GOD...

God

Say God and our mind begins to search for what we cannot fathom. So we

conjure reasonable concepts; our God is the one and only uncaused reality,

the self-contained and self-existent, self-willed and self-purposive being as

He is deliberate in His elections toward us, self-personalized in God the Son

and divinely familial in God the Holy Spirit, self-distributive in His infinite

giving and divinely revealed as He is known to humans by ordering into

existence the visible and the invisible, God is the self-experiential being

involved in our life as He gives us grace to accomplish our divine purpose,

and His most magnifical of attributes – God is a creature-Creator-unifying

Divine Being who is absolute holy in all aspects. GOD is a word symbol

designating all personalizations of Deity as it is the act of tailoring our

experience with that of the Godhead based on information He knows of each

individual’s character.

The first thing God did was give us insight into His vastness…He called it

Eternity and He created it because there was no thing before Him. God is

the never beginning, never ending Divine Excellence. None of God’s

existence is altogether comprehensible by man. It is beginningless, endless,

timeless, and spaceless. Now, to address our ignorance let’s get rid of the

next question; what was God doing before eternity? The answer is – that’s

why He is God, He was being God as He always is. There is no insight that

we could be given to understand what God was doing before because that

is implying time and time was not brought forth until He created time, space,

and the heavens and the earth. And remember, time was created to deal

with the sin problem on earth where the infection occurred. And in this time

He would also deal with the affection that sin had upon the unfallen. There

was no sin infection in the unfallen universe. So before time there was

eternity and before eternity there was God and before God…yea, now what

is the question. Can we just from that brief exchange of ignorance even

imagine the awesomeness of GOD! In truth, there was, there is, there never

can be a ‘before’ God. And any who questions that is without faith and

without faith it is impossible to please God.

Hebrews 10:30-39

What has this to do with our lives today? It is here to help us become the

kind of people described. God’s true people joyfully accepted the

confiscation of their property and the plight of their lives in the service of

Christ and the cause of love for we realize why God termed us “peculiar”. In

other words, we are radically free from the love of this world and the values

that drive most of what passes for success in America. We were free from

this bondage because, verse 34 says, "we knew that we had something

better.”

Hebrews 11:6

Faith is not against reason, but such things go beyond our understanding.

But what kind of faith does it take to “see” into eternity? Hard wisdom; God

has a continuous existence that was not concealed. He is everlasting. So

much so until He Himself sounds this declaration…

Isaiah 43:10

What God has prepared for us that are faithfully continuing onto eternity will

open up a wisdom that bridges eternity, but for now God gives us that test of

faith through the wisdom He presents and that wisdom is this: that we can

know all the essential details about God’s plan of redemption from the

beginning of time, including the promise of the coming of His Christ. God is

working His purposes out in His Story. Jesus is the centerpiece. All our lines

of our story converge on the Son of God in His Story. The bible is the big

picture of truth. And God is the Sovereign Lord of His Story. But we are not

mere automata. We are bordered on both sides by eternity, involved in time,

playing our part as God works out His purposes in cooperation with His

people. At the first moment of time, God stands in a new relation in which He

did not stand before, since there was no "before". In creating the world God

undergoes no intrinsic change for at the moment of creation, in relation to

sustaining the universe, extrinsically He now allows us to co-exist in His

cause. God created the world not in time but with time. Time is not some

primordial container—an infinite bucket of moments—in which certain events

happen. Time is not a receptacle; it is a relationship. That is why our great

hope is found in the eternity with Christ, our God.

God never began to exist, and He never will go out of existence. He exists

at each moment in time. And God’s relation with eternity is found in event

creation without ordered intervals. You notice how it is difficult for us to think

about God outside of time and space? By this we bring God into a bearing

of Omnitemporality. We lay out things chronologically for God. We try to bring

God close to the creation of the world. But God has a changeless

determination of His will. His will is done. Carnal wisdom discounts God by

saying if the world is only six thousand years aged, why didn’t God create it

sooner? God’s determined events are not dependent upon time. Time came

into existence with the creation of the heavens and the earth. There was no

emptiness prior to creation. Eternity is not simply the negation of time with

reference to God, but rather the arena of the events of His full, majestic,

unimaginably rich and overflowing life as the Father, the Son, and the Holy

Spirit. Did God have a reason for delaying the creation of the earth? God is

causally relational. Each one thing is caused for the benefit of His purpose

and concerns variable necessitation of another. Prior to creation it is

impossible to differentiate between a tenth of a second and ten trillion years.

What did God do before He created the sanctuary? He was God. We must

not singularly think of God as outside of time. God is aeternal, one present

perpetually and continuously.

What was God doing in eternity? Just because there was ‘no time’ does not

imply that God was idle. God cannot be idle. God governs the course of and

the order of events. God does not react to events as they happen; He has

determined how the events themselves come to pass. There is a cause, and

there is an effect. God orders and things happen. In the counsel God

designed the coming forth, the course traveled, of everything that could be.

