Genesis 1:1 - God Before Time

Intro

Good morning. I hope that everyone got a good night of sleep and that your brains are ready for some stretching this morning. Maybe you even had some Wheaties for breakfast. This morning we are going to officially start off into Genesis 1-11. Though admittedly we are not going to get super far. My desire for this morning is to cover the first half of verse 1. More specifically I would like us to consider the implications of the phrase “in the beginning.”

Specifically we are going to spend much of our time this morning considering God without time. Considering the eternal nature of God and what we can know of God and how it is that we can know particular things about God.

I knew that I wanted to go here from before we even started into the introductory messages that we have done but I’ll admit I don’t think I was quite ready for this topic, I don’t know that any of us could truly be. When we come to consider the attributes of God, the facts about God and His being that set Him apart from the universe and the creatures that He has made we are necessarily standing before a great mountain that not even the most intellectually astute person is going to be able to climb. When we consider the eternal nature of God we are coming up to a vast and unfathomable area of knowledge that is truly meant to humble us.

I have felt humbled as I have prepared and read and reread things that other theologians and philosophers have thought and written about this subject, seeking to understand as best as I could the flow of their reasonings and arguments for the various truths that are connected to and grow out of the discussion of God’s timeless nature.

These are not easy topics to wrestle with and my primary aim this morning is not to stun us with some hard to grasp theological or philosophical reflection but to rather have us grow together in our appreciation of the greatness and glory of the God who exhausts even the mightiest efforts of our most learned thinkers to define.

This verse forms the foundation of all of the rest that we read about in scripture and the God that it presents to us is unashamedly the central figure in this whole story and so our desire today is to spend our time marveling at the God who Himself is outside of time and who created time itself as a gift for His creatures.

Lets take a moment to pray and then jump right on in.

Pray

Ok, so as we jump in here we come to this first verse of the Bible. It is interesting to consider how far we have come as a society. In 1968 as the first astronauts were orbiting the moon on the Apollo 8 space craft, the first men to ever orbit the moon, as they greeted the American people over the radio they quoted the words of this first chapter of Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Can you imagine that today? Now there is still some of that; I don’t know much about Him but one of those astronauts that was just brought home from the international space station has a lot of videos from out there in space talking about God and the gospel so its not as though it is totally foreign to these types of pursuits but still, you wont find much that he has said on the national news media as was these words that streamed back from the Apollo 8 space craft in 1968.

We live in a world that seeks to do anything it can do to throw off any idea that God exists and that He is the creator of all that there is.

Over and against this sinful pursuit stands these first 4 verses of Genesis. In fact the book of Romans tells us that each and every avowed atheist, even the most ardent of them, knows full well, that “In the beginning God.”

We read in Romans 1:18-22

Romans 1:18–22 ESV

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools,

Here we see that man is without excuse in regard to their commanded acknowledgement of the creator God of the universe. As the 1st commandment demands we are all to have “no other God before Him.” We are all to submit out lives to the truth declared by Moses here in verse 1 that in the beginning God. That all that we know and see comes to us as a result, not of some slow and gradual evolutionary process, not as the result of some cosmic big bang, not as the result as is now often claimed of some bubbling universe generator, but as the result of the creative purposes of God in generating the universe and the world in which we dwell.

Now we will of course spend much of our time in the next months looking at various faucets of creation and while we are going to spend at least two weeks here on the nature of God in verse 1 we will eventually move on to the created part of the verse.

However as we start out this morning we need to consider as I have stated already that the God that we learn about in this verse does not have the same relationship with time that we do and this ultimately forms the foundation for how it is that God is able to rule over this entire universe, both space and time, as the 1689 London Baptist Confession teaches us:

“God the good Creator of all things, in His infinite power and wisdom does uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures and things,1 from the greatest even to the least,2 by His most wise and holy providence, to the end for the which they were created, according unto His infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of His own will; to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, infinite goodness, and mercy.”

The Beginning

This morning we will consider how it is that God’s being outside of time is essential to His foreknowledge, and even His immutability, the fact that God does not change. All of this is grounded in the reality that is expressed when we read that “In the beginning God.”

Now as we begin to consider the beginning it is important that we dispel with one popular attempt to twist the words of Genesis. There are those who, due to their liberal propensities and desire to explain away the truths of the Bible, say that the verse should be translated something like “In the beginning when God created…” This makes the beginning relative and a dependent clause allowing the verse not to describe the absolute beginning of all things but the beginning of God’s creative works as described in the 1st chapter.

The simple and straightforward reading and translation of the text wont allow this. This is not a relative beginning to some other point this is the literal beginning of everything. This, as we will see this morning, includes both space and even time itself.

