Jesus Christ Concerning Time and Eternity
God is both the Creator and master of time, in complete control of it. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and not confined by time. He is an infinite being to whom the past, present, and future are all the same: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and for ever.” (Heb.13:8). “…day with the Lord is as a thousand years…” (2 Peter 3:8).
“We are creatures of time; God inhabits eternity.” J. Phillips.
The Cross
Only the sacrifice (shed blood of the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ) can pay the penalty of our sin and remove its stain from all time.
The concept that God resides outside of time helps explain the perplexing question of how the Scriptures can simultaneously proclaim believers as both dead and alive. “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”
In a paradoxical enigma (co-crucifixion), we who are “in Christ” are only temporarily bound by time in that we presently reside in natural bodies (“bodies terrestrial” 1 Cor. 15:40).
As a result of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ on our behalf, we are said to be “in Christ.” “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.” (2 Cor. 5:17).
Upon salvation, God’s eternal Spirit permanently joins to our spirit, thereby removing us from the constraints of time. “But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.” (1 Cor. 6:17). In the mind of God, we are as dead as Christ was on the cross because we were in Him when He died. As Paul stated in Gal. 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live…”
Therefore, in a spiritual sense, believers are simultaneously present in all three dimensions of time: past (Calvary), present (temporarily confined to physical bodies), and future (destined to glorified bodies).
Consider 1 John 3:2: “Beloved, NOW are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” [emphasis mine]
“For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.” (Col. 3:3-4).
Dead in Christ’s death on the cross, alive in Christ’s resurrection. Cf. Rom. 6:1-6. Our physical bodies are subject to time and decay; our future spiritual (“celestial bodies” 1 Cor. 15:40) are not. “Time is a friend of God and became an enemy of man when Adam fell.”
“For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:16-18)
A. W. Weckeman
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