Chapter 17

Genesis and Creation

God Acts, Creates, and Enters Temporal Relationship with the World

Introduction: Why the Creation Story Matters for the God-and-Time Question

If you want to know what kind of God the Bible describes, the very best place to start is at the very beginning. The opening chapters of Genesis do more than tell us that God created the world. They show us how God created — and the "how" turns out to be enormously important for understanding God's relationship to time. What we find in Genesis 1–2 is a God who acts in stages, creates in sequence, evaluates His work step by step, rests after finishing, and enters into an ongoing, living relationship with the world He has made. This is not the portrait of a timeless, static deity gazing on all of reality in a single frozen instant. This is the portrait of a God who does things — one after another, in a meaningful order, across a stretch of time.

In this chapter, I want to walk carefully through the creation narrative of Genesis 1:1–2:3 and show why it provides powerful biblical evidence for divine temporality — the view that God genuinely experiences time, with a real "before" and "after" in His life. We will look closely at the Hebrew text, examine the theological significance of key words like bara (בָּרָא, "to create") and bereshit (בְּרֵאשִׁית, "in the beginning"), and pay attention to the way the narrative presents God's creative work as an ordered sequence of temporal acts. We will also tackle some of the biggest philosophical questions raised by the creation account: Did God create time itself? What was God doing "before" creation? And how should we understand the relationship between the created, physical time of our universe and whatever form of time existed in God's own life before the world began?

My thesis for this chapter is straightforward: the creation narrative of Genesis 1–2 presents God as a temporal agent who creates in sequence, acts in stages, evaluates His work, and enters into genuine temporal relationship with the world He has made. This portrait is deeply problematic for divine timelessness but perfectly natural for divine temporality.¹

As we have seen in the overview chapter (Chapter 16), the Bible consistently portrays God as a being who acts within the flow of time. The creation narrative is the foundational instance of that portrayal. Everything else in Scripture — the covenants, the exodus, the prophets, the Incarnation, the coming return of Christ — flows from the initial act of creation. And that initial act, as Genesis presents it, is thoroughly temporal.

The Text: Genesis 1:1–2:3 in the ESV

Before we begin our analysis, we need to have the text in front of us. I will provide the full ESV text of the creation narrative in stages as we move through the argument, but let us begin with the opening verses that set the stage for everything that follows:

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day." (Genesis 1:1–5, ESV)

Already in these first five verses, we encounter a flood of temporal language. God creates. The Spirit hovers. God speaks. Light appears. God sees. God evaluates. God separates. God names. Evening comes. Morning follows. A day is counted. Every single sentence describes an action, and every action takes place in a sequence. There is a clear "before" and "after" in the narrative: before God speaks, there is darkness; after God speaks, there is light. Before God evaluates, the light simply exists; after He evaluates, it is declared "good." The sequence matters. The order matters. The temporal structure of the narrative is not incidental — it is the very backbone of the creation account.

"In the Beginning": Bereshit and the Inauguration of Created Time

The opening words of the Bible — bereshit bara Elohim (בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים) — are among the most analyzed and debated words in all of Scripture. The phrase bereshit (בְּרֵאשִׁית), translated "in the beginning," immediately sets a temporal frame for everything that follows. This is not a description of a timeless state of affairs. It is a marker of a starting point — the inauguration of something new.²

There has been some scholarly debate about whether bereshit in Genesis 1:1 should be read as an absolute statement ("In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth") or as a subordinate clause ("When God began to create the heavens and the earth..."). Most evangelical scholars, and I believe the strongest grammatical evidence, support the traditional reading of Genesis 1:1 as an absolute statement describing the commencement of God's creative work.³ As William Lane Craig observes, the verse "states, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' ... Thus with majestic simplicity the author of the opening chapter of Genesis differentiated his viewpoint not only from that of the ancient creation myths of Israel's neighbors but also effectively from pantheism, panentheism, and polytheism."⁴

What does this "beginning" signify? At least two things are clear. First, it marks the beginning of the created order — the heavens and the earth come into existence at this point. Second, it marks the beginning of created, physical, measurable time. The expression "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day" (Gen 1:5) establishes a framework of temporal measurement from the very first day of creation. The concept of "days" — with evenings and mornings — is inherently temporal. Time, at least in its created, measurable form, begins here.⁵

