Imagine you walk around a mountain on a very narrow road halfway up its slope. As you walk, you cannot see around the bend before you, nor can you see around the bend behind you.
That is our perception of time. We think of it as linear and a straight line. Some of the ancients believed it was cyclical. Even science gives credence to a circular shape to the long fabric of spacetime by the possibility that our own universe may have contracted and expanded many times.
But as for our current perception of today, tomorrow and yesterday, we walk the long narrow road in which we may only perceive the present. But we’ve been born to believe that God knows what happens tomorrow, and yet we still have free will.
Many believe these two conditions cannot coexist. How can 1) God know the future and 2) have a Will for the future and yet we might still have 3) Free will?
We get these arguments by assuming God will work today for tomorrow as if he were not already there. Not merely in foreknowledge, but in actual person. How might we visualize that?
Imagine that while we mortals walk the road, God sits atop the highest peak, and from that peak has a view of every point in the road. When we are at point A, we are age 5, and at point B we are 55. While to us there is a grand journey between the two, to God, all points of the journey occur within his sight at the exact same moment. That means, when you pray to God upon your knees as a 5-year-old boy, God hears it at the same time you pray on your knees when you are 55.
Time is wrapped around him. He touches all points simultaneously. How, then, might we have Free Will if he has a Will of his own that can supersede ours? Imagine that you are a car driving across an open field. You might turn at random, or you might make decisions based upon the conditions of the road. God knows you so very well, both in time and in the present, that he knows which way you will take, and so writes his own plan accordingly to pave a road beneath your feet before you even reach your next decision.
There will be times that he will let you decide which way the road will turn, and others that the road will force you to turn, and since only He can see the breadth of time, we won’t really know if it was our decision or His decision until after it has taken place.
Anyone who has studied prophecy can tell you that prophecy never really heads us off something, inasmuch as it confirms God’s Will to the path ahead. For example, I’ve received a prophecy that when the company I work for goes bankrupt, I will be offered a new job by someone I didn’t expect in a completely new industry. I cannot force the prophecy to come true in order to acquire the new job, or attempt to get a new job in order to force the company into bankruptcy. It will only be when the events come true that prophecy validates what occurred.
You see, prophecy is not a telling of the future, contrary to popular belief. Prophecy is a perception of truth, and truth is timeless. While dialectically we might say something was or will be true, in actuality, truth is always present. It IS true that Johnny bashed his thumb when he was 3. It is also true that his thumb has healed and you cannot tell any longer that he injured it.
Truth is timeless, and those who have the gift of prophecy are, for a moment, allowed to peer through the veil of clouds separating the road travelers from the light atop the mountain. God allows prophets to see truth from some other point on the road, almost like a large mirror. Seers and prophets sometimes can see what is before us, behind us, and even gather truth about present happenings in ways beyond logical understanding.
While I don’t believe that at the end of our age, we will experience a new Adam, Eve and Garden of Eden (in whatever physical or metaphorical form we might imagine through faith or science), we know that God can perceive all at once. And while you might chew on that, consider that God first named himself as “I Am,” referring to himself in the present tense. It is not far to believe that such a name, given the nature of powerful names in Biblical canon, that it lends to the idea that while humans might be past, present and future, God exists presently in all three?
