God and Time in The Epistle of 1 John

The apostle John tells us a great deal about the nature of God in his first letter.  And he wastes no time getting to it.

I John 1:1 – “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched — this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”

‘That which was from the beginning…”

This first phrase begs the question: The beginning of what?

Possibly John is referring to the beginning of his experience with Jesus on the shore of Lake Galillee.  It’s more likely, however, that he’s thinking much farther back.  All the way back to creation.  That was the beginning of all human experience.  This view can be inferred by his use of the phrase ‘the Word [logos] of life’.  The Genesis account says that God spoke the universe into existence, after all.  So, the word existed even before the universe which it brought into being.

In my mind, this prompts another question: What is time to God?  In 2nd Peter 3:8, the apostle Peter writes, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”  What an Einsteinian statement for someone with little to no formal understanding of physics!  Time is relative.  To the physicist, time is relative to velocity and the speed of light.  To God, time is relative to the confines of His creation.

The least we can gather from this verse is that God doesn’t perceive time as we do.  He does not experience it in sequential, linear fashion.  He created time, along with space when He said, ‘Let there be light!’  This is implied in Genesis 1.  The Bible doesn’t claim to be a science textbook and its writers could hardly have conceived of space and time as separate things.  Even we, in the sophisticated 21st century, have difficulty thinking of them as separate without some rather convoluted mathematics.  Without space, time is meaningless – there is no thing the duration of which can be measured; space without time is completely static.

If follows that, if God created space and time, He existed before either.  God exists beyond time, outside, not within it.  Although He acts within it, He is independent of it.  Time, like everything else that was created, has its source in God and exists within Him, dependent upon Him.  We may suppose then, that God perceives all of time at once, as a whole.  When He told Moses His name, it was ‘I Am’ – the eternal now.  Everything to God is present tense.

This lends some new perspective to the concept of God’s omniscience.  He sees all that is, all that has been, and all that ever will or could be throughout the universe.  If the apostles and prophets didn’t understand Einsteinian physics, they certainly couldn’t have conceived of quantum physics; yet here it is.  The future is packed with unknown possibilities from where we see it  But if God see all of time holistically, perhaps as a gestalt, then He sees all possible paths, all possible choices.
There is new perspective about His omnipotence here as well.  The God of the Bible is one who sees every conceivable alternative of the future, and His will encompasses all of them.  Nothing any man, movement or nation can do, nothing Satan can do, can possibly deflect God from His purpose.  He saw (as expressed from our vantage point) every possibility when He conceived of creation, before He ever uttered a word.

Although He was not addressing this particular issue, Jesus spoke of possibilities.  ‘With God, all things are possible.’ (Matt. 19:26; Mark 10:27).  This is so because every possibility, every choice, every outcome is seen by God and accounted for.  Nothing surprises God.  There is no mistake which cannot be overridden.  There is no sin excluded from the redemption of the cross.

Later in this epistle, John talks about sin and our propensity for rebelling against God to do things our own way, for our own selfish motivations.  If we understand God’s omniscience and omnipotence this way, sin can be seen for what it is:  completely pointless because it in no way diminishes God or thwarts His purpose, and foolish because the only thing it does accomplish is to separate us from the source of life and any chance for the fulfillment we so deeply desire.

Why would we intentionally waste one more second of our time on such useless, self-destructive thought and behavior?  The God who knows all, sees all, sustains all, controls all and encompasses all has so much more for us.