But here we must ask a crucial question: Did God create time itself at creation? Many classical theologians, following Augustine, have answered yes. Augustine argued in Confessions Book XI that time is a feature of the created world — it came into existence along with the world, and therefore God exists outside of time altogether. On this view, asking "what was God doing before creation?" is a meaningless question, because there was no "before" creation. Time and the universe were created together.⁶

Craig notes that James Barr, in his influential study of biblical time language, argued that the Genesis account, taken together with the expression "the first day," could be intended to teach that the beginning was the beginning of time itself, not merely of the physical universe.⁷ This reading has some support from ancient Near Eastern parallels. John D. Currid, examining the Egyptian background to the Genesis cosmogony, argues that both the Egyptian and Hebrew creation accounts involve the idea that creation marks "the first time" — the beginning of temporal reality.⁸

However, I believe this conclusion, while understandable, needs careful qualification. There is a critical distinction between created, physical, measurable time and time itself as a feature of God's own life. I agree that Genesis 1:1 marks the beginning of the first kind of time — the kind of time that involves days and nights, evenings and mornings, the rotation of celestial bodies, and the measurable passage of physical events. But I do not believe it marks the beginning of time in every sense, because I believe — following R. T. Mullins — that time is an attribute of God's own being, grounded in the dynamic relational life of the Trinity, and therefore existed before the creation of the physical universe.⁹

We will return to this crucial distinction later in the chapter. For now, the important point is that bereshit marks a real beginning — something genuinely new came into existence. And this "beginning" implies a "before" — a state of affairs in which the universe did not exist and then a state of affairs in which it did. That transition from "no universe" to "universe" is itself a temporal event, a genuine change from one state to another. As we will see, this simple point creates enormous difficulties for the doctrine of divine timelessness.

The Verb Bara: Creation as a Temporal Divine Act

The Hebrew verb bara (בָּרָא), translated "created" in Genesis 1:1, is one of the most theologically significant words in the entire Old Testament. It is a word reserved exclusively for God — in the entire Hebrew Bible, only God is ever the subject of bara. Human beings make, fashion, form, and build, but only God creates in the sense conveyed by bara.¹⁰

Craig highlights this important observation in his analysis of Genesis 1: the verb bara "is a word used only with God as its subject and which does not presuppose a material substratum."¹¹ This is the foundation of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo — creation "out of nothing." God did not fashion the world out of pre-existing material, as a sculptor shapes clay. He brought the entire created order into existence from nothing at all. No pre-existing raw material. No primordial chaos waiting to be organized (though Genesis 1:2 describes an initial unformed state, the point of verse 1 is that even this initial material was created by God). No competing gods or cosmic forces. Just God — and then, by His word, everything else.

Now, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo has enormous implications for the God-and-time question. If God created the universe out of nothing, then there was a state of affairs in which only God existed and the universe did not. And then, by God's free decision and powerful word, the universe came into being. This means God transitioned from being alone — without a universe — to being the Creator of a universe. Something genuinely new happened. And that means God underwent a real change, which means God is temporal.¹²

Mullins puts this argument with great clarity in The End of the Timeless God. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo affirms that there is a state of affairs where God exists without creation and another state of affairs where God exists with creation. God cannot be the Creator until He actually brings the universe into existence. When the universe came into being out of nothing, God began to stand in a new causal relation — a relation He did not previously have. This transition from "not creating" to "creating" is a genuine change, and genuine change requires time.¹³

How do defenders of divine timelessness respond? The classical theist typically argues that God did not "begin" to create — He is "eternally creating." Whatever a timeless God does, He does timelessly. From all eternity, God is sustaining the universe in being. On this view, God's creative act is not a temporal event with a before and after, but a timeless, changeless act that somehow produces a temporal result.¹⁴

But this response faces a devastating problem, which Mullins formulates as what he calls "The Revenge of Creational Change." Even if we grant that God is "eternally creating" in some unspecified sense, it still seems that once creation comes into existence, God stands in a new causal relation to the universe — a relation He did not have before. There is a state of affairs where God exists alone, and then a state of affairs where God exists in causal relation to a universe. This looks like genuine change, regardless of how we describe God's creative act.¹⁵

The bottom line is this: the verb bara in Genesis 1:1 describes a divine act — and acts are inherently temporal. An act involves an agent doing something, producing a result. There is a logical and temporal order: the agent decides, the agent acts, the result occurs. We can try to reinterpret this temporal language away, but doing so requires us to empty the verb of its natural meaning. When Genesis says God "created," it means God did something — and doing something is a temporal activity.

