This text is an excerpt from the article "If God Knows the Future, do we have Free Will?"
This is a common question that many Christians struggle with. In order to answer whether God is inside or outside of time, we’re going get a little deep. To start, we need to define what time is. A page on a website called “got questions” (www.gotquestions.org) put it really well when the author said this: “To put it simply, time is duration. Our clocks mark change or, more precisely, our timepieces are benchmarks of change that indicate the passage of time. We could say, then, that time is a necessary precondition for change and change is a sufficient condition to establish the passage of time. In other words, whenever there’s change of any kind we know that time has passed. We see this as we go through life, as we age. And we cannot recover the minutes that have passed by.
Additionally, the science of physics tells us that time is a property resulting from the existence of matter. As such, time exists when matter exists. But God is not matter; God, in fact, created matter. The bottom line is this: time began when God created the universe. Before that, God was simply existing. Since there was no matter, and because God does not change, time had no existence and therefore no meaning, no relation to Him.”
So what is the answer to the question: is God inside or outside of time? Well, God is kind of outside of time, but that’s a really limiting way of saying it. Time is simply irrelevant to God. God does not change and has no physical matter. Time is a human concept we created to describe change. Past, present and future are human terms that simply do not apply to God. God existed before us, exists now and will exist forevermore. Additionally he will not change in any way. God simply exists. Period. He knows everything now and will have the same amount of knowledge in five-hundred years from now. To God, five-hundred years from now is the same as right now because he and his knowledge will not change. That’s what is meant by 2 Peter 3:8, when it reads “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”
That all being said, he is still with us in the moment. As humans, we experience change. We get to learn, something God created just for us. He is with us through it all in a one-on-one relationship. God’s relation to time can be a confusing concept and hard to understand, since everything in our lives is constantly changing and under the ruling of time, but it is one of the many things that shows how awesome he is.
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