The Time Line
Have you ever wondered how God could choose us way back in time before the worlds were even created? You use your imagination to try to peer way back in time before anything material existed and ask yourself, How could God choose me before anything had happened yet?
There is a teaching which says that God just appointed certain people to be saved someday and others, well...they did not get the lucky ticket. In our minds we can try to see a hundred years ago where travel by car and plane was just starting to grow. We think back 500 years ago to the discovery of the Americas by the European powers. We realize Jesus walked the earth about 2,000 years ago. There were not any photographic images or any audio recordings from that era. We have heard that Noah's flood and ancient Chinese dynasties existed some thousands of years ago.
Concerning things before that time, we are fed tons of indoctrination by experts who tell us about sub-human creatures and dinosaurs from millions of years ago. This is a really loud narrative fueled more by grant funding proposals than by objective facts. [That last sentence is probably bigger than any of us realize.] There are indications of very ancient civilizations on the earth but the true science gets fuzzy and unclear.
I have developed an interest in genealogy and DNA studies recently. I can trace my family tree to Sir Robert Stewart II King of Scotland. This is if the records are accurate. Being that the Stewarts were close to government positions, the births and deaths were highly documented. The Stewart family was a huge one but everybody claims they are related to the royal family. Apparently, peasants never had children. Also, apparently there was never any “soap opera” stuff that went on. In 20 or 30 generation there was never any case of a wife telling her husband that a child was his when it really was not. A man never assumed that another man was his father when he really was not? A child was never adopted from other family or neighbors who was never told the truth about his origins?
I can keep going farther back on my family tree, but at about 1000 AD things get cloudy. The exact details are in question. Historians disagree with each other.
We try to peer into the darkness of the distant past and wonder how did God choose some to be saved.
This will not answer all the questions or end the debate but I think I can help some of you. Stop trying to squint and see into the past. Turn around. Look in the opposite direction. Let me try to give an illustration that may help the light bulb come on with some people.
Imagine a stage such as in a large church building. There are 2 or 3 levels which are steps onto the main platform. In the center of the main platform is where God dwells. God is eternal. That means that He is outside time. Time may be a product of physics, therefore time is a part of His creation. He dwells outside of His creation. He dwells outside of time, an important entity He has made.
We are told that God made the heavens and the earth. When? In the beginning. In the beginning of what? In the beginning of His creation, therefore in the beginning of time. He must have made the heavens first, with its own special “physics” and inhabitants. Therefore the heavens are made with at least one realm along with its strange characteristics and nature of time. The sons of God rejoiced together when God made the earth (Job 38:7). There must have been a spiritual realm before the creation of the earth. The earth is the environment that we are familiar with. Not to say that the old earth may have been very different that how it is now, ruined with the effects of sin and rebellion.
You and I live in what we could call the time line or time stream. Some have theorized that we are living in a computer simulation. I think someone has been playing too many video games in the basement. It is a simulation in the sense that our universe was made from the substance of another parent realm; the things which cannot be seen (2Cor 4:18). However, you can be assured that everything in earth-time is very real.
Let us use the bottom level of our church platform to represent earth-time; the time line that you and I live in. If we look to the past we could imagine when our grandparents lived. We could roughly place the Crusades in Europe somewhere along the time line. If we look back farther we can realized that Jesus was born in the time stream about 2,000 years ago (Gal 4:4). Jesus suffered in the temporal time line and by that He worked eternal redemption (Heb 9:12 ). Therefore we can see that the time line is very, very real.
I was born in 1958 along the time line. Let us say that I live a long life and die in the time stream at age 90 or so. I close my eyes in death and in one blink open them in a strange place. (This is represented by the second step on the church platform.) It is the spirit realm that I was not greatly aware of during my entire natural life. Everything is so different than what I knew in earth-time. The “physics” of that place are so strange. Therefore “time” in that place is so odd to the natural mind. I get my bearings a little and go up a step toward God's throne. I want to come very close, to enter the very heart of God. When I do, I discover the strangest thing of all. I have always been with God.
What? Wait a minute. Let us look at that again.
I entered the time line. I was born in 1958. I lived 90 years, then exited the time line. I came to the heart of God and discovered I have always been there. Always! What?
Of course! It depends on what kind of life you received.
Some translations of the Bible tell us that when we receive Jesus as Savior and Lord that we are given everlasting life. It never ends. You get an electric bill every month and every month and every month and every month and every month and every month. And it never ends. Your mother-in-law calls your wife up every Saturday and talks for 6 hours and it lasts forever and ever forever and ever forever and ever forever and ever forever and ever forever and ever forever and ever forever and ever. And it never ends.
Stop it! That is not the kind of life you were given by God.
True, it does not have an end but it is just as true that it does not have a beginning. It is ETERNAL life (John 10:28). It is the very life of God. We do not receive something that would be an endless extension of our natural life. That would be nearly like hell.
Remember when Adam fell into sin? God was very concerned that he might eat of the tree of life and remain forever in that ruined state (Gen 4:22-24). Therefore we have to be given a different kind of life and our old natural life has to die which it did when Christ died (Rom 6:6).
We, who are believers, have been given the very unending, un-beginning, uncreated, eternal life of God Himself! We have not received an everlasting life of natural, sinless Adam. In Christ we have received an eternal life that exists outside of time. Therefore we have always been with God, the timeless One. No wonder He knows us!
We can enjoy this life of the Father now. It is not in our mind. It is not in our emotions. It is not in our unregenerate soul. It exists in our spirit which has been joined to the Holy Spirit. This can be confusing. We are saved but not yet (entirely). Our job in this natural life is to allow the Word of God to enter our mind and displace all natural things. This slowly produces an effortless change.
Allow the Father's life which is in you now to be the supreme thing in your life and in your thoughts. I trust this has made the light bulb, so to speak, to come on for many. I hope you can begin to see how the Father has known you and has loved you since before the world began.
Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, (2Tim 1:9)
Nov. 5, 2023