The Six Days: Creation as an Ordered Temporal Sequence

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Genesis 1 creation account, from the standpoint of the God-and-time debate, is its presentation of creation as an ordered sequence of divine acts spread across six days. God does not create everything all at once in a single instantaneous act. He creates step by step, day by day, in a carefully structured progression. Let us walk through the six days and pay attention to what each one tells us about God's temporal activity.

Day One (Genesis 1:3–5): Light

"And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day." (Genesis 1:3–5, ESV)

The pattern established on Day One is repeated throughout the entire creation week: God speaks, something new comes into existence, God evaluates what He has made, and the day concludes with the refrain "And there was evening and there was morning." This pattern is thoroughly temporal. Speaking is a temporal act — it involves the production of words in sequence. Creating is a temporal act — something that did not exist before now exists. Evaluating is a temporal act — God looks at what He has made and then pronounces it "good." The refrain "evening and morning" explicitly marks the passage of time. Every element of this pattern requires temporal sequence.¹⁶

Day Two (Genesis 1:6–8): The Expanse

"And God said, 'Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.' And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day." (Genesis 1:6–8, ESV)

On Day Two, God creates the expanse — the sky — separating the waters above from the waters below. Notice the verbs: God "said," God "made," God "separated," God "called." Each of these is an action verb, and the narrative presents them in sequence. God did not perform all of these actions simultaneously; He did them one after another. This sequential ordering is not accidental or merely literary — it is how the inspired author of Genesis chose to present God's creative work, and it tells us something real about how God operates.

Day Three (Genesis 1:9–13): Land, Seas, and Vegetation

"And God said, 'Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.' And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, 'Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.' And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day." (Genesis 1:9–13, ESV)

Day Three is particularly interesting because it contains two creative acts: the gathering of waters and the appearance of dry land, followed by the creation of vegetation. God evaluates each act separately — "God saw that it was good" appears twice on this day. This double evaluation further underscores the temporal nature of God's activity. He does one thing, evaluates it, then does another thing, and evaluates that too. The sequence of create-evaluate-create-evaluate makes no sense if God is performing all of His creative work in a single timeless act.

Day Four (Genesis 1:14–19): Sun, Moon, and Stars

"And God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.' And it was so. And God made the two great lights — the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night — and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day." (Genesis 1:14–19, ESV)

On Day Four, God creates the sun, moon, and stars, and He assigns them a specific temporal purpose: they are to serve "for signs and for seasons, and for days and years." In other words, these celestial bodies are created to mark and measure time. God creates the instruments of temporal measurement. This is significant because it shows that measurable time — clock-time, calendar-time — is itself a product of God's creative activity. God designs the temporal structure of the created order. He is, as Mullins puts it, "the divine timemaker."¹⁷

Day Five (Genesis 1:20–23): Sea Creatures and Birds

"And God said, 'Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.' So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.' And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day." (Genesis 1:20–23, ESV)

Day Five introduces a new element: God not only creates but blesses His creatures. This blessing — "Be fruitful and multiply" — is relational and forward-looking. God speaks a word of purpose and destiny over His creatures. He is not merely producing objects; He is entering into relationship with living beings, giving them a future, directing them toward a goal. Blessing is inherently temporal because it is oriented toward the future — toward what these creatures will become and accomplish over time.

