In the economy of God time is one dimension that is not needed for God to dwell in since He exists outside of time. Since God exists in the past, present, and future simultaneously His need for time doesn’t exist. And because God exists from everlasting to everlasting time is irrelevant to Him. In fact God has always been, before time began, and will always be even when time ends.
So the question before us is why did God create time and what relationship does it have with eternity. Well, for one, we humans are finite beings, unlike God, who is infinite, and thus time is the one dimension that puts a beginning and ending to our physical existence. As humans we have a beginning called birth and an ending called death. And in between these two time markers we are allotted a specific amount of time to live here on planet earth. And everything we do in life revolves around time.
But praise God, for those who are children of God, by being born again by accepting Jesus as their Savior, we get a sneak peek now about a dimension that lies outside of time called eternity. While humans have long speculated about what eternity is, we as Christians have the only authoritative source of what eternity will be like – the Bible.
The Scriptures share some amazing thoughts on eternity. For example, the Bible tells us that our souls were created to live for eternity, and shares quite a bit about where each soul will eternally reside, depending on whether Jesus is our Savior and Lord. The Bible also tells us that God is eternal and exists outside of time.
One last thought concerns the intersection of time and eternity, and for this, Arthur W. Pink provides us with this fascinating comment: “We must not forget that the issues of Eternity are settled in Time.”1 For you see we are given only this life to get right with God. Picture it this way – Jesus is the great timepiece and when we physically die, His timeclock, as we know it, ends and our eternal dimension begins. And the only question is where will you spend eternity!
1 Quote by Arthur Pink: “We must not forget that the issues of Eternity …” (goodreads.com)
Great comments. So, do we believe that God created time after the fall of Adam and Eve? Could have Adam and Eve lived forever, timeless with God had they not sinned?