[10/03/19]
Apart from time, we cannot have any sense of meaning for the first words of the Bible. “In the beginning God” (Ge 1:1). A beginning implies time, at least to our way of thinking, and in like fashion, talk of the Last Day puts us in mind of a point at which time and its passing cease once for all. Yet, if ‘in the beginning God’, then God, the true Eternal being, exists before the beginning, or perhaps more properly, apart from the beginning. For, to posit a before still applies the construct of time. Likewise, Scripture gives us plentiful reference to events happening after the Last Day, but that, too, suggests a continuance of time. It might be better to contemplate these things as occurring beyond the Last Day, or again, apart from that whole span from beginning to Last Day.
Here, I cannot help but venture into the theoretical, for Scripture really doesn’t speak to matters of time and timelessness except to note that God is eternal, and we shall, in due course, be refit with bodies suited for eternity. That said, when we have put on immortality, I don’t suppose that this erases our beginning and makes us fully eternal as God is fully eternal. It erases the terminal point, else immortality is but a lengthening of days, but we remain creatures with a beginning, a birth, and also a rebirth.
Mind you, the same is to be said for those who are not found in the Lamb’s book of life. They, too, shall put on bodies fit for immortality, but that immortal future shall be spent in the Lake of Fire, the second death; a death as eternal and timeless as is the life of the elect. Unrepentant sin against an eternal God demands no less if Justice is to be upheld, and upheld it must necessarily be.
So, what can be said of this period outside of time? Is it also part of the created order? I think we must answer yes and no. This timeless realm predates the beginning, exists apart from the time-soaked regions of our existence. I should think it must in some ways overlap our experience of existence, and also overlap the present heavenly realms. That is to say, in somewhat of a modification of prior statements, the heavenly realms must include regions untouched by time, regions that remain apart from the reaches of Creation. Can it be otherwise? For God exists apart from Creation, and it seems to me that to exist it is necessary that there is a place of some sort in which He exists. Can one exist apart from some volume of area, whatever the nature of that area might be, in which to do so? I suppose it may be possible, but it does not strike me as likely. Existence implies place, even if it implies nothing about place.
So, then, Creation contains within itself the full span of time. It has a beginning and an ending, as concerns this temporal aspect. Yet, Creation has also, or will have from our perspective, a form with no end. This is the message of the Revelation. God has made His dwelling amongst His people in a new heaven and a new earth. There He has set His throne. There He has established His temple. There He reigns forevermore over a kingdom without end. In all of this, observe that there remains a ‘there’. But, again, the eternal nature of the thing suggests an absence of time, at least time as we know it.
This feels like the stuff of science fiction. It pokes into realms of existence truly beyond our ken, beyond our capacity to fathom. It also finds scant biblical evidence by which to establish any solid foundation of truth. We have suggestions of timelessness, but not outright declarations. We have that favorite observation of mine, already visited, that God declares the end from the beginning. He has the full scope of existence in view immediately – or whatever the proper, non-temporal term might be – before Him. He knows your beginning and your end as one. He knows Creation’s beginning and end as one, as well as all the intervening moments from dawn to terminus. This is beyond us. His ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts (Isa 55:8-9). His are higher, greater, indeed perfect.
So, what can be said of this time before time or this time after time? Not much, honestly. We have the sense of God creating everything ex nihilo, out of nothing. He brings matter into existence. Very good. Now, we need some idea of what existence means. At base, it describes the reality of being, of presence; let us say tangibility. Yet, being implies life, and not all that exists is alive as we would count it. Rocks, to the best of our understanding, are not alive. Water, while it may contain and support life, is not itself alive. We reserve that to plants and animals. Likewise, to borrow the example offered by the Cambridge Dictionary, the existence of a theatre does not imply life in that building. It implies presence. The building may be said to exist from the moment of its construction, whether we choose to start from the laying of the foundation or from the completion of the structure, to the moment of its destruction, after which it exists no more, except perhaps as a memory.
Yet, there are those things which have real existence that are not naturally tangible to us. They are present, though we do not sense their presence. We begin to be able to measure and observe these sub-microscopic particles or energies or whatever they are, but they did not have their beginning in our observation of them. These two, however, fall into that category of things God created out of nothing.
We see this unfold in the record of Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep” (Ge 1:1-2a). The earth was empty, ‘a vacuity’, per Strong’s choice of words. It was formless, a desolate waste, empty. Both terms, it seems, can take on the sense of vacuum, although it is not necessitated. Most of our lexicons suggest that the image in Genesis is not of point prior to the dawn of creation, but rather to its earliest stages. The earth is in existence, as is suggested by there already being a ‘surface of the deep’, but it is lifeless, formless, pointless.
So we are left with the hanging question. What was up before Genesis 1:1? What was before the beginning? The only sure answer is God. As I say, I posit a place, however it might be defined, in which God is before the beginning, a place where God is outside Creation as He establishes and maintains that magnificent work. This place outside Creation, it seems to me, eventually combines or subsumes Creation. That would appear to be amongst the implications of the Last Day. The heavens and the earth that we know are consumed as by a great fire. “The present heavens and earth by His word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men” (2Pe 3:7). In the day of God, “the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat” (2Pe 3:12).