Day Six (Genesis 1:24–31): Land Animals and Humanity

"And God said, 'Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds — livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.' And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.' So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.' And God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.' And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day." (Genesis 1:24–31, ESV)

Day Six is the climax of the creation narrative. God creates land animals and then, as the crown of His creative work, human beings — male and female, made in God's own image. Several temporal features stand out here. First, there is a deliberative moment: "Let us make man in our image." The plural language ("us," "our") suggests intra-Trinitarian deliberation — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit conferring about what they are about to do. Deliberation is inherently temporal. You consider, you discuss, you decide, you act. Each step follows the previous one.¹⁸

Second, the final evaluation is heightened: "God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." The shift from "good" to "very good" implies that the creation has grown in complexity and value over the six days. There has been a buildup, a progression, a development — and at the end, God surveys the finished product and declares it not merely good but very good. This kind of culminating evaluation only makes sense if the creative process has unfolded over time, building toward a climax.

Day Seven (Genesis 2:1–3): God Rests

"Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation." (Genesis 2:1–3, ESV)

Day Seven is perhaps the most significant day for the God-and-time question. God rests. The Hebrew verb is shabat (שָׁבַת), meaning to cease, to stop, to desist from activity. God transitions from working to resting. He moves from the activity of creating to the repose of enjoying what He has made. This transition — from working to resting — is a temporal transition. It involves a "before" (God was creating) and an "after" (God has stopped creating and is now resting). A timeless being cannot rest, because resting implies a previous state of activity from which one has now ceased. You cannot stop doing something unless you were doing it at an earlier time.¹⁹

"God Saw That It Was Good": Evaluation as a Temporal Act

One of the most theologically rich features of the Genesis 1 creation account is the repeated refrain: "God saw that it was good" (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). This refrain appears seven times throughout the creation week — six times as "good" (tov, טוֹב) and once, at the climax, as "very good" (tov meod, טוֹב מְאֹד). What does this evaluative language tell us about God's relationship to time?

I believe it tells us something crucial: God's evaluation of His creative work implies temporal sequence. The pattern is always the same — first God creates, then God evaluates. He makes the light, then He sees that it is good. He creates the dry land, then He sees that it is good. He forms the animals, then He sees that they are good. The evaluation follows the creation; it does not occur simultaneously with it. God acts, and then He reflects on what He has done.²⁰

Now, a defender of divine timelessness might object: "This is anthropomorphic language. God doesn't really need to 'look' at what He has made and then decide whether it is good. He knows it is good even before He makes it, because He is omniscient." And there is a grain of truth in this objection — God certainly knows the goodness of His creation from all eternity. But the objection misses the point. The narrative does not present God as needing to discover whether His creation is good, as if He were uncertain. Rather, it presents God as taking pleasure in His work — as savoring what He has made, delighting in the result of His creative activity. This is the language of enjoyment, of satisfaction, of relational engagement with the created order. And enjoyment is temporal. You enjoy something by experiencing it, and experience unfolds in time.²¹

The evaluative refrain also serves a cumulative function. Each day adds something new to the creation, and each day receives its own evaluation. The creation grows richer and more complex as the days pass, building toward the climactic "very good" of Day Six. This cumulative structure presupposes the passage of time — things are getting better, fuller, more complete as the days unfold. A timeless, simultaneous act of creation has no room for this kind of progressive development. If everything is done at once, there is no buildup, no climax, no progression from "good" to "very good."

God's Speech Acts: "And God Said"

Another profoundly temporal feature of the creation narrative is God's speech. The phrase "And God said" (vayomer Elohim, וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים) appears ten times in Genesis 1, making it the driving force of the entire creation account. God creates by speaking — He says "Let there be light," and light appears. He says "Let the waters be gathered," and dry land emerges. Each creative act begins with a divine word.

Speech is inherently temporal. Words are spoken in sequence — one after another. A sentence unfolds over time, with a beginning, middle, and end. You cannot speak a sentence all at once; the very nature of language requires temporal succession. When Genesis says "God said," it is describing a temporal activity — the production of meaningful communication in a sequential order.²²

Craig makes this point powerfully in his argument from divine personhood. A personal God thinks, decides, responds, communicates, plans, and acts — all of which require temporal succession. You cannot think a thought without temporal duration. You cannot make a decision without a "before" (considering the options) and an "after" (choosing). You cannot communicate without producing a sequence of ideas or words. If God truly speaks — and Genesis 1 insists that He does — then God is temporal.²³

The atemporalist might respond that God's "speaking" is not literal speech — it is a metaphor for the exercise of divine power. But this response raises a serious problem. If God's speech in Genesis 1 is merely a metaphor for a timeless exercise of power, then we have lost any meaningful content in the word "said." The text does not say "God timelessly willed," or "God exercised omnipotent power." It says "God said." And saying something is a temporal, personal, communicative act. To reduce "God said" to "God timelessly caused" is to strip the narrative of its personal, relational character — which is precisely the character the narrative most wants to convey.

