God is the ultimate author of the Bible, though He inspired human writers to put His message into the form we have it. Because of that, and because it is written from His viewpoint, how He talks about time can sometimes be confusing to us because He is outside of time and sees the past, present, and future simultaneously.
I created this chart and the short video that goes with it, to help you visualize it (though admittedly, we may never fully understand it). —
Click on the chart to download the pdf.
Why understanding God’s view of time is useful as we read through the Bible
It is important however to attempt to understand it or at least accept it for the prophecy in the Bible to make sense. If God is outside of time it is not hard to imagine that He can speak confidently about future events. He can then inspire the writers of scripture to write about them accurately hundreds, sometimes thousands of years before they happen.
If you don’t understand God’s view of time and accept the reality that He is outside of it and can speak in this way, then you are forced into the anti-supernaturalist explanation that all of prophecy was written after the fact.
When looked at objectively, this view becomes tortured and ultimately rather goofy. Instead of accepting that various prophets, with clear time stamps of their writing and thousands of years of tradition, spoke when the Bible said they did, and that they could correctly foretell the future because the God outside of time spoke through them, those who don’t believe that lump all the prophets into some vague, anonymous group who somehow wrote all these books sometime, somewhere (with no historical verification of any of this) after the Babylonian captivity.
They are still left with over 300 prophecies about Jesus that he specifically fulfilled.
It is much more intellectually honest and mentally restful to accept that the God who inspired the prophets was outside of time
You still may not accept Him as Savior and bow to Him as Lord, but to accept the view of God outside of time who spoke to those who recorded His Words does not require the unproven mental gymnastics required to believe otherwise.