Every element, every beam of light, even as it stops and produces a shadow.

God spoke the angels, the unfallen worlds into being, the stars by the

googolplex. And a googolplex is the number 1 followed by one thousand

zeroes. God designed, purposed, and related each element, beam of light,

star, and all other things of His creation in eternity where time was not yet

brought forth. He spoke the heavens, the earth into creation in six days. God

could have simply thought all things into being but there is nothing in God

that is not God. God is divinely complex. Consider how the Father took

everything into His mind, visible and invisible to us, with every consideration

of that thing and determined with the Word how the Holy Ghost would move

for its consistence and harmonious uniformity and agreement among all

things.

I John 5:7

Colossians 1:16, 17

God is all powerful and there is a manner in which His counsel is determining

of all other things. We can see this determinate counsel spoken of in the

book of Acts when referencing the predestination of Judas to betray and

deliver over Jesus Christ to His enemies.

Acts 2:23

Luke 22:22

Truly, if God were to give counsel or decide to do anything, it could not be

resisted and none could stand against it!

Proverbs 19:21When God gives the counsel from eternity past, no method or circumstance

at present in any time could take over what “was determined” already by

God.

We know that love was here before the foundation of the world.

John 17:24

Our God loved the duration of six days of creation in noting the interweaving

relationships of the creature lives of animals and plants, in air, on earth, and

in the waters. We know that the atom was part of God’s creation, and it was

thought indivisible, until it was split to reveal protons, neutrons and electrons

inside. These too, seemed like fundamental particles, before learned women

and men discovered that protons and neutrons are made of three quarks

each. And now we’ve learned that preons are point particles, conceived of

as sub-components of quarks. As of now we haven't been able to see any

evidence at all that there's anything inside preons. Have we reached the

most fundamental layer of matter? Or does God’s creation just in this our

universe contain objects that are even more minute? Now, with that

consideration, God is so intrinsically specific that He pathed out the entire

existence of each event and thing brought forth from, through, and until

eternity ends… God enjoyed perfect companionship within Himself as the

three persons in One God. The Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

loved each other, shared in the divine glory, and had a perfect relationship

to each other. How closely love is connected with God’s plan for His eternity.

God was laying out eternity. He is intentional with a specific objective in mind,

and this aim was pre-determined.

In thinking about God, we notice that God is to the greatest degree possible.

He knows everything that it is possible or impossible to know. He can do

anything that it is possible or impossible to do. He is maximally merciful and

excellently gracious. All that is true of Him is true of Him to the greatest

degree possible. Isn’t it awesome how God knows all things at the same time

and yet when we pray to Him today He knows it is today that we are praying

to Him and not tomorrow. Hear Him say, “Remember the sabbath day, to

keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh

day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work,

thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor

thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD

made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the

seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed

it.” Notice the seventh day refers to a time related to creation when all things

were finished. So, at sunset on the sixth day God rested and it is from His

rest that the sabbath comes because had He done on this day as He had

done from day 1 to day 6 then God Himself would have broken the

commandment. The sabbath is the effect of God’s enjoyment and

satisfaction in the work of His own hands. He was one well-pleased with the

instances of His own goodness and the manifestations of His own glory.

The Sabbath is the evidence that God is not in time, but rather that time in within

Him. The Sabbath will never have an end. And here is our answer as to how

God feels for us. Christ God came in the fullness of time as our brother, in

our humanness. And this Sabbath which is a time within God was made for

us, as man. And the word tells us that God was in Christ, reconciling the

world unto Himself. God feels us as He is in Christ and Christ is as us! I pray

that I should not say more than scripture does on this point, but neither

should I say anything less. The Sabbath day rests us in God in Christ. The

Sabbath is God’s hearing and answering the prayer of Jesus.

John 17:21, 23

Maybe someone listening would care to read the entire chapter???????

How eternal is our God? He is utterly distinct from everything that exists

outside of Himself; He is before and after, above and beneath, incomparable

to all creaturely realities, including the heavens and the earth. So, we come

to a resolve with the question. It is appreciation to ask what God was doing

before He made the world if, and only if, both God and the world are separate

items within the same temporal continuum. But they are not. God’s events

or day years, unlike ours, do not come and go. They are succeeded by no

yesterday, and they give way to no tomorrow. It is not in time that God

precede all times. God precedes and follows all times in the greatness and

beauty as the observer of an ever-present reality. So, may we conclude with

the answer…eternity is the dimension of God’s own life and that is what He

was doing...God was living for all life.

---

⛰ Go Deeper

This reflection is part of a larger Bible-based study on faith and transformation.

👉 Read more at OnlineBibleCourse.com

---