Did God Create Time? The Key Distinction

We have arrived at one of the most important questions in the entire God-and-time debate: Did God create time? The answer depends on what we mean by "time," and getting this distinction right is essential for understanding the creation narrative correctly.

The classical Augustinian answer is clear: yes, God created time. For Augustine, time is a feature of the created world — it came into existence along with the world and has no existence apart from it. Before creation, there was no time. God exists outside of time entirely, in a timeless eternity. When people ask, "What was God doing before He created the world?" Augustine's famous reply (though he credited it to another) was that He was preparing hell for people who ask such questions. His serious answer was that the question is meaningless, because there was no "before" creation — time itself began with the created order.²⁴

This Augustinian view has been enormously influential. It shaped the entire classical theistic tradition and was adopted by Aquinas, Anselm, and countless other theologians. It received apparent scientific support from modern cosmology, which tells us that space-time itself began with the Big Bang. Craig notes that "according to current cosmological theory, time and space came into existence with the Big Bang."²⁵

But here is where I believe we need to draw a crucial distinction — one that Mullins has articulated more clearly than anyone else in the contemporary debate. We need to distinguish between created, physical, measurable time and time as a feature of God's own being.²⁶

Created time — the time of days, seasons, and years; the time measured by the movement of celestial bodies; the time of the physical universe — certainly began at creation. Genesis 1:14 tells us that God created the sun, moon, and stars to serve "for signs and for seasons, and for days and years." Physical time is a created thing. On this point, Augustine was right.

But time itself — temporal succession, the experience of before and after, the reality of sequence and change — is not a created thing. It is, as Mullins argues, an attribute of God's own being. The dynamic, relational life of the Trinity — the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — generates a form of temporality that exists independently of the created world. Before the universe existed, the Father loved the Son, the Son responded to the Father, and the Spirit proceeded from them both. These relational acts involve sequence and succession. They are not frozen in a static, timeless "now." They are dynamic, living, and therefore temporal.²⁷

This distinction is crucial because it allows us to affirm two things simultaneously: (1) God is the Creator of the physical time-order of our universe, and (2) God has always been temporal — experiencing genuine sequence and succession in His own inner life. The first point is taught clearly in Genesis 1. The second point is implied by the very act of creation — because creating requires a "before" and "after," as we have already seen.

Ryan Mullins, in God, Time, and the Incarnation, highlights an important observation from biblical scholarship. He notes that the Hebrews understood time as meaningful — as the arena within which God acts purposefully. Simon DeVries argued that for Israel, "temporal event was the vehicle of [God's] self-disclosure." The Hebrews took history seriously because they understood it as the medium of divine action.²⁸ Furthermore, Mullins points out that the Bible nowhere indicates that time is something God created as part of the material universe. The notion that God created time comes not from Scripture but from Greek philosophy — specifically from Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions about the connection between time and the motion of physical objects.²⁹

This is a remarkable observation. The idea that God created time is not found in Scripture. It comes from Greek philosophy — from Plato's association of time with the movement of the celestial spheres, and from Aristotle's definition of time as "the measure of motion." When early Christian theologians like Augustine adopted this philosophical framework, they read it back into the Genesis text. But the text itself does not teach it. Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon, the plants and the animals. It does not tell us that God created time.

The Problem of Creation Ex Nihilo for Divine Timelessness

We have already touched on this issue, but it deserves fuller development because it is one of the most powerful arguments against divine timelessness that arises from the creation narrative. Let me lay out the problem clearly.