Now as we being to consider this truth this morning it is important for us to see theologically why this is important. We read in John 1:1-3

John 1:1–3 ESV

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

This well known text that describes the eternal nature of the Word, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God as we will see more about in our next time together, this text is clearly intended to draw its reader directly to our text in Genesis 1 and it locates the Son with the Father outside of the created realm of space and time. This is utterly important for the divine nature of the Son to be upheld as the Gospel of John does; but in upholding the eternal divinity of the Son John also tells us that “ALL things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.”

Now philosophers like to argue about the nature of things and one of those things is time but it is clear both Biblically and scientifically that time is a created thing. From science we have learned through Einstein that time and matter are related so that mass can cause time to speed up and to slow down. We will explore how relativity and time can help to explain things like the distant starlight dilemma when we get to the creation of the sun and moon and stars. However, for today we need to understand that time as we know it exists, asJonathan Sarfati says in his commentary, as a part of the space-time universe.

Now, for anyone interested in a deep dive into the subject of God and time I would direct you to the book that I worked through over the past few weeks getting ready for this message. It is written by Paul Helm, a reformed theologian and philosopher and is called Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time. I am not going to say that I was really able to process nearly all that I read but it is a challenging way to stretch your mind and work through some of the philosophical arguments and profs for the nature of time as it relates to the eternality of God.

One of the discussions that Helm gets into a bit is the argument over wether time itself is eternal. We don’t need to work through the philosophical proofs for this, I probably couldn't anyway, however it is important to realize that nothing exists eternally outside of God and this includes time.

Some philosophers like to try and argue that there are certain things like numbers that exist as abstract entities eternally. They would argue that the number 2 is an abstract entity that exists independent of any sort of natural created order. Because a number is a concept or idea and not a physical thing they argue that these things simply are.

Similarly they would argue that 2+2=4 is likewise a abstract and eternally existent entity.

Now here is where we need to understand that there can be nothing that exists outside of God. The proper way to understand it is that these abstract realities flow from the nature of who God is. 2+2=4 not because some abstract law of mathematics says that it does but rather it equals 4 because God is a consistent and noncontradictory being and as such we can count on 2+2 being 4 tomorrow because the laws of mathematics and reason are reflections of the mind and nature of God woven into the fabric of creation. God is not bound by laws outside of Himself, these laws flow from the nature of God Himself and exists because God exists.

It is similar with time though as we have seen time and matter are connected and so time, while it is similar to an abstract entity is actually a part of creation itself.

We spend time making this case because we need to see this morning that God exists outside of time. Helm states the the purpose of his book is to:

“provide a sympathetic account and defence of the idea that God exists in a timeless eternity, rejecting the idea that God exists at some or at all times…’

Anthropomorphic Language

Now as we wade into some discussion here about God and time; probably the most helpful point that I took from Helm’s work is that we need to learn to see that much if not all of the language we read in the Bible that relates God to time is what we call anthropomorphic language. This is language that uses words and concepts understandable to mankind to describe the ways and attributes of God that are beyond our comprehension. So, as I was sharing with Grace yesterday, we read in the Bible of God’s hiding us in the shadow of His wings. Now we know that as a Spirit with no bodily form that God does not have wings. This is anthropomorphic language that helps us understad the great care that God has for His children. We see the protective nature of chicks gathered under their mother’s wings and we understand a bit about what it is like for God to care for us though we also explicitly know that God is not a chicken and does not have wings and we did not hatch from chicken eggs.

Well, we need to understand that as God is a being who is outside of time that when we read any language in the Bible regarding God and time that this is also God condescending to us and explaining His nature and ways in words that we can understand.

For example we read of God remembering like in Genesis 8:1

Genesis 8:1 ESV

But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.

Clearly here we are not to think that God had forgotten about Noah but rather we are to think of this from the perspective of Noah on the Ark. This is where the remembering comes from, remembering here triggers a movement forward in time. From Noah’s perspective it was raining and the waters were prevailing until a time when God moved to cause the waters to recede and this is described as we can understand it as God remembering Noah and bringing about the circumstances that would end the flood and put Noah back on dry ground. Anthropomorphic, it is viewed from the perspective of Noah.

But what about verses like Hosea 7:2

Hosea 7:2 ESV

But they do not consider that I remember all their evil. Now their deeds surround them; they are before my face.

Here God seems to be remembering facts. This is less about the movement of a narrative and more about God knowing certain facts, ie their sins.

