Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent.

Well that’s the general perspective of God. New earth thinkers would have it that exact.

The poles of thought around creation, range from literal to lateral. The literal Sadducee's of our age hold to a very black and white, narrow and legalistic interpretation of the world around us. Not that our faith is enhanced thereby. Not that it makes any real difference.

On the contrary, describing God as a wand-wielding wizard, capable of making worlds within 24 hours, poses even more questions. After all, why 24 hours when a second would do?

The fact that time, as we know it, was only defined on day 4, seems to not matter. Nor does it evidently matter that it took thousands of years to bring Jesus to the cross.

I do not know how or why, in that model, God made the Unicorn of scripture or Behemoth, and removed them a day later together with the dinosaurs and fossils that have been unearthed from times long ago. Oh well, whatever, that is all the least of our problems.

The biggest dilemma for me, is that the literalist view makes a sham of the cross.

That said, I actually want to introduce another thought

I concede that God is omnipresent – He has to be to touch all of us and relate to us individually. One of the benefits of the cross was the replacement of a distance temple with the imminence of God, who sees and feels even the faintest cry or the most lost sheep.

Many scriptures confirm His omnipresence. That, by implication, makes Him omniscient, for if He has seen everything, He knows everything. I am not convinced of omnipotent.

We can move mountains and tame rivers, but we use man-made machines to do that. Is it not possible that the bulldozers of God were black-holes, super novae, gravity and so on? He certainly uses and lives by the laws of the universe that He made.

To be more precise Jesus did it all

He was the agent of creation (Colossians 1:16). He was at the cusp of time and eternity, but on our side of the line, inside time. Thus He is called the ancient of days and has white hair.

Logically, even mathematically, Jesus had a beginning. He is the son of the Father. His beginning = ¥ + n or infinity + some elapse of time.

About eternity

The biggest concern I have with our many perspectives of God, is not imposed by scripture. It is the assumption that He lives in an eternal now, in a flux of past, present and future.

I reject that. It would mean that God is constantly reliving what His Son so painfully resolved. I rather lean to the Einsteinian idea of an event horizon. It is defined as a boundary of space-time, which in layman’s terms means the boundary of an event in a given time and place.

What I allude to is the idea that the creation was an event horizon with a discrete beginning and future end. It dawned, it reached its fullness at Calvary and it will set.

God lives in a linear eternity

The number system is infinite. You can go from minus infinity to positive infinity. However, no matter how long the line, it is still linear.

It proceeds logically from left to right or from lowest to highest. It is never an amorphous flux of events colliding into an eternal now, where past, present and future are one.

I do not know enough about God to stand on my head for this, but I am willing to state with conviction that the ordered, rational God of my experience is linear.

An obscure little reference in Revelation 8:1 says there was “silence about an half hour”. It confirms that heaven does have a concept of the linear nature of time and of time lapse. A half hour in that world may have been eons for us, but it was marked.

They knew that such a moment had elapsed and they waited for it to be so.

Thus, while I gladly believe that God is eternal, I see that as still being a time-based thing, but not as we understand time. It was a logical progression through the event horizons of an advancing realm.

Acts 17:26 and Daniel 2:21 confirm that God appoints “seasons” and marks their onset and conclusion. Matthew 24:36 confirms that the marker of such “seasons” is the Father. He is the divine metronome. It is His sole prerogative.

That changes things for creation

A linear eternity brings a different perspective to the new earth argument. If God does advance along a logical continuum and can mark out the knots in the rope to record the passage of time as a half hour, then His concept of a day is almost certainly very different to ours.

Thus a day to Him is a thousand years to us and vice versa.

If Jesus were among us today, He would still oppose the lateralist Pharisees who interpret the scripture too selectively, too expediently, all in a misguided quest for relevance. His concern would simply be, “are you relevant to man and irrelevant to God?”

I dare not, ever, compromise His precious, priceless truth to fit my reality. By His spoken word, the dark void acquired life and became a profound creation. That same word, spoken into my life, transformed me into something of value to Him.

The contemporary interpretations of scripture are at risk of departing from the faith into a philosophy that will once again exclude this Jesus as an inconvenient truth.

Yet, the same Jesus would undoubtedly reserve a degree of disdain and rebuke for the literalist Sadducees, who have subjected our faith to ridicule because what they profess is simply not supportable in science.

Not a problem, they might say. ‘Yes a problem’, God would say, for the invisible things of God are clearly known and understood by what is made (Romans 1). If the two do not reconcile, faith in God or our understanding of Him, will falter. Well so Paul thinks and I like Paul.

(c) Peter Missing @ Bethelstone.com