The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo — creation out of nothing — is one of the foundational doctrines of Christian theology. It affirms that God created the universe freely, from nothing, without using any pre-existing material. This doctrine is clearly taught in Genesis 1:1 and affirmed throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition. As Craig notes, the Church Fathers insisted on the temporal creation of the universe ex nihilo in opposition to the eternity of matter.³⁰ In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council officially declared creatio ex nihilo as church doctrine, affirming that God created all things "from the beginning of time ... out of nothing."³¹

Now, creatio ex nihilo entails that there was a state of affairs in which God existed alone, without any created universe. And then God brought the universe into existence. This means there are two distinct states of affairs: (1) God alone, without creation, and (2) God plus creation. The transition from (1) to (2) is a genuine change — and genuine change requires time.

Mullins develops this argument extensively in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker. He notes that within the history of Western thought, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo gave rise to a series of puzzles about divine timelessness versus temporality. When Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers affirmed that God created the universe out of nothing, they inherited a difficult problem: if God is timeless and changeless, how can He bring about something new? Creating is, by its very nature, making something that did not previously exist. As L. R. Farnell observed: to maintain is not to create, because to create means making something new — and "new" and "before" are time-determinations.³²

Mullins formulates the core problem as follows. If creation ex nihilo is true, then God begins to be causally related to the universe. If God begins to be causally related to the universe, then God changes. Therefore, God changes. And if God changes, He is not timeless.³³

The classical theist's standard response is to deny that God "begins" to create. God is "eternally creating" — His creative act is timeless, not temporal. But as Mullins shows, this response effectively collapses the distinction between creatio ex nihilo and eternal creation. If there is no state of affairs where God exists without creation, then the universe is, in some sense, co-eternal with God. And that is precisely what creatio ex nihilo denies. The whole point of the doctrine is that the universe is not co-eternal with God — it has a beginning, a first moment, a point before which it did not exist.³⁴

Craig makes a similar point, though from a slightly different angle. He argues that a "robust doctrine of creatio ex nihilo" involves both the affirmation that God brought the universe into being out of nothing at some moment in the finite past and the affirmation that He sustains it in being moment by moment. The static time theorist — the person who holds the B-theory of time — can only genuinely make the second affirmation. On that view, God never really brings the universe into being; as a whole, the block universe co-exists timelessly with Him. The universe has a "beginning" only in the way a yardstick has a beginning — it has a front edge, but it was never "brought into" existence in any robust temporal sense.³⁵ A robust, biblical doctrine of creation requires a God who genuinely acts to bring a genuinely new reality into existence — and that requires temporality.

Some atemporalists, like Katherin Rogers and Paul Helm, have tried to respond by arguing that creatio ex nihilo only requires that creation is contingent upon God — not that there is a temporal state of affairs where God exists without creation. But as Mullins points out, this response effectively abandons the historic meaning of creatio ex nihilo. If there is no prior state of affairs where God is alone without the universe, then the distinction between creation out of nothing and eternal creation collapses entirely. And historically, the overwhelming majority of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers have understood creatio ex nihilo to mean precisely that there is such a prior state — a state of affairs where God exists and the universe does not.³⁶

God's Decision to Create: Deliberation, Decision, and Action

The creation narrative does not merely describe God performing a creative act. It describes God deciding to create — deliberating about what to make and then executing His plan. This is most clearly seen on Day Six, when God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26). The plural "Let us" suggests a deliberative moment within the Godhead — the Father, Son, and Spirit conferring before acting. This deliberation presupposes temporal sequence: first there is the consideration of what to do, then there is the decision, and then there is the action.

Even apart from the Day Six deliberation, the entire structure of the creation week implies divine planning and decision-making. God does not create randomly or chaotically. He creates in an orderly progression — first light, then sky, then land, then vegetation, then celestial bodies, then sea creatures and birds, then land animals, and finally human beings. This order is intentional and purposeful. It implies a plan — a deliberate arrangement of creative acts in a meaningful sequence. And planning, like deliberating, is an inherently temporal activity. You plan before you act. You deliberate before you decide. You decide before you execute. The entire process unfolds in time.³⁷