Discussing this type of remembering Helm says:

What such an individual knows and what he remembers (Speaking of God) would be logically equivalent, and the question of whether such an individual remembers (as against whether he knows) would arise only when prompted by a certain kind of question, such as, `Could a timeless being forget?’ `No, he remembers everything he knows.’

If this is coupled with the idea that for a timeless being what is known is not learned, i.e. is not the result of some time-taking process but is `innate’, then it appears that a timeless being remembers in the sense that he can forget nothing he knows, and what he knows he knows `innately’, and not as the result of a process of learning.

…. Though a timeless being does not remember in the sense of call to mind or retain for a time what he has learned in the past, or learned about his own past, he nevertheless may be said to know and to not forget.

In other words this again is anthropomorphic language, this remembering. It doesn't speak to the time bound order of God gaining knowledge of Israel’s sin and then in time recalling that knowledge to His mind, it is simply a way of showing that the timeless mind of God knows all and can not forget that which He knows. When we experience this knowing of God in time, from our perspective this is called remembering.

God Outside of Time

An analogy is maybe helpful here for understanding God outside of time. I use this analogy because both Helm and Sarfati use it, Sarfati quoting Augustine, though Helm will show us that it is not without its own difficulties.

Consider a man walking up a hill on a very windy road. This man can only know that which is immediately in of him and what is behind (as long as nothing changes the road behind after he has moved forward). As a man in time, ie. on the road, he can only know that moment in which he exists. However if there was a man in a tower or high above the road who could see all the road at once that mans knowledge of the road would be more akin to God’s knowledge of time. God’s knowledge is not bound to the road, bound to time, because He is outside of time and at once can see all of time.

However, Helm even points out that this is not totally analogous because God not only sees the road in a temporal sense of seeing the man frozen in that moment on the road but God sees the man at every moment on the road. In other words unlike an outside observer in time seeing the road and the man on the road God at once sees not just the road but all the time that will pass on the road. God sees this all at once because for God there is no time, as an outside observer all of these events, each step that the road walker takes are fully known to Him in what you might call the never ending present, though even that places a time marker where there is not really one. For God there is no present, there just is.

I told you this was going to exercise the brain a little!

Helm puts it this way:

“To say that God is eternal is thus to say that he is not in time. There is for him no past and no future. It makes no sense to ask how long God has existed, or to divide up his life into periods of time. He possesses the whole of his life at once: it is not lived successively.”

God outside of time!

Theocentric

Helm also stresses why this is important, why we must apply ourselves to seeking to view these things through what he calls a theocentric point of view:

“A more theocentric point of view than most of us habitually adopt in thinking about God would allow us to think of God accommodating himself to human time-bound and space-bound modes of thought… to accommodate himself to human powers of visual or other imagery in the use of what are traditionally called anthropomorphisms.”

The ancient peoples got themselves into trouble when they thought that the sun revolved around the earth because the only sought to view the situation from their earthbound perspective and some refused to budge when observations were made that showed that in actuality it was the earth which revolved around the sun.

We run this exact same risk when we seek to only view God from our perspective. Just like the geocentrists of old we become what you might call anthrocentrists, capable of seeing God only from our time bound perspective.

This kind of thing leads to questions like “Can God have a new thought?” and does God “Change His mind?”

These are anthrocentric ways of thinking and questioning that fail to see how disastrous it is to bind God to time and to a time bound perspective. God’s Word is quite clear on the issue:

Psalm 90:2 ESV

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

Hebrews 13:8 ESV

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Malachi 3:6 ESV

“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.

James 1:17 ESV

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

Numbers 23:19 ESV

God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?

God does not change and this is because change is linked to time and a being who exists outside of time can not and does not change. And as we see there is great comfort to be had by God’s people in the fact of God’s changless nature! Even if we cant recite all of the philosophical proofs for God’s timelessness as a possibility we can take great comfort in Malachi’s message that because God does not change His people are not consumed. Because God never changes we read in Lamentations 3:22

Lamentations 3:22 ESV

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;

Providence

We also said that God’s timelessness was going to be an essential foundation for His providential rule over all creation. Because God is outside of time and God sees all time in His eternal present we understand that all things in time happen according, as we read several times in scripture, to the purpose of His will.

