Mind Blown

Some of you may have to forgive me if this is patently obvious, because I have never heard this described so that I understood it this way. I'm talking about the key to God's omniscience and omnipresence. Because every way I've heard it described indicated to me that His omniscience was simply a trait -- just something He had that we had trouble explaining. If God knows everything, we ask, do we actually have free will? If I'm getting this right, the answer is unequivocally "yes." Here's why.

My understanding had been something like this: omniscience was just like mental forethought taken to the infinite. As if, say, I could be given omniscience for a moment and by that endowment alone I would know what would happen in the future. Because that's what omniscience is.

Until someone spoke briefly about the concept of time not being in a line, but an arc; God sat in the center, equidistant from each point in time. That festered, because it was making sense -- and if the speaker had explained it further, my mind might have been blown a long time ago.

It's not that God sits in the present with an omniscient eye on the future; He knows what I'm going to do ten years from now because He's there right now watching me do it.


See, God is not just in every place at once, He's in every time at once. He is not just by nature in the past, the present, and the future -- He literally is, at this moment, simultaneously watching me write this, watching the Saxons invade England, His Son praying earnestly in Gethsemane, Daniel standing up to Nebuchadnezzar, David watching Bathsheba, Rachel gluing herself to Naomi's side, He's parting the Yam Suph*, calming the flood, marking Cain. And he's simultaneously watching over me as I go to college in two hours, getting married in six months, and (I pray) watching me sign with an agent, and getting my book into the hands of a publisher.

Forgive me if that was patently obvious. But that blows my mind; and God forgive us all if that became so second-nature that we can talk about it in so basic and general terms that it could be misunderstood. Unless, of course, you don't think it works that way. I haven't had enough time with the idea yet to see if there's some theologically gray areas into which such a concept would take us.

See you Wednesday.

*Yam Suph is the Hebrew for the body of water God parted to allow the Israelites to flee from Egypt. It translates literally as Sea of Reeds, and was misprinted in the 1600's as The Red Sea, lending to some geographical confusion. Rather than perpetuate potential confusion, I've decided to call it by its Hebrew name.