11. In-N-Out

I guess Saint Augustine said everyone knows what Time is until they’re asked to define it.  When I heard that, I was naturally like, “Challenge accepted, sir.”  I thought about the fact that “a second” is just a pair of markers used to measure.  The length of a second was proposed by someone and other people accepted it (yup), and it could’ve been any tempo; really slow, or crazy fast, there's a Start marker and a Stop marker.  It doesn’t matter to me what the interval is between the markers; they simply provide something like little goal posts with something between them.  My answer to Augustine is:

“The presence of sequence is what defines time.”  This, then That.  Any interval.

And just about everything here on earth is bound to sequence.  Every single thing in nature is built on waveforms: light, sound, the visibility of invisible atoms.  Think about a sine wave: there's a top to it, and then a center point and then a bottom before it heads back upward.  Sequence is required for a wave to exist.  Up, then down, then up.  This, then that.  Waveforms are the triggers behind all of our senses; all the light and reflection that we see and sounds that we hear, and even the sensation of touch.  Look in small enough detail at any aspect of the entire physical world and you’ll find waves, and thus, sequence – the hallmark of Time.

Why am I talking about this?  I’ve heard many people confidently declare that God exists outside of time, but cannot verbalize how or why, nor why he would have made every part of our human experience bound to sequence if that’s not his experience.  Things that make me go hmmmmm.

For the record, the scriptures never say that he exists outside of time, and that claim is the result of some really weak theories.  Men have said the Lord was around before time existed because it says, “In the beginning,” and that time was created on the fourth day when the sun and moon were created to measure days... but we’ve already discussed that the beginning of the book is actually talking about “in the beginning of this part of the story,” because the events leading to demonic angels being cast to earth happened before Genesis 1:1.  The first thing we see in the story is waves, right?  The earth is a formless void of deep, troubled waters (full of demons), and those waves can’t be waves without sequence, right?  Up, then down.

And then there’s the 2Peter 3:8 quote, “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day,” which only really says that the Father is not subject to Kronos’ authority (wut?) while we seem to be bound to those rules.  If you think logically about the Holy Ghost’s statement, it’s a lot closer to saying, “With a billionaire, a hundred bucks is like a penny to the rest of us.”  They both still use money.  And the Father spends every day with every single person and creature on the planet at the same time, so you can add up our collective day multiplied by billions and see him investing a thousand years worth of cumulative time into his creation every single day.  It also means he can break the rules.

So these arguments that God exists outside of time take the scriptures further than what they actually say -- which is what scripture calls “imaginations” -- so naturally that teaching would cause us confusion.

Anyway, I propose a totally different approach to the idea.  Humans grope around at the thought of God being outside of time because there are some elements of him where it’s true, and we have this gut feeling about it.  And it can be proven with scripture.  Annnd there’s value in this; we can save ourselves a lot of trouble (and time, ironically) when we understand the mechanics of our Father’s outside-of-timeness.

Honestly, I don’t wanna talk about anything if it’s not going to have a direct impact on our lives following Jesus to our Father, so all this theory is going somewhere practical. Okay, moving on.

The fact that “seconds” even exist to measure time illustrates that sequence is time’s idiom.

We know that whoever proposed the length of a second was hearing prophetically what’s in heaven, because the angels decided measurements and men “feel” them from the prophetic gift.  Revelation teaches this, where John is shown the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, and is told to record an angel who is measuring it.

Rev 21:16-17  And he measured the city with his rod, 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal.  (so it’s a cube, that’s kind of interesting, right?)  He also measured its wall, 144 cubits by human measurement, which is also an angel’s measurement.

Angels defined measurements long before people were around, and ours match theirs – not by coincidence.

In article 6 we talked about how angels decided where borders would lie in the earth and we “sensed” that as well, when we thought we were drawing lines of our own decision.  So we start to see that heaven defines lots of things that people's prophetic gifts pick up on and bring to earth.

Let’s say with some level of confidence that “a second” was defined by heaven.  Time clearly exists in the third heaven because there is music there, as well as measured periods of silence and definitely sequence.

To set the scene, in 2Cor 12:2 Paul speaks of John, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven”

Then in Rev 8:1 John is saying, When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.

Rev 5:9 And they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy are you to take the scroll and open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.”

Just the existence of speech in heaven means time is involved.  You can’t make an intelligible sentence, saying one word followed by another -- meaning, without time.  You can’t play music without sequence.  Melodies of sequential pitches; louder, softer, higher and lower pitches, and empty space between the sounds.  You can’t hear any of it without waveforms communicating “things in a certain order”.

So the third heaven is loaded with evidence that it is time-bound.  And you sit there and scratch your head and think, “Okay, then in which heaven does God live outside of time?”  Ooo, I love that you asked!  Let’s talk about it.

Let’s talk about Love.

In a previous article we talked about “the three things that remain when we come to perfection are faith, hope, and love.”  Two of these exist outside of time.  The way to wrap our minds around it is to look at the character of our Father.

Hope is the one that’s bound to time.  If I hope for something, it means I have this vision of what is possible, and I look forward to it appearing.  There is a sequence to it.  You can’t hope for something that already happened or hope for something that’s in front of your face in the same moment.  There is always a beginning marker (I get the vision and believe it) and an ending marker (I see it come to pass, or not).

Love, the way our Father shows us, is not dependent on sequence.

What can you do that will make him love you more?

What action can you take, or not take, to make him love you more?

