Tom raised the very interesting question about how God experiences time, and how His time might interact with our time, and whether that might have some implications for prophecy. (At least, that's how I read his post - it had big words!)

When we ask time-related questions (like one I asked recently elsewhere on this forum about how Jesus is judging lives in 0.007 seconds in the Investigative Judgement) we tend to be told 'a thousand years is like a day to God and a day is like a thousand years' (ack, did I quote? I think I paraphrased!)

My own take is that God is outside of four-dimensional spacetime entirely. 'Outside' is not quite the word, since space-time is inside God in my view of it, so he permeates space-time without being bound by it. As such his existence is atemporal - he is not going through eternity like we are, at one second per second, but instead is experiencing all of time at once, all the time.

But I guess in the Bible he has to try to communicate with us, who are time-bound...

I agree with your point about God "experiencing all of time at once, all the time," if we can put it that way.

There are some Bible verses that certainly support that. Yet there must be, even for God, a difference between something that actually happens and something that hasn't yet occurred. What is that difference?

Does God see the future with the same detail and certainty as we see the past? If He does, how can God experience the actual event as distinct from the same event when it is still in the future?

I suggest that He knows some details but that we have true freedom in the sense that God does not know what we will do in everything that happens in our lifetime. But he knows human beings so well, and he knows His own plans so well, that He can make "predictions" on the basis of those contingencies and powers.

The concept of meta-time in time theory may get to where you are heading with this ... I am thinking out loud here but it seems that beyond living human functional time-bound concepts there are possible time dimensions that God experiences that either overlap, encompass or parallel our own time existence.

From my quick cramming of time theory, here is a base line to build on. For humans (not sure about other life forms) experience of time can be broken down into two broad concepts - conscious time and para-time. Conscious time is what we live in. Para-time includes dream-time, memory-time and imagination-time. Comparing conscious time with dream-time shows that the time-line for each doesn't measure equally. Dreaming time skips and jumps, fast-forwards, etc., so that you may experience extended and prolonged events in a nano-second of actual conscious time. You may dream you have driven from Maine to Florida and wake up to realize you were only asleep for an hour.

God may live in a para-time environment along similar lines.

Stochastic process being a part of the string theory and understanding that may lead us to a possible idea of how God operates in time. It seems logical to me, that He would be operating according to physical laws and we simply do not have enough understanding of those laws. I for one don't, but have a curiosity about them and surmise.......

I hear echoes of open theology, which tries to balance free will with God's foreknowledge.

If free will/choice is foundational to our relationship with God and real experience of life, the predictability of outcomes in the future becomes more akin to great stabs in the dark, humanly speaking. That is where applying a stochastic process to time theory could come to play. Essentially a stochastic process is a random sequence of connected events, if I understand it correctly.

What may to us seem random or even chaotic events over time viewed from God's experience and meta-timeframe history is fractal in nature. Expansion or magnification exposes the continuous pattern in what may seem random at a previous level of observation or experience.

The divine meta-time somewhere out there can handle it. Our conscious time bound experience of history limits our perception.

Yes, [open theology] is influenced by the process theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg and Alfred Whitehead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfhart_Pannenberg

Richard Rice, one of my teachers, wrote a controversial book, The Openness of God, exploring some of these ideas. The book isn't expressing Rice's firm beliefs but merely challenging our thinking. It shows God as evolving along with His evolving universe.

I'm wondering Tom if you think it is reasonable to assume that Heaven runs on earth time? (as in i844) I'd like to hear your thot on that....mel...:-)

Yes, I've read The Openness of God which he wrote along with John Sanders, Clark H. Pinnock, and William Hasker, and Rice's book, God's Foreknowledge & Man's Freewill. Both very thought provoking. Also of interest was a debate on Christianity Today entitled Does God Know Your Next Move?, between theologians John Sanders and Chris Hall.

HEY ALL

THESE are all interesting questions and thoughts

dgrimm60