God, Time and Prophecy: Understanding Prophecy in God Time
Sometimes, we talk about God’s relationship with time. The most common way we explain it is to say, “God is outside of time.” Typically, this is meant to say that he is not limited by time in how we understand. But is that what this really conveys? To me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense the more I think about it. God must be IN time in some way, shape, or form – Jesus was inside of time. God, as a human, had to be inside of time. God also acts in time; his actions are visible in specific moments in time.
Now, he isn’t bound by the laws of time, especially in the ways we are. God created time, so he can’t be bound by it; instead, he creates its boundaries for us. However, God and time in the bible are not said as him being outside of it. This has often been said for years by many theologians, but I find it does a disservice to explaining God and Time to summarize it down to he is “Outside of it”. My biggest issue with this is that it implies everything is done for God because if he is outside of time, then all is complete already. Also, I find the phrase “outside of time” vague and misleading. C.S lewis is one of the people who used it saying;
“God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty— and every other moment from the beginning of the world—is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.”
But does being in time require moments to follow one another? Does it require linearity? To view time as linear is a very white, western view. Various cultures have different conceptualizations of time. Some cultures view it more cyclically than linear. In Greek, they had two words for time – Chronos and Kairos. Kairos is a qualitative measure of time, when time is Kairos, it is the best time for something new. In biblical Hebrew, instead of talking about the future/past with a linear view, the language lends itself more to saying complete and incomplete.
God’s relationship with time is not linear. It is far more complex than we could imagine; he lives across every moment and has endless time for each moment. If, by outside of time, we mean he is outside of linear time, then you could argue it’s correct. But he is still in time because He is IN each moment.
His relationship with time doesn’t exist in future/past chronology as we tend to think of time. For God, one day can be years long, and years can fit into days. He is very close to a moment, seeing all the individual details. He is far away, seeing many moments as if they happen at once.
This is also how the bible talks about God and Time. In 1 Peter, it says, “One Day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.” On one hand, this is metaphorical. However, the metaphor directly tells us God is not outside of time. Instead, it’s saying his relationship with time is one outside of what we can imagine.
One day is like a thousand years
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A thousand years is like one day
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One day is like a thousand years 〰️ A thousand years is like one day 〰️
Shifting our understanding of God and time can revolutionize how we interact with prophecy, especially biblical prophecy – which is notoriously hard to understand.
The prophetic books are hard to understand for a few reasons. First, they assume that we are well versed in the Torah and Histories, which is what they draw a lot of from their context. The second reason is the rest of the context is drawn from their own moment. Having a better understanding of God’s relationship with time won’t suddenly make us able to interpret the texts fully. However, it can help us better understand how and what God is talking about through the prophets.
Before we get into that, we need to break a second myth. Prophecy is not about future telling. Well, in the English language, it is. However, biblically, prophecy is about the sharing of God’s word. To be a prophet is to be a mouthpiece for God. This doesn’t require the person to tell or speak of the future, unless God wants to speak something about the future through them.
Prophecy in the bible often uses a mixture of all the different things at once. it will draw from the current context, talk about the future and God’s promises, talk about the past, and talk about the unseen realms all at once. Prophecy is always somehow about their present moment and how the people are behaving or could be behaving.
Often, God will use his prophets to remind people of what he has done. He will call their minds back to different points in time where he has come through for them. Other times, he will call their minds to their specific situations and moments. He will call them to reflect on what is happening around them.
He may also tell them of things happening in the future, but often, this will have a strong present relevance to them as well. He will warn them of the consequences of their actions if they continue in their ways. Rarely is what God says will happen guaranteed, especially if it is negative. We see it happen because they often don’t change their ways. However, when it is positive and God promises to redeem, he always comes through. His promises are not dependent on us, but the consequences of our actions are.
Prophecy in the bible is not about telling us what will happen in the future. Instead, it is God speaking to us through others, which includes his complex relationship with time. He talks of many things at once, things now and a thousand years ago. He sees it all at once and their current moment in detail.
He sees things we cannot see in the present moment due to how close he is to them. But from his distance from it, he can see how it fits with the rest of history and all the things that could be to come. He warns us of the things that could be to come. He also tells us sometimes how he will be intervening in different ways. He also sees things we can’t see because sometimes we cannot process what is happening in front of us, which makes it hard for us to understand. But God doesn’t need to process it to understand it, he just does understand.
The prophetic books get even more complicated when we remember how God can see entire events happening that we cannot see. He sees all of earth and heaven, all the universe. We see this more clearly in some prophetic books, like Ezekiel and Daniel, but it is present in all of them – think of Isaiah’s call story in Isaiah 6.
Maybe instead of our summary being “God is outside of time”, we could say, “God has a complex relationship with time”. Or we could even use scripture, “One day is like a thousand years to him, and a thousand years like a day.” He sees every moment in infinite detail and each moment in the context of all of history.
