What I Believe (And Why): The Nature Of God

God transcends Time and Space in a way we humans cannot fully comprehend.

There are hints of God's transcendence in Genesis & Exodus, tantalizing glimpses at what we now call quantum mechanics.* God tells Abraham "I have made you a great nation" before Isaac is born; using the past tense to describe something that has not occurred yet.  He was talking about something from His POV that had already happened, or more properly, something that was happening simultaneously with the future and the past.

Likewise, He identifies Himself as I AM WHO I AM to Moses, not a God of the present but the past & future as well.

In other words, God exists in what the Buddhists would refer to as the Eternal Now:  He is simultaneously everywhere all the time, eternally experiencing everything past / present / future.

That's why God's prophecies can be trusted.  He didn’t have to “make” anything happen, He doesn’t have to guess or predict what is going to happen.

He simply reports what He sees happening in the future simultaneously with His conversation with Abraham.

We human beings have free will & uncertain futures in the Space / Time universe God has created for us; we can absolutely decide if we wish to follow God or not. We are not preordained to do so one way or another.

But God is already experiencing our decision and in fact had already experienced it before our great-great-grandparents were born. God is experiencing / has experienced things that will not occur for another thousand centuries. To us humans the future is wide open & infinite.  From our particular POV they are, but God has had already / is right now experiencing every decision every human being has / is / ever will be making.

There are no surprises for God.

There is no human frame of reference for that.  The best we can do is come up with the paradox of free will & predestination coexisting simultaneously w/o canceling each other out.

We know it is God's intent that every human being choose to accept His grace.

We know every human is capable of making that choice.

We know many humans will either not make it, or actively reject it, but which humans they are, we cannot say.

God is right now experiencing the rejection of every human who has / is / will ever reject Him, just as He is right now experiencing the acceptance of every human who has / is / will accept him.

He has done everything He possibly can to make His grace easy for us to obtain.

But ultimately we have to choose to accept it.

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*  While we’re always learning more, to date everything humanity has learned about quantum physics has only confirmed what the Bible has indicated of the miraculous nature of God.

Consider:  There are worms living deep in caves that (a) have no eyes (b) have no cells in their meager brains to process information about light (c) are in an environment of such unvarying sameness that they are incapable of sensing differences in temperature.  How could such worms possibly comprehend the values of a color wheel?

Likewise, humanity is “blind” to the Universe as God perceives it.  How can human concepts of time and nature possibly be an accurate reflection of what they mean to God?  The best we can hope for from human prophets and apostles is a rough approximation.

Fortunately, all the important core stuff that God wants us to know about -- y’know, love your neighbor as you love yourself, treat others the way you want to be treated, etc., etc., and of course, etc. -- is much easier to comprehend.

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