God is everywhere. That means he’s everywhere in both space and time. The two, as scientists deduced in the last century, aren’t really two different things: They’re one and the same thing, spacetime. And God fills both.
We Christians were able to figure from the bible God is everywhere. But the idea God fills all of time is a much harder concept. The writers of the bible had the hardest time expressing it. They used terms like eternity, everlasting, ancient days, forever, forever and ever, or “was and is and is to come.” There were no ancient words for it, so the writers of the bible had to do the best they can. This makes it really easy for people to pick apart each of these words, and argue the writers of the bible didn’t really mean to say God fills all of time.
But it’s the simplest explanation for what they did say—and the simplest explanation for what we observe about God.
Describing time.
Obviously we live in time. We’re dependent on it. We’re made of atoms, you see. Atoms move. If time didn’t exist—if there wasn’t an instant, just after this instant, where an atom could move from one place to another place—then atoms wouldn’t move. Hence we wouldn’t move. Our brains wouldn’t process data. Our bodies wouldn’t process oxygen and food. We couldn’t live. We need time. We were created to live in it—not outside it.
Because time allows us to move, we use movement to describe time. Time is the sequence everything happens in the universe. We start with now: Now is what’s currently happening, at this instant. What happens after now is the future; what happens before now is the past. Now continually moves forward: Now’s events become past, and future’s events become now. And that is as simple as I can put it. (Which is still pretty tricky. So reread this paragraph if you need to.)
Our atoms—and the atoms around us—need to move from the position they are now. If they can’t, we’re frozen. (Literally frozen: Atoms that don’t move have no temperature; they drop down to absolute zero, or –273.15° Celsius, and you can’t get colder.) Physical life would be impossible if atoms couldn’t move.
Spiritual life is another deal. Spirit isn’t made of atoms. Of course, nobody knows what spirit is made of (spirit-atoms?) so we don’t know how it works. All we do know is God is spirit, and God created the universe, and the universe is spacetime. So this means God created time: There’s a point where God existed but time didn’t. He can exist outside of time. But he created the universe because he chooses not to.
God inside time.
Many Christians teach God exists outside time. They call this place outside time eternity, and say God spends his time there, looking down on time like a person looks down from a skyscraper’s observation deck, watching all of time at once. He can see past, present, and future, like a history student sees a timeline. He can see Abraham walking around, alive. He can see Jesus doing likewise. He can see you. And all of us are alive to him.
I learned this idea in my theology classes, and used to teach it. (Even taught it on this blog.) But it ultimately creates too many contradictions.
You see, we say God is everywhere in space… and then we turn round and say God is nowhere in time. That doesn’t work. Space and time are the same thing. If he’s outside time, looking down on it, he has to likewise be outside space, looking down on it. If he’s inside space, observing everything in it because he fills it, then he has to be inside time, observing everything in it because he likewise fills it.
And I mean fills it. Past, present, and future: God’s there. But not traveling through it in one direction, like we humans are. God is in all of time at once, seeing it all at once. The reason he’s the first and the last, (Is 41.4) and can declare the end from the beginning, (Is 46.10 ESV) is because he perceives it all at once. To us, this might look like God sees it all from the outside, but he’s really seeing it all from the inside. ’Cause he’s everywhere.
So yes: Every human is still alive to God. But he doesn’t observe us from a distance. He observes us from here. “God is watching us from a distance” may make a nice line from an old Bette Midler song, but it’s bad theology.
But music brings up a good point: God loves music. And music, like atoms, requires time. Soundwaves don’t travel without moving atoms. Notes can’t change without time. Tempo is time. So if God didn’t create time for our sake, he’d at least have created it to make music. With all the music playing in heaven, (Rv 5.9, etc.) it’s kinda ridiculous to describe God as living outside of time.
Open theism.
Open Theism is a branch of Christian theology which teaches God can’t be almighty, yet at the same time be a good and loving being, because of all the chaos in the universe. They see a contradiction. Mostly ’cause of the way they practice theodicy—defending the idea that God is good, yet bad things still happen.
Fr’instance. Since God is love, he won’t act in any way which contradicts love, right? Yet sometimes terrible things happen. If God knew about these terrible things in advance, why didn’t he do anything to stop them? Well, open theists say it’s cause God would stop these bad things from happening… if he knew they were coming. But he doesn’t know they’re coming: He doesn’t know the future.
