Biblical Objections to the Conclusion

The Bible does not contradict what reason has shown. In the case of God's being outside of time, the Scriptures support it and do not counter it, although a fundamentalist reading of Scriptures raises problems. The absurdity of fundamentalist methodology shall be passed by here, except to say that to noone can figure out what a fundamentalist means when he says that he interprets "everything literally."

The reason that some people think that the Bible suggests that God is contained by time is that it seems to say that God changes. For he goes from being angry to being at peace with certain people, depending upon their changing levels of sinfulness. He wanders the paths of the Garden of Eden. He speaks to Moses from a burning bush, and surely speaking involves change, at least the changing of vocal chords!

The problem with these sources of objection is that they are fundamentalist readings of Scripture. Fundamentalist readings of anything are, as such, automatically to be discarded as foolishly simplistic, partly for the reason given immediately above and partly for the assumption that either God or the ancient Hebrews or both were not complex enough to use metaphore or analogy where appropriate. Fundamentalism is a game really played only by religious atheists when the urge to issue Biblical revelations to Christians and Jews moves them. But when speaking of God, reason has shown that it is most appropriate to speak of God by analogy, and - in the case of our immediate subject - the following in fact show God to be outside of time according to the Scriptures.

[Note: I shall not quote entire paragraphs here to give you the contexts because these are so well known, and so straight forward, and so easy for you to look up using my page using the Menu of Sources.]

  • The Jews were surprised at what Jesus said of Abraham. "So the Jews said to him, 'You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?' Jesus said to them, 'Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.' So they picked up stones to throw at him..."(John 8: 58). Far be it from us to imagine that Jesus spoke gibberish! No, then this is factual. But it would be gibberish to say that anything now exists in the past, unless that being be outside of time. The Word, who is God, is therefore outside of time.

  • In the book of James, we read, "Do not be decieved, my beloved brothers: all good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change."(James 1:16-17)

  • The Old Testament also instances verses such as "Surely I, the Lord, do not change..."(Malachi 3:6) but these without a tradition guiding their interpretation are insufficient proof that God is totally unchanging or outside of time. For taken alone and divorced from their context in tradition, one would not know if God meant that he did not change in any way, or that he did not change in respect to something, such as his law. But the case has been made well enough.

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