That’s not how he works, right?  There’s nothing you can do that can make him love you less, either.  There’s also nothing you don’t do that can make him love you more or less.

There is absolutely no “This, then Love” from him.  The Lamb was marked before the foundation of the world according to 1Peter 1:20, meaning our Father chose to purchase you before you made any decisions to do right or wrong.  Is there anything you can do to make Jesus have changed his mind, and decide not come to cleanse you of your sins with his holy blood? Jesus never looks at the cross, then looks at you, and says, "Y'know... never mind."

There is no “this, then that” in any of this.  Love is a characteristic of God that exists apart from time.

Faith is also not sequence-bound.  When you have faith in someone, you just know that you know that they’ll do what they say, or be who they say.  You have enough evidence and experience that you don’t doubt them.  There’s nothing that can change your mind about them.  (kind of the reverse flow of the Lord’s love for us, right?)  Faith is equivalent to expectation, so with faith there is no, “If this happens, then I’ll believe.”  No “this, then that”; no sequence.

Remember how Jesus didn’t bother with men in John 6:30 when they said, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you?”  There wasn’t going to be any faith in the outcome of that manner of thinking.

Like, I’m sure beyond any doubt that I am currently saved by Jesus’ blood sacrifice.  I have faith and I (boldly) expect that my name is in the book of life.  He is who he says he is, always, every time.  It’s not a hope that, “Maybe if I do all the steps of the law correctly, I might be saved.”  Actually, a lot of people name hope as “faith”.  If you hear, “I have faith that someday…” -- nope, that’s hope.

While we’re on the topic, “belief” is also not the same as faith – it’s an element that can undergird faith and also other things.  Hope is also founded on belief.  You get this vision for something down the road, and you believe it can become.  In Gen 15:6 the Lord promises to Abraham that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars.  And he believed the LORD and it was credited to him as righteousness.  Believing what the Lord says about something you may never see.

Faith has unquestionable expectation in it, which Hebrews 11:1 calls “assurance”.

I can tell you right now, you have great faith in gravity.  You never think about the time it won't pull you down in exactly the amount that you’ve learned to expect.  We have such faith in some aspects of nature that we call them “laws of nature”.  They are so consistently measurable and obedient to mathematics that we expect eternal consistency.  It’s the time when we start to have the same level of faith in the laws of supernature that I’m getting excited about!  (i have hope for that! hahaha)

The centurion in Matthew 8:9 had actual faith. "Jesus, you don't even need to lay hands on my servant. I know that demons have to go when you say, 'Go,' and that's just the law of supernature." Jesus marvels at the fact that someone understands, believes, and then expects the spirit to respond to authority just like the natural does.

Thinking about our faith in the Lord is a great way to relate to “how God can be outside of time”.  He is unchanging, always gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.  We expect him to be that way and know that nothing is going to change that about him; therefore it’s a good, tangible example of faith.  And if he is unchanging, there is no sequence in him, is there?  We have identified, therefore, an aspect of God that is outside of time.

Now here’s the practical part of all of this.

The Father’s love and faithfulness is Who He Is.  They’re aspects of his character.  He really wants us to know him by his character, because he wants us to recognize him when he appears to us.  He equally wants us to recognize what’s not him; what comes in his name but is false or counterfeit.

In Exodus 3:13 when Moses asks God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”  God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”  And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

He wants so much for us to know his character that he names himself “I AM” to us.  “Just keep thinking about who I am.”  “I am love.”  “You can’t do anything to change who I am.  Nobody can do anything to make me love you more or less.  My love is unconditional.”

Think about that word, “unconditional.”  There is no sequence allowed by that word.  In mathematics, a logical condition is “If this, then that, otherwise something else.”  Unconditional literally means there is no This, then That.

So his love is outside of time.  His characteristics are outside of time because they cannot be changed by any event.

The problem is, pretty much none of us have ever had that love modeled to us.  Our enemy creates counterfeit versions of every pure thing of the Father, and he wants us to trust in the counterfeits.  The version of love that we know is the love demonstrated by our parents.  Then we demonstrate that to others.  And that version of love almost always, always says, “If you do this thing I like, I’ll approve of you and you will feel loved.”  “If you don’t do that thing I don’t like, you did a good job and you’ll feel the love.”  We do, and do not, looking for the dopamine hit of approval that we incorrectly associate with Love.  Counterfeit to the max, it’s nothing like our Father’s love for us.

So I said we could save some time and trouble by understanding how our Father can be outside of time, right?  Here’s a lesson: If someone says they love us and we recognize that they’re really just dosing approval that’s conditional to our behavior… understand that the counterfeit is being sold to us.

Do we run for the hills?  No!  We just fished and caught something!  Start talking to the Holy Spirit to find out what to pray ;)

Begin with, “Holy Spirit, fill this one with your true love.  With your help, in the name of Jesus, I heal their wounds that make them associate performance and acceptance with love.”  Then continue to the part where I know I’m clueless and he knows everything, so please help give me the understanding of which spirits I’m dealing with and the words that will heal.  Keep pressing into that, and watch that person start to change.

And you just saved yourself months and years chasing approval and thinking you were loved and wondering why it never felt too good or fair.

I bless us, in the name of Jesus, to learn our Father’s love, to have it overwrite our approval-based misinterpretations of love, so that we will become like him and he will be glorified among the people we learn to demonstrate genuine love to.

I'm always thankful that you spend your time with me.

- Garrison