and working ourselves to death. Even when we think we are lying still, sound asleep, our organs and cells are churning around, wearing themselves out. The sun and stars are slowly burning out around us as well. Eventually everything we see around us will be burned up and the Lord will create for us a new heavens and a new earth, and our spirits that have been given eternal life will also be given new bodies that won't wear out. These are some of the awesome things God has planned for those who love Him. These things don't exist yet, even in some imagined future, but they are certainly sure to come, not because God "sees" the future, but because God is trustworthy and able to keep His promises. Enough for now...I have to go deal with some of those other things moving around me. Blessings to you!
-nOFuTuRe
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