God who in his unimaginable Now created the world, also sustains it. His will and ours combine to shape this world, and no home is built or threat sounded or murder done without His power sustaining both the builder and the robber. In giving us our freedom He has deigned to be our servant—and because our hearts have turned wicked, a suffering servant.
And so, in retrospect, it seems fitting that to redeem us ungrateful wretches who are ever trying to implicate God in our wickedness, He should join us more fully—take on our sin and implicate Himself. He who knew no sin became sin for us, and having atoned, made us clean. He redeemed us and this war zone of a world, joining us to God.
Here within time the war is still going on and we face wicked hearts and wicked problems, and Jesus said it would get worse. But death could not hold Him and it will not hold the world He joined and won.
Maranatha.
I'm not sure that idea works where God exists outside of time and we exist within it. That implies that God doesn't even know what time it is "now", here in linear time. And what would be the mechanism for our sense that the present is "now" and not five minutes from now, or five minutes ago, and what process would ensure that the present remains the present for everyone in every place? Even a starship traveler who avoids aging like his twin still agrees with his twin when they meet again that it is now "now". All of these problems have led to to believe there is no such thing as time. there is only eternity. God doesn't change within this eternal "now" but we do.
ReplyDeleteGod's perspective on time is not something I can easily wrap my mind around. For Him there is eternity, and the world and time He created (and we in some measure co-create) laid out before him. I suppose you could model it as yourself looking at a timeline on a page. "This year" is something that makes sense within the timeline, but you observe all the years together at once.
ReplyDeleteThat's not a very satisfactory model, since it is an observational and not an active model, but as I said, it is hard to wrap my mind around.