Open theists take the bits of bible where God sounds like he’s surprised by human behavior. Like when he tells Adam and Eve, “What have you done?” (Ge 3.13, 4.10) They say God really was surprised by this: He had no clue the humans would sin. They believe the future doesn’t exist. Only the present exists. And since the future doesn’t exist, God can’t look at it and see what’s going to happen. He can only make educated guesses, or really accurate predictions, about what might happen. He can, being near-almighty, make certain things happen, like making his Kingdom come. But because the future doesn’t exist, God can’t know what it is, any more than I can know I’m gonna complete every task on my daily schedule. (Besides, our prayers might get God to change his plans.)
Critics of open theists (especially Calvinists, who are really fond of God’s almightiness) claim the bits in the bible where God looks surprised, are actually anthropomorphism—the writers of the bible, or the interpreters of the bible, reading their human responses into God’s behavior. God, they say, isn’t surprised. Not by anything. He knows the future all too well. So don’t take the bible so literally.
Okay, here’s my take on both these groups. Have you ever watched a suspenseful movie more than once? You already saw it once—you already knew the plot twists, all the surprises, like when the bad guy was gonna jump out of the closet—and even so, weren’t you still just a little bit startled when these things happened again? Now, if we can be just a tiny bit all-knowing yet still be surprised, I don’t see how it’s a problem when God acts like that too. We don’t have to call it anthropomorphism. Nor do we have to say it’s because he’s not really all-knowing. If anything, it just shows us how really involved God is with our doings.
Open theism’s biggest problem is that it contradicts basic science: Space and time are the same thing. The future does exist, same as the present does, same as the past does. We don’t see the future, so to us it doesn’t appear to exist, but that’s because we’re time-based creatures who can’t see beyond the present. Just like we can’t see ultraviolet rays: We’ve invented machines which can see ’em for us, but we can’t do it, and we may never invent a machine which sees the future for us. We’re limited. But God isn’t.
The future doesn’t come into being as God wills it into being, moment by moment. It already exists: God created it, and the entire universe, at the very beginning. Open theism is based on a philosophical understanding of time, which predates the scientific understanding of spacetime. And the scientific understanding, I find, fits the bible’s description of God rather well.
So that’s how he does it…
Have you ever prayed for something, and your request was answered immediately, or near-immediately? Let’s say you prayed for money, and that very same day a check showed up in the mail. Now, that check obviously had to be written, and put into the mail, days before. So at what point did God start answering your prayer? That’s right: Before you ever prayed anything. From our point of view, God heard it now, then answered it in the past. Cause-and-effect happened a little backwards.
People don’t realize God does this most of the time. God regularly answers prayers before we pray them. The open theists’ idea that our prayers affect the future—well, it’s not wrong. But our prayers also affect the past. Because God is in both the past and future.
Predestination is the idea that God decided, at the time of creation, who would be saved. Most of what Christians argue about is which came first: Did God save us first, and as a result we turned to him? Or did God look into the future, see which of his creations would turn to him, and save us based on that? My view—which I discuss in greater detail elsewhere—is that “which came first” doesn’t work when we’re talking about a God who fills time. His choosing us, and our choosing him, happened simultaneously.
Lots of Christians wonder how God saved people in the past, before Jesus could die for their sins. Dispensationalists claim God even had to use an entirely different system to save them. But that’s bunk. If you think about it, in the Old Testament, sacrifices were meant to apply to past sins. Not future ones. The fact Jesus’s sacrifice applies forward in time, applies to us, is the oddball idea. But we grew up with that idea, so we never thought about how strange it is. In any event, Jesus’s sacrifice applies to all people in all times, (Ro 3.25-26) and there needn’t be any other system. Jesus’s death was always the plan of salvation since the beginning of time. (Ep 1.4, 2Ti 1.9)
Lastly, God knows how we’re going to turn out at the End. He’s going to make us perfect. We’re going to live with him personally, forever. (Rv 21.3) But because God’s in the future as well as the present, believe it or not, he already sees us as perfect: He looks at us from his eternal, fills-all-time perspective, in which he sees our entire eternal lifespan. He sees the hundred or so years we spend in this messed-up world… and the trillions of years we spend in the Kingdom, fixed and perfect. So if you’ve ever wondered why God puts up with us despite all our failures, that should explain everything.