Interpreting Eden: God and Time

By Martin Morrison

Why doesn’t anybody have any time today? Where did all the time go? We’ve all said or heard that many times. What is time? Where did it come from?

Question: Was time there before God created the world?
Answer: No, God created time. God is the author of time.

Here is a concept our finite minds are barely able to handle. God lives beyond time and is never limited to any moment of time. God transcends time. God is external to time. God is timelessly eternal. God has no beginning and no end. He always is. God exists, but never came into existence.

Moses testified to God’s eternity, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God”, Psalm 90:1 – 2.

John records the words of God, “I am the Alpha and Omega, …who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty”, Revelation 1:8. Since God is everlasting, his perception of time is not like ours. We experience one moment followed by another moment. We experience time successively and sequentially. We have a definite past, present and future. We cannot transcend time. We are in time and formed by time. Time for us, is like the air we breathe. We rarely notice it. We cannot escape it. We are bound by time.

God who is everlasting, perceives time differently. God sees and experiences time all at once. He lives in the past, the present and the future all at once. He is, he was and he is to come, all at the same time. For God, all time is like an eternal present. As Aquinas said, God sees all things together, and not successively. As I said, we can barely handle this!!

Stephen Charnock uses the illustration of the sea in contrast to a river. A river changes, moving from place to place, sometimes even shifting its location or its destination, depending on its environment. It is highly susceptible to being affected by something external to itself. Not so the ocean. It’s as if it never changed. Always in the same place; always the same body of water from year to year. It’s fixed and stable. If a river ever came into contest with an ocean, there would be no contest. The ocean would swallow up the river. The sea is such a vast body of water that it remains constant. God is more like an ocean than a river. While the river of time is always changing and developing, the ocean of the divine remains constant, consistent, and invariable. He is changed by no succession of moments, for he has none. God who is infinite and eternal, doesn’t change.

C S Lewis helps us to understand the difference between our time and God’s time in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. When Lucy goes through the wardrobe into the land of Narnia, when she returns hours later, it’s as if no time has passed back on earth. Her brothers and sisters don’t believe her story at all. But then the Professor backs up her story, that there really is another world through the back of the wardrobe.

“But there was no time, said Susan. Lucy had had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place. She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room. It was less than a minute, and she pretended to have been away for hours. That is the very thing that makes her story so likely to be true, said the Professor. If there really is a door in this house that leads to some other world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time. But do you really mean, sir, said Peter, that there could be other worlds, all over the place, just around the corner, like that? Nothing is more probable, said the Professor”.

So, God is the creator of time. He lives beyond our time in another sphere of existence.
God not only created time, but he divides time into portions, seasons and years.

“And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.  And let them be days and years”, Genesis 1:14.

One of the striking features of Genesis 1-2, is its focus on time. The chapter is constructed as a week of seven days, whether they are 24 hour days or a period of time.

God created the sun and moon, in order that there may be ordered time, structured time. God has created a natural rhythm for our good. There are 24 hours per day, every day. There is a rhythm of six days work and one day rest, every week. There is a rhythm of 52 weeks per year, every year. There is summer, autumn, winter, spring, every year. There is dry and wet, hot and cold, dark and light.