I will suggest, and I must insist it is only a suggestion, that this burning away of even the very elements is the fire of purification, the arrival of that realm beyond the created order wherein sin can have no place, for all is in the immediate presence of the perfect and holy God. He whose face one cannot see and live is come. His purifying fire must consume all that is not holy, and consume it utterly. Is that not the image we have before us? Is that not the image portrayed in every description of the sacrifice for sin? The new heavens and the new earth, in order that they may be established as places into which sin cannot enter, must first find every last vestige of sin once for all fully eradicated from the very fabric of existence.
Some, by God’s choosing, shall experience that purifying fire and come forth as pure gold. That is not to say we shall be in substance like gold, or even necessarily that we shall have that luster we associate with well-purified and polished gold. It is, however, the image Scripture chooses by which to convey the utmost purification, and it conveys something further: That purification comes by fire, by the burning off of all the dross of sin; the very elements being consumed, lest some stray particles remain which might combine and reignite the process of the Fall once more.
The suggestion, therefore, seems to be that whatever this new creation entails it is made of an entirely new set of substances; elements as yet unknown and unknowable. It implies the present stuff of creation now made nihil in, into nothing, or returned to nothingness, if you prefer. Time, however we might construe its construction, is part of that return to nothingness. Is there a new time to go with the new creation, a time somehow fit for eternity? I cannot rule that out, although to my thinking, time and eternity are mutually exclusive ideas. But, that assumes time as currently experienced pertains to this new order.
I will say that it seems to me that apart from time as we know it, there must exist some means of keeping various events separate. That is to say that while God knows both the end and the beginning, and exists beyond both the end and the beginning, it would seem odd to suppose that He experiences the whole span as if it were an instant. Eternity would not seem to be much of an eternity if it was begun and done of an instant, as it were. But, that may be me once more imposing the present, linear experience of time upon a timeless realm. What if it is more the case that time is made something one can pass through in non-linear fashion, and without the current linear effects of time’s progress? This is beyond the idea of time travel, I think, but has its stamp.
[10/04/19]
We may well come to learn that time as we know it is itself a shadow of some higher order heavenly mode of accounting for events. As I have suggested above, it is perhaps less linear in its passage, or in the experience of its passage. From the perspective of our present understanding, it remains a timeless place, a place where the whole span of history is visible, knowable, and able to be experienced. We may spend some of our time imagining who it is we would wish to meet and chat with when we get to heaven, whether it’s family members who have gone before, or heroes of the faith from ages past. Perhaps we think it would be a wonder to be able to sit and discuss theology with Paul, to talk with Moses about what his experiences were like, or even to chat with Adam and learn of life in Eden. It seems to me that this is but the beginning of the possibilities. If time, as experienced in eternity is non-linear, then perhaps we shall discover that we can look back upon the earliest days of Creation, even though it has been done away. I honestly don’t know, which is obvious, I suppose.
Perhaps there continues to be a linearity to whatever has become of time in eternity, which is to say you still can’t go back, and what is gone is good and truly gone. I should think that might well have to be the case. If all who ever were have been resurrected either unto life eternal or punishment eternal, who remains to populate that prior space? If the elements themselves have been dissolved by intense heat, of what would that space now be made? Again, we are dealing with something thoroughly outside our experience in dealing with matters of eternity and timelessness, so we really can’t know, can we? God hasn’t said. As for those who have passed over the threshold into the grave, even assuming they have already transferred to this eternal existence, they don’t come back. Further, given the message that this transformation for eternity transpires for all, the living and the dead alike, in the blink of an eye at that last trumpet’s call, it seems to me that those who have gone before us are not as yet in that place, wherever it is they may be.
If one is willing to accept that some have gone into the realms of the dead and returned to talk about it, and that the visions they bring back are more than imaginings and tricks of the mind under duress, this would seem to hold for them as well. Wherever it is they may have been, it is not yet that new heavens and new earth. Or perhaps it is. I’m sorry. It is simply impossible to come down to concrete conclusions on such matters. Perhaps, as I have previously suggested, the experience of whatever correlates to time in this new eternal order allows that the experiences that are separated by millennia here in our temporal plane are all the same moment in that realm. But, I don’t think so. Paul’s declaration in teaching the Church about resurrection (1Co 15) does not suggest any such experience, but rather, insists we shall all experience it in the same moment, as moments are measured here in the temporal realm.
What, then, can I say about this place beyond time? Not much. I can speculate and theorize, but I cannot conclude. There simply is no basis for conclusion. God chose not to reveal, and it would be utmost foolishness to claim knowledge where He has not seen fit to impart knowledge. Let pride be humbled by this recognition, whether mine or anybody else’s. To pronounce certainty where God has left ambiguity is prideful in the extreme. If I can be just a little dogmatic about it, if the point cannot be made upon the foundation of Scripture, then the point can be no more the speculative opinion. This I say in regards to matters of theology. I do not require, for example, that mathematics be able to trace its theorems to some Biblical foundation. That would make no sense. The Bible does not purport to be a guide to mathematics. It is a guide to life, to living in the light of a holy God who made us, who cares for us, and who has revealed to us all that is needful to be known if in fact we are to come home to Him in that last day.
