I admit not all Christians believe like I do that God is omnipresent. Regardless, I believe Jesus as God exists everywhere in time and space at the same time. We have seen Jesus in specific places and at specific times, but that does not mean He was bound to those specific places and times in that specific moment in time. Christians, on the other hand, are not omnipresent.
There has never failed a single word of all God has said and there never will be such a failure. Here are just a few verses about that:
Interestingly, 2 Thessalonians 1:9 has been used by religious people against me who think I am of the devil because I understand Scripture differently than they do. I cannot help that. I have had to constantly seek the Lord for wisdom for 50 years now, ever since the day I got saved, and I still must trust Him to lead me into all truth and not let me be led astray.
I don't believe you are "of the devil". I believe you have been misinformed by a great deal of "religious" doctrine, most of which are the same views I held for decades.
Some Christians I know well and have great respect for believe I am wrong in my views. I can accept that. I encourage them to be open to debate if they are still interested in either of us being corrected in our thinking.
At least, we are in agreement, as is God's word, that Calvinism / reformed theology is an egregious cult.
So were back to the first point I made a couple of posts ago.
I wonder if he believes that because what you've said here about our position in Christ is true that it means we exist outside of time?
Not certain I'm following. I was just showing that the spiritual is not limited by the physical. Whereas the physical measures time, time is spiritual.
Time is measured by days. Before days were invented God dwelt in eternity where no time existed. Humans may think it is easier to comprehend God if God is bound by time, but how then do they explain God's eternal existence before time was created? Or, to put it another way, did God exist before the beginning and, if so, what was the beginning?No, it doesn't. That's your doctrine being read into the text. The fact is that it teaches the opposite of your doctrine, which we'll get to in a moment.
You did, however, use the correct term when you said that God "predicts the end from the beginning". Everything after that was just your doctrine and not what the passage teaches at all. Indeed, that doctrine isn't only absent from Isaiah 46:10, it's absent from the whole of scripture. The bible very simply does not teach anything so transparently self-contractictory as "He (God) dwells in the end and the beginning at the same time."
Don't minimize it. It isn't hard to comprehend, it is entirely impossible to comprehend because it is irrational in the extreme. God Himself could not comprehend it. It would be like trying to imagine a color without light or a sphere with sharp corners. It cannot be done because it is a contradiction.
The concept of timeless existence is, in fact, one of the best examples of a stolen concept fallacy that anyone could come up with. A stolen concept fallacy occurs when a concept is employed that is based on another concept that is being denied. A more obvious example is the statement, "All private property is theft." The statement "steals the concept" of theft by seeking to undermine the concept of private property which the concept of "theft" is logical predicated on. The statement is therefore self-contradictory and therefore false.
The idea of timeless existence steals the concept of existence because existence has no meaning outside of time. Time is not a thing, it is an idea. Time is a convention of language used to communicate information related to the duration and sequence of events. It cannot be existed outside of because the concept of existence implies the concept of duration and duration is all time is. Therefore, the idea of timeless existence steals the concept of existence because the denial of time (duration) renders existence meaningless. It is a self-contradiction and is therefore a self defeating falsehood.
It is a good thing that the bible does not teach it. If it did, it would, by itself, falsify the whole of Christianity and both Judaism and Islam as well for that matter.
Why? Why couldn't that be true? Because you said so?
It doesn't teach that a thousands years IS a single day or that a single day IS a thousand years. It simply likens one to the other. How would an infinite amount of time and a God who is outstandingly patient not be able to reasonably liken a thousand years to a single day when compared to the tiny time scales we mere mortals are used to dealing with? It sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
There is no passage of the bible that says anything similar to "God exists outside of time." In fact, the concept of timelessness is entirely foreign to the bible altogether, never mind in relation to God. The only reason you believe it is because Augustine of Hippo imported the concept into Catholicism from the Classics (i.e. Aristotle and Plato) and it survived the Reformation fully intact because Luther, an Augustinian monk, broke from Rome, not Greece.
There's much more to say but I'm out of time! (See what I did there?
Clete
His response to me establishing that God cannot exist outside of time, he responded by saying the Jesus was both on Earth and in Heaven at the same time as though it was somehow relevant to anything I said, which of course it isn't, but the point is that if the logic works in his brain in one direction, I wonder if he'd let it work in the other direction. My bet is that he wouldn't.
Time was not created! Where do you read a word about the creation of time? You don't! It isn't in the bible any more than is the self-defeating notion of God's timeless existence. You only believe otherwise because of Plato, marke! You didn't learn it from scripture. It isn't in there.
We can visit this another time, if you want, because I'd like to hear what you have to say about John 10:38; 14:10-11
There is no point debating what nobody can know. If time existed before the universe was created what was God doing all that time? There is no answer. Humans are incapable of comprehending eternity past, with or without time.
Interestingly, I gave the same argument. Time is a property only of a physical universe. God is relational, as per ozos concern, to time thus involved with it, but it is essential that we see God as not constrained in any way, by containers. Time measured physical change and duration.
How many years did God exist before He created the universe and everything in it? What was happening during all that 'time' when there was nothing but God and nothing in existence apart from God?
Humans, including Christians, should not try to venture too far into areas which cannot possibly be understood in human terms.
