12/03/2005—
If God knows everything about the future, then he should be able to predict his own actions. But doesn’t that very notion suggest that his actions are predetermined by someone else? If his actions aren’t preset, then wouldn’t he not know the future, thus nullifying his claim to be all-knowing? We know two things about God. That he does know all things about the future and that he is completely sovereign, that is, he’s not limited by any external force, only by his own nature, so his actions aren’t preset. How do we resolve a seeming contradiction? Well, one answer at least, is that God exists outside of time, in a place where past, present, and future have no meaning. An “eternal now,” as it’s called. It’s as if God could see the past, present and future happening all at once. Why wouldn’t this apply to his experience of his creation, as well?
Perhaps it’s because he wants to give us freedom to choose. But, if he had the same relationship to time as he does to eternity, wouldn’t he experience it also as that “eternal now?” Certainly, in my model, the Father and the Son have limited their perspectives on creation, but what is the Holy Spirit’s perspective? Maybe his p.o.v. is is each and every moment, not being aware or a past or a future. This seems a very childlike perspective and were there no God, any being with perspective would be quite vulnerable. It seems to me that this would limit the Spirit to acting rather than thinking.

Is there such a thing as the present? I guess the answers is “yes,” because we experience it. Could it be an illusion, constructed by our minds to make sense of the world? The “future” is a “grammar tense referring to things to come: the tense or form of a verb used to refer to events that are going to happen or have not yet happened. Also called future tense.” The “past” means “expressing action that took place previously: used to describe or relating to the verb tense that is used for an action that took place previously . . . time before the present: the time before the present and the events that happened then.”[1] Isn’t the present simply the point at which past and future meet? And yet “future” is something that hasn’t happened and “past” that already has. So, it seems there is a gap, though I can’t see it. And it seems an unbridgeable one.


[1] Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.