“…for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord…” (Jer. 31:34)
During the Big Bang creation of the universe dated 13.7- billion years ago…God created time and the three dimensions of space…length, width, and height…along with all of the material particles and energy in just the right quantities and proportions…that brought into existence an expanding universe that billions of years later was capable of supporting complex life like ourselves.
God created the fourth dimension of time for a definite and deliberate reason…one of the highest reasons imaginable.
In Isaiah 46:9-10 and 2 Peter 3:8…God tells us directly that His reality is a timeless reality.
Throughout the entire Bible, God indirectly infers that He lives in a timeless environment…evidenced by the precise and penetrating foresight God exhibits in crafting and guiding the life-scripts of the people of faith in the Bible…to successful conclusions.
The biblical narrative stories of faith…having end-point goals not fully known or entirely understood by its main participants at the outset of their callings…make sense only if they were written by a divine Author having premeditated foresight and timeless foreknowledge at His disposal…in other words a God outside of time writing exceptionally brilliant life-scripts for people locked into the course of unfolding events engineered through the steady and orderly medium of time.
The goals-targeted transcendence of the biblical narrative stories of faith…having God’s higher ways and thoughts experientially baked-into their storylines…and the timeless nature of prophetic predictions in the Bible…reveals that God intentionally and purposely works with time as an invaluable tool…to shape and channel the context of events played-out within intervals of time…to manufacture novel and innovative journeys of faith singularly unique to the Bible…that defines biblical faith as articulated in Hebrews 11:1, 11:6, and 11:12-16.
The key point here…regarding the element of time…is that throughout the Bible we do not see or detect the slightest hint of God exercising less-than-perfect faith…that contains some partial degree of doubt or uncertainty in the outcomes of His life-scripts and mission-plans composed for people…and for the world-at-large.
In the Bible…God is not in suspense in the reactive mode waiting to see how human free-will decisions and actions will play-out…contemplating in-the-moment His next trial-and-error, reactive move…in response to events on-the-ground.
In the biblical narrative stories of faith…of Abraham through Paul…the outcomes are not a product of serendipity…of random-chance…of good or bad luck…because the same quality of faith is not in operation on both sides of the equation.
God and people are not both operating in the same mode of discovery…in the brave new world of unfolding, ever-growing, and improving faith.
As discussed elsewhere in this book…God lives in a timeless environment…revisited here in this essay in more detail.
The God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…for Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, Ruth, Esther, Hannah (including Noah) all the way through the New Testament to Paul…are totally pre-meditated on God’s part and do not entail doubtful, unsure “faith” in us…in the time-limited, to-be-determined sense that we normally experience…when the final positive outcomes of these journeys of faith…are in doubt in-the-present-moment.
Learned faith and trust in God within the context of this world is a brilliantly designed, created reality…for our benefit…using the four dimensions of space and time…to be able to discover the character and trustworthiness of the living God…to be able to parse and divide-out the one true worldview narrative amidst a sea of multiple competing narratives…to discover truth through experience.
I perceive this is somewhat of a revolutionary concept…in the divine blending…in the humanly inconceivable and seemingly irreconcilable mixing…of these two disparate dichotomies of the timeless nature of God…and our dimension of time.
2 Corinthians 5:7 tells us: “For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
But in the biblical narrative stories of faith…and in prophetic predictions regarding the future…it is clearly apparent that God walks by the timeless vision of foresight, and not by faith that is a work-in-progress over time…that is an ever-growing and unfolding faith through time.
Our faith must overcome doubt and uncertainty in-the-moment as the result of discouraging outward appearances…that are purposely and ingeniously written into our God-composed journeys of faith life-scripts…for the express purpose of creating and building previously non-existent faith in God…a new quality of faith transferred from being solely placed in ourselves…to instead being placed toward and in God (Acts 14:22; 1 Pet. 5:10).
A God who is brilliant pure light and absolute goodness…at the very top of the vertical spectrum-line of goodness and light…already possesses perfect faith exhibited in divine love…and does not require the passage of time to perfect His faith through experiential lessons-learned.
When combined with divine foresight and foreknowledge in a timeless reality…this reveals a God walking by sight.
The Cross in the Christian Life 