Over the last couple days I have been reading through the chapter on creation in Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. I think that Wayne did a terrific job of breaking down the various views and evidence in a comprehensive & approachable way. As I was contemplating the Biblical and scientific evidence and arguments between Young Earth Creationism (YEC) and Old Earth Creationism (OEC), I was struck by one thing… none of the arguments appear to consider the omnipresent & omnitemporal nature of God.
Did God create a “mature” earth that instantly appeared as he spoke things into existence over 6 days? Were the “Days” described in Genesis actually longer than 24 hours…. Perhaps each millions or billions of years? Did the matter that makes up the universe already exist in some other form? Are modern scientific advances in methods for dating matter completely wrong?
The apparent contradictions between a plain reading of the scriptures and the evidence available from both Christian and secular scientific research have been the topic of countless debates. But what if we stopped thinking of the creation event from a human perspective, and started thinking about it from the perspective of God?
God does not relate to time and space the way we do so we should not look at God’s acts of creation from our perspective. When we consider Einstein’s theory of relativity and the relationship between space and time, there is simply no way to separate the existence of what we call time from our physical universe. Therefore when God created the universe, He also created all of spacetime. Since He created and actively sustains the entire physical universe, He must also have created and actively sustains all of time. Indeed scripture tells us that
In him we live and move and have our being
Acts 17:28 (ESV)
and
He upholds the universe by the word of his power
Hebrews 1:3b (ESV)
Both life and movement require time as well as a physical universe to exist, and these verses (among several others) tell us that all of spacetime exists in Him and is actively sustained by Him. Therefore, God’s consciousness is not bound to one specific moment in time and space. Indeed, scripture seems to say that we should not simply believe God is present in all of spacetime and instead we should realize that all of time and space are present in Him. All of spacetime exists in Him and is sustained by Him.
Whenever God interacts with spacetime, His interactions are not limited in their impact to only affect events that occur after the point in time where He chooses to act. Rather, His sovereign actions can have any impact He desires on all of spacetime. This concept is clearly demonstrated in scripture through the redemptive effect of Jesus’s death and resurrection on everyone who was saved prior to Jesus’s death.
In Genesis 15:6 we read:
And he [Abraham] believed the Lord, and He counted it to him as righteousness.
We also see in Genesis 22:8a
Abraham said, ‘God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’
When we look at the faith in God’s promises that Abraham demonstrated and we study the Jewish sacrificial system God designed, it is plain to see that these things point forward to the focal point in time when Jesus’s death and resurrection occurred. From God’s perspective, however, that redemptive event happening was set in stone by His will & perfect plan when He created all of spacetime.
Consider this analogy: when an author writes a novel, they sometimes start that work with a particular end scene in mind. They sometimes even write the last chapter of the book first! They then outline a timeline of events that lead up to the incredible ending they envisioned. As they go through and backfill the rest of the book they may get to chapter 23 and decide that a character should have blonde hair instead of red! They can retroactively go through the “timeline” of the chapters they have already written and change that characters hair color. After they finish writing the main story, they may decide that this novel really needs a prologue, thereby extending the entire timeline of the book, perhaps by hundreds or thousands of years, to some prior age that occurred before the real story. Perhaps this author buckles down and writes his whole novel in a matter of days or weeks from their perspective, but the story within the book itself contains a timeline that spans centuries or millennia! At the end the writing process, the author looks at his completed work, and decides it is good… perhaps even very good. The book is published… then it is set… the work is complete… it is finished.
When God decided that there should be stars in the sky, for example, perhaps He didn’t cause the stars to instantly exist at that single moment in time on Day 4, but rather instantiated a timeline that was internally consistent into the spacetime continuum He was creating. Every photon of starlight hitting Earth has a “valid” 14-billion-year ID card that scientist can observe, because God authored the entire journey of that photon from the temporal focal point of the 4th day of creation. He wrote in a “prologue” to essentially establish the 14 billion years of celestial activity that would be required for the stars to appear in the sky from the perspective of Earth at the anchor point of the day He created them!
Not only that, He established the exact patterns of celestial activity that has happened since Day 4 of creation and will continue happening until He creates a new heaven and new earth (Revelation 21). So on Day 4 God created all of the celestial activity required to accomplish His plan for all of spacetime, including perfectly timed cosmic events He designed as signs and wonders, for example:
- The long day of Joshua (Joshua 10:12-13)
- The sun dial of Ahaz moving backwards (2 Kings 20:9-11)
- The star of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:2)
- The darkness at the crucifixion (Luke 23:44-45)
- The prophesied cosmic events described in Revelation 6:12-13.
Really let that sink in…each time He spoke something into existence on a Day of creation… the entirety of time & space bent to His will to make it so!
God brings out the starry host by number and calls them by name, sustaining their existence.
Isaiah 40:26 (ESV)
This is an important distinction because the strongest criticism against Young Earth theories used in defense of a literal 6 day creation centers around the truthfulness of God. Since God is truth, He could not create “fake” history by making the universe “appear” older than it actually is in a way that would deceive or trick people who are using modern dating methods. However, if He wrote a history into the spacetime block, that history is as “real” as the present moment because His will sustains all time and space.
God is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the great “I AM”. Every moment in time exists in Him and is sustained by Him, so “when” He does something is a distinction that only really matters from the perspective of us temporal mortals. Of vastly more significance, I believe, is that if God decides to act within the dimension of the spacetime He created, He must be fully committed to the effects each of His actions have on the spacetime continuum.
God is the same, yesterday, today and forever, because He experiences all of the effects of His choices and actions eternally for as long as He wills to maintain spacetime. Because He decided to send his Son to die on the cross, everyone who God elected to save by grace through faith (whether they lived before or after the temporal focal point of Jesus’s death & resurrection) was saved. When He looks upon one of His adopted sons or daughters, He does not just see them in a single point in time. He sees them from the time they were born through their entire eternal future all at once! In the same way, He sees the entirety of the universe in one spacetime block that He created and sustains from beyond the 4 dimensions of height, width, depth, and time that we can perceive.
I propose that when we consider this perspective, there is no actual contradiction between what human scientists can observe from our perspective in the physical universe and the Biblical narrative that God created all of space time in 6 literal 24 hour days. Indeed, I propose He could have created all of it in one nanosecond if that was the story He wanted to write. I believe that He elected to spread that effort out over 6 days for our benefit, so that He could establish a pattern of work and rest that He knew we would need.
The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.
Mark 2:27 (ESV)
From the Author’s chair, the work took six days… from the perspective of the universe and characters in the “ink” of spacetime, the story is billions of years deep.