What is God's relationship to time?
God has no history. He is before time, outside its reckoning, and unchanged while it runs — yet He works within it, and the way He measures days is not the way we do.
Eternity, Not Merely Endless Time
Scripture gives God titles that stretch language past its limit — He is called eternal, and is said to live in eternity itself. One commentator warns that these words must be allowed their widest force:
James McBroomThe word must be taken in its full unlimited sense, showing the infinity of Deity in regard to what we call time. We are lost when we try to think of eternity. Time, to us, is what comes in between events which our minds can take account of, as space is what we conceive as the distance between bodies. There is no time with Him who is the First and the Last, who is, was, and is to come, nor are there measurements of space with Him who fills heaven and earth. "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting You are God."
So "eternal" is not really a quality God has, in the way a thing has a length. It is simply what His existence is:
J. N. DarbyThere is no time when God is not; no place where His eye and hand, to use human language, are not. "I AM" is the proper expression of His existence. While time rolls on, "I am" remains unchanged, and when time has rolled away, "I am" continues the same.
Why the Mind Struggles Here
Our thinking runs on a track laid down by time, and this is why the subject feels like pushing against a wall. One writer traces exactly where the resistance comes:
James BoydWe can better understand a thing having no end, because this thought does not force our thoughts out of the stream of time. With us it is still time lengthened out indefinitely. If we think of God, we know that He cannot have had a beginning, and yet we find in our reason an undercurrent of rebellion against this thought, for it is utterly foreign to our way of thinking, and entirely beyond our understanding.
The same difficulty shows up in translation. Commentators note that even careful translators have flinched at rendering the word for "eternal" plainly, because the state it describes is one
Frederick W Grantwhich is independent of time — a condition which crushes eternity into an hour, and extends an hour into eternity.
Nothing Ever Occurs to Him
If God has no past and no future, then He is never caught out. Nothing arrives as news, and no crisis makes Him rethink:
VariousThings do not begin with God. Things do not occur to Him like they occur to us. His life is one eternal present, one eternal NOW. Time does not enter into His life. One day is with Him as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. When sin entered He did not have to turn round and enquire what should be done. He did not have to consider plans.
Plans Made Before There Was a World
What God has done in history was settled before history existed. Writers draw a line between God's eternal counsels and His ways in time, and they place the remedy for sin on the eternal side of that line:
C. H. MackintoshThe Blessed One did not have to pause in order to devise some plan to remedy the terrible evil which the enemy had introduced into His fair creation. No, He had only to bring forth, from the unexplored treasury of His precious counsels, the truth concerning the spotless Lamb, who was foreordained from everlasting, and to be "made manifest in the last times for the sake of you."
Those plans were hidden until He chose to speak. As one writer puts it, the counsels of grace existed in the Godhead from eternity, but their existence had to be revealed to us within time.
Two Ways of Counting
Peter's words about a day and a thousand years are given as a cure for a particular anxiety — the feeling that God is late. Faith learns a second arithmetic:
The Bible TreasuryIf days and years are taken away from their ordinary computation by time, and put in connection with the Lord and His coming... faith's reckonings become like His... It is this new method of calculation which enables us to declare, as to this apparently long interval which measures His absence, "The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you."
The Delay Has a Reason
The gap is not neglect; it is deliberate, and it is aimed at people:
Hamilton SmithIt is not that the Lord is slack in the fulfilment of His promise, but that He is patient, "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance". In His grace God gives space for repentance before the judgment falls; in his unbelief man takes occasion by the delay to deny that judgment will ever come.
Summary
- Before — God has no beginning and no end; "I AM" is the true statement of His existence, unchanged while time runs and unchanged when time is gone.
- Beyond — Eternity is not time stretched out longer. It is a state independent of time, which our minds cannot enter because we think only in befores and afters.
- Settled — Nothing occurs to God. The Lamb was foreordained before the world was founded, so sin never forced Him to invent a rescue plan.
- Revealed — Those counsels existed in eternity, but we only know them because God disclosed them to us inside time.
- Patient — What looks like slowness is mercy holding the door open, giving room for repentance before judgment comes.