Time and God

Time is a very interesting thing. Humans experience time in a linear directed fashion. That is we progress into the future having experienced the past and existing in the present. We have a sense of causality which gives us a short glimpse into what MAY happen, and we have memory which gives us access to what COULD HAVE happened. In the category of memory, I include books, video, songs, stories, and all the things that give us access to what could have happened in places and times which we could not directly experience.

For any one person, the only bit of time for which we can attempt to verify is that of the present and even the present moment is not well defined. I might say, it is NOW, but now has passed and it is a different NOW a few moments later than the first. -- BTW, notice my use of "later", this is really an expression of direction which allows us to sequence moments in time. It is very hard to make statements about time without refering to how we experience it, but I will try.

God... How does God experience time? The implication of the Bible is that God created time, in Genesis he created the Sun and the Moon, Light and Darkness and hence the first Day. God is not said to have sprung into being as he created the first day, but rather he authored it, having existed before it. "Before" in this sense is a misnomer, because "before" is a reference to something happening before another, i.e. it is a marker in time, as "later" is. And this begins the problem we have in understanding perspectives outside of the limits of time.

I have thought a lot about this problem and the best thing I can come up with is this:

The creation, all of it, from the first evolving microbe to the last celestial body consumed by a black hole and the black hole itself are like a gigantic, multidimensional tapestry. In the way we look at a painting and see its height and width or the depth of the panter`s brush strokes and all the subjects of the painting at once, so God sees everything at once. All of creation can be surveyed as a whole. We experience this tapestry as a sense of becoming, we are miniscule bugs moving through this tapestry from one side to another, and what we experience of time is the sequential encounters with different partsof this celestial tapestry. God sees every possibility, every choice, every thing and every moment. He does not decide for us, but can see the consequences of our decisions; He does not choose our fate, but He knows its outcome no matter what we could possibly choose.

The Christian God, and to some extent the Jewish God, put his divine finger in the middle of this tapestry, he inserted himself into time, in the same way that a painter touches his brush to a painting. He didnt do this to remove our will but to exemplify His(or Her if you prefer) will. He gave us examples of what He does that we may emulate Him and be able to guess at what to do when no situation for emulation is possible. In the Old Testament we are taught to avoid defilement. We are told to set aside what we make as an offering to God, a thanks, a repentence, an acknowledgement that nothing we have is our own. He made it know that humanity, and all of creation is His In the New Testament we are told that God is Love, and that Love is this, that a man lay down his life for a friend. And Christ, the incarnate God laid down his life for those who would accept him, those who he would make his friends.

The Cross

In Christianity, as with all religions there are many symbols of faith. Today in Church, I was looking up at the icons and the menorah and the different objects adorning the walls of the sanctuary and I looked at the Cross. Instantly, I began to think about the Lossky book I have been reading. The last chapter I had read talked about Orthodoxy as a process of aligning one's will with God's will. In that description, sin was anything against God's will, even if that action was "moral" in the conventional sense. As I looked at the Cross I saw two wills, the will of God, standing upright and the will of humanity laying across it. Then Christ's body nailed to the Cross, bringing the will of man, which is at cross-purposes to the will of God, into union with God. I felt like I had stumbled on something profound, but alas, I am sure it is not such an uncommon observation.