God’s view of time

The Incredible Implications of God’s View of Time

June 26, 2022 by bible805

Though it sounds complex, the topic of this lesson has important and practical implications for how you live day-to-day.

Let me explain—as this lesson shows, God’s view of time, seeing and knowing all that is past, present, and future is what enables us to understand prophecy and trust that what He promised in the past He will fulfill in the future just as He made promises in the past in the Old Testament that He fulfilled in the New Testament.

Though that is comforting, it also brings up the question of if God determined the major events of Biblical history, does He predetermine my every action? If that’s so, am a responsible for them, or just a puppet?

This lesson answers those questions–so listen or watch to find out the answers!

Below is the podcast, video, notes, and a link to the chart, and a short video explaining God’s view of time talked about in this lesson.

Handout of God's View of Time — CLICK ON the image above to download a copy of this chart.

Infographic–God’s view of Time, essential to our understanding of prophecy and much of the Bible

June 7, 2022 by bible805

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.

Intro to the Prophets–much more than a bunch of angry old men

June 22, 2019 by bible805

When you hear the term prophecy, what do you think of?

For many people, we think of dire warnings of an end-time apocalypse, with images of our favorite sci-fi movie dancing in our heads.

But is that what prophecy, specifically prophecy in the Bible is all about?
In our podcast today we’ll see that that the books of the Bible after the poetic books we just studied, that we call the Prophetic books and that make up a major part of our Old Testament are about so much more and that they have surprising applications to ups, not just in the future, but for how we live our lives today.

This section of the Bible can be confusing as the parts that go together historically with the preaching of the prophets are scattered in different places in the Old Testament. The history is told from differing viewpoints in both Kings and Chronicles and then the prophetic books that were written during specific historical times. All of these parts are grouped at the end of our Bibles and not precisely in order of when the prophetic messages were delivered.

This makes it extremely challenging to try to make sense of it all, particularly of the prophets who at first reading appear to be simply ranting against evil interspersed with cryptic warnings about future calamities.

However, when the prophets are read IN the proper places where their messages were spoken in historical contexts and when we understand how to correctly read and interpret prophetic messages, the Old Testament and what the Lord wants us to learn from it will open up to you in new and exciting ways.

The notes are printed following, and for a copy of the PDF notes that go along with the podcast, CLICK the following link: Notes for an Intro to the Prophets