That God knows all that will happen in this world because He is its timeless creator in in the mystery of this divine timelessness He has foreordained as the catechism tell us, what soever comes to pass. (Q10)

I really appreciated the way that Helm explained God’s decreeing of all that comes to pass in the world:

And for such a timeless God to sustain the universe over a period of time, say from Monday to Friday, is simply for God timelessly to decree that the universe created has duration for that period. `Sustain' here does not mean, as it does for some theists,'° `create anew', nor does it mean to extend what is in existence at a time by a new act at that time (for that would reintroduce the idea of God being in time), it means rather that God has timelessly decreed that the universe shall develop, unfold, or continue at least until now, this stage in its development, the stage it has reached, say by 1988. Or, alternatively, that God has timelessly decreed that the universe has a 1988 stage. Whether it will continue to develop and whether God has decreed timelessly a post-1988 stage is presumably not something that can be determined a priori, but must wait upon experience. Perhaps this is what Augustine means when in his Confessions he writes of the universe being created by God not in time, but with time. “Furthermore, although you are before time, it is not in time that you precede it. If this were so, you would not be before all time. It is in eternity, which is supreme over time because it is a never-ending present, that you are at once before all past time and after all future time.... Your today is eternity. And this is how the Son, to whom you said I have begotten you this day, was begotten co-eternal with yourself. You made all time; you are before all time; and the `time', if such we may call it, when there was no time was not time at all.... It is therefore, true to say that when you had not made anything, there was no time, because time itself was of your making.”

“God has timelessly decreed that the universe will develop, unfold or continue up until…” Until such a time as He decrees that it will cease if indeed that is what is to happen. I am not sure that we are given a way to speak of what time will be like in eternity, it certainly seems like it will continue and yet even then God will remain outside of it for all of eternity which is just as incomprehensible or maybe even more so than our considerations this morning of God being outside of our time now.

God’s timeless providence is what undergirds Isaiah 46:8-10

Isaiah 46:8–10 ESV

“Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’

“I will accomplish all my purpose!” This is the supreme comfort of challenging our minds to think on this timeless nature of God. That this creator who was before the beginning and who exists as the unchanging immutable omniscient creator God of the universe WILL accomplish all of His purpose and we combine this with the Promise of Romans 8:28

Romans 8:28 ESV

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

And we find here what has been called the pillow of God’s providence, hymn writer William Cowpers smiling face that hides just behind the often foreboding clouds of God’s providence. All things work together for the good of those who love God, those who have been called by Him in accordance with His eternal purposes and we know that all these things will work together for good because we know that all of His purpose will be accomplished and as God outside of time purposing the entire universe of space and time all that transpires in this universe transpires according to His good and perfect purposes!

Closing

There is so much more that could be said but we need to draw our time to a close. As we close I have two points of application for us. One is a word of caution and the other a word of comfort.

First the caution. There are ditches on both sides of the road when considering truths of the magnitude that we have considered this morning. On one hand there are many who would seek to challenge the nature of God outside of time. As a result of anthrocentric thinking they just can’t conceive how anything truly meaningful can transpire in a world of such divine oversight and intention. These are the free wil absolutists, the open theists, the ones who gleefully ponder what they believe to be the benefits of a God who is inside of time and capable of change. However there are others who would dive off the other side of the road. Someone who might be able to read Helm’s book and understand all His proofs and be learned enough in the scriptures to think that they just might have it all figured out, just how it works for God to exist out of time.

For both of these mindsets there is the challenge of God to Job that Jake read at the outset this morning:

Job 38:4 ESV

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.

We must take great caution to never think that we have fully comprehended or figured out the mysteries of the Godhead. God has given us His word and has condescended to make Himself known to us but not fully knowable. This verse cautions those who would think that they have raised their intelect to a sufficient height to grasp the godhead and those who would seek to drag God down and make Him fully knowable and relatable here.

Where were you? How dare you! Our job is to learn and wonder at the glory and magnitude of God! In his last chapter Helm says:

“In the Christian theological tradition metaphysics is but a prelude to worship.”

Pondering the glories of a God outside of time is but a prelude to pouring out our hearts in worship to that God.

And lastly I want us to consider one of the wonderful, well at least for the true child of God, wonderful comforts of this divine timelessness.

Because God exists outside of time and has all knowledge, He has all knowledge of you. This means as we wander that winding road and experience all of the struggle and backsliding that often attain to our walk through time. God knows you fully and timelessly. God knows your end from the beginning, this is one of the reasons that God can declare us righteous through the blood of Christ and yet even that is a time-bound way of speaking. God knows you and loves you because in His mind He knows the full course of your life and in His mind you are fully clothed in the righteousness of His son and no amount of stumbling along the way can change the way that God sees you because God already sees all of you and sees the glorious end and the joy filled eternity that aways you as a child of His!

“For what I wish to claim is that in such talk the concept of foreknowledge applies not to a timeless knower’s knowledge of certain events or actions, but to a temporal agent’s recognition of timeless knowledge under certain temporal circumstances.”