Time and God

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a friend. The topic was something that everyone wonders about at one point. We were discussing some of the things that are confusing about God and how our finite minds are incapable of fully understanding an infinite God. The question arose: What was before God? And this was my response, for what it was worth.

We, as humans, have one understanding and it’s that we are limited by time. We are born, on average, at a particular stage of our mother’s pregnancy. If you stay inside the womb longer than the supposed due date, then doctors sometimes need to induce labor, because even though you have no idea what life is like outside of the womb, it’s time for you to be born. So, as soon as we are conceived we have this thing called time looming over our head. We grow up, but time is always constant. You have a time to eat, a time to get ready for school, a time to go to school, and a time to be picked up. You have a general time for dinner, a time for leisure, and a time to get ready to go to bed. Although these times are different for everybody, you probably get the idea.

When you stop and consider it, time, second to breathing, is the nature of life. But, when considering your own questions of God, you have to remember that God is the creator of time. No creator is limited by His creation. And if that’s the case, God was right when he said that He was “the beginning and the end.” You have to ask yourself, the beginning of what? If there was a beginning then what was before that? What was before God?

Think of a time line. We’ll start with the creation of the earth. We’ll call that zero. At that point (zero) was the creation of time. “On the first day God created…..” Time was established. God wasn’t established, time was. It’s a weird concept. It’s too profound to understand. You’re probably thinking, well what was God doing before the creation of the earth? Just sitting there? Wasting time? Well remember, time had not been established yet. There wasn’t a zero on the timeline. So if there is no such thing as time then there must have been nothing before God because the word before or after had no relevance. God then becomes infinite.

Our major problem with finite thinking is that we have the limited understanding as a creation to apply the things we know to something bigger than the actual creation itself. Applying time to God would then only be logical if I was the creator of both time and God. Since I am not, it is not. It becomes illogical, something that cannot be done. We can’t fathom anything outside of our solar system or the possibility of an infinite, omniscient creator, when we can’t understand a life outside of time.