Time Was the First Thing Made (2 of 2)

The second implication is that words like before and after, when applied to God's relation to creation, do not mean what they would mean inside time. When Scripture says that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, the word before is not pointing to an earlier moment of clock time. There was no clock. It is pointing to a logical priority — to the fact that the choosing is grounded in something that is not itself a moment of created time. The grace that saves was prepared, Paul says in 2 Timothy 1:9, before the beginning of time. Read that phrase carefully. Before the beginning of time. The temporal language is being used to point past itself.

The third implication does the most pastoral work. God does not experience your prayers, your trials, your decisions as a sequence He is hurrying to keep up with. He does not learn what you will say. He does not wait for the next moment to arrive. The entire arc of your life, from the moment of your conception to the moment of your last breath, and beyond it into the new creation, is present to Him in one act of complete knowing. His presence to every moment of your life is total. He is not catching glimpses of you. He is fully attentive at every point of your existence, because every point of your existence is held by Him in being from a side that is not subject to time's passing.

To the person inside time, this can feel like a paradox. We make decisions in real time. We pray in real time. Does it not collapse our freedom if God already knows what we will choose? Does it not flatten our prayers if He has already determined how He will answer them? The short form of the answer is that knowing is not causing. God's seeing all moments at once does not reach into any moment and force the choices made there. He sees what is freely done. From the side that does the choosing, the choosing is genuinely free. From the side that sees, the seeing is genuinely complete. Both are true. The paradox is grammatical, not metaphysical.

If time is a created thing, then time is not the ultimate reality. Something is more fundamental than time. That something is the One in whom time subsists. And if time is the form in which created things have their existence, then the One who grounds time is also the One who grounds the existence of created things. Not at a distance. Not from outside. From the source. Every moment that ticks past in your life is sustained in being by the God who made the kind of being that has moments to begin with. Coram Deo is not a posture you take up by working at it. It is the description of what is already the case. Every moment is already before the face of God. The disciplines of awareness are not the construction of that reality. They are the recognition of it.

The engineer in me wants to put it this way. The architecture of creation begins with a structural fact almost no one understands. Time is not the floor. Time is one of the things resting on the floor. The floor is not another floor underneath it. The floor is not a floor at all in any sense we would recognize. The floor is a Person. And the Person is closer to every moment of created time than created time is to itself.

The Person is the One the Preface named on both Johannine anchors. The floor that holds time in being is the One whom John identifies, in 1 John 1:5, as light, and in 1 John 4:8, as love. Light is what that Person reveals Himself as in self-disclosing presence. Love is what that Person does in holding every moment in being. The two angles converge in the act of sustaining. Light could remain constant without coming down, and love could not. The fact that your moment is held at all, rather than collapsing into nothing, is the working of an essence that is both.

This is where wonder begins. Not at the size of the universe. Not at the elegance of its laws. Those are downstream wonders. The wonder upstream of all of them is that the universe has a beginning at all, and that the beginning is held in being from a side that does not begin.