Mullins draws on a rich historical tradition to make this point. He notes that in the literal reading of Plato's creation story, the demiurge — the divine craftsman — reasons about what to create, acts on the basis of its conclusions, and then rests after completing its work. This sequence of reasoning, acting, and resting is inherently temporal. And the same sequence is found in the Genesis narrative: God plans, God creates, God evaluates, God rests. As Mullins observes, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is even more radical than Plato's story, because it involves God creating from absolutely nothing — no pre-existing material whatsoever. If even Plato's demiurge, who merely fashions pre-existing material, cannot escape temporality, how much more must the God of Genesis, who creates from nothing, be understood as temporal?³⁸

Genesis 2: God's Relational Entry into the World

The creation account does not end with Genesis 1:31. In Genesis 2, we get a closer, more intimate look at God's creative work, and what we find is a God who is not merely producing objects but entering into personal relationship with His creation.

"Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." (Genesis 2:7, ESV)

The verb here is yatsar (יָצַר), meaning "to form" or "to fashion" — like a potter shaping clay. This is hands-on, intimate language. God does not merely command the man into existence from a distance. He forms him carefully, deliberately, with the craftsmanship of an artisan. And then He breathes into the man's nostrils — an act of stunning intimacy. God's breath enters the man, and the man becomes a living soul (nephesh chayyah, נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה). This is personal, relational, temporal activity. God is not standing outside of time, timelessly sustaining a block universe. He is present, engaged, and active — forming, breathing, giving life.

"And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed." (Genesis 2:8, ESV)

God plants a garden. This is a temporal act — planting involves preparing ground, placing seeds or plants, and nurturing growth over time. God prepares a home for the man and places him there. Again, the sequence matters: first God creates the man, then God plants the garden, then God places the man in the garden. Before, during, after — the narrative is drenched in temporal structure.

"And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.'" (Genesis 2:16–17, ESV)

God gives a command. Commanding is a communicative act — it requires a speaker, a hearer, a message, and a temporal context. God speaks to Adam at a particular moment in time, giving him specific instructions about how to live in the garden. This command also has a forward-looking, temporal dimension: "in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die." The consequence is tied to a future moment — a hypothetical event that has not yet occurred. God is looking ahead in time, warning Adam about what will happen if he makes a particular choice. This kind of forward-looking, conditional communication only makes sense within a temporal framework.

"Then the LORD God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.'" (Genesis 2:18, ESV)

This verse is remarkable. For the first time in the creation narrative, God sees something that is "not good" — the man's aloneness. God observes a deficiency and resolves to address it. This sequence — observing a problem, deciding on a solution, executing the solution — is the very definition of temporal, responsive action. God sees that the man is alone, and He decides to do something about it. He brings the animals to Adam to name (Gen 2:19–20), and when no suitable companion is found among them, God creates the woman from the man's side (Gen 2:21–22). The entire process unfolds step by step, with each action building on the previous one.³⁹

What we see in Genesis 2, then, is not a distant, timeless deity contemplating the world from outside. We see a God who is present in the garden, walking with His creatures, speaking to them, responding to their needs, and entering into genuine temporal relationship with them. This is the God of the Bible — and He is a temporal God.

The Atemporalist Response: Accommodation and Metaphor

At this point, the defender of divine timelessness will raise a familiar objection: "All of this temporal language about God is merely accommodative. God accommodates Himself to our limited, temporal way of understanding by describing His actions in temporal terms. But in reality, God's creative work is a single, timeless act. The sequential, day-by-day structure of Genesis 1 is a literary device, not a literal description of how God actually operates."

I want to take this objection seriously, because it is the standard move that atemporalists make when confronted with the overwhelmingly temporal language of Scripture. But I believe the accommodation strategy ultimately fails, for several reasons.⁴⁰

First, if we dismiss the temporal structure of Genesis 1 as mere accommodation, we are left with no way to know what God's creative work was actually like. The narrative tells us that God spoke, created, evaluated, rested — all temporal activities. If none of this actually reflects how God operates, then what did God do? The atemporalist answer is that God performed a single, timeless, changeless act of will that produces the entire created order all at once. But this description is utterly unlike anything the Bible says about creation. It is drawn from philosophical theology, not from Scripture. We are replacing the Bible's own account of what God did with a philosophical theory about what God must have done — and then claiming that the Bible merely "accommodates" our limited understanding. This gets the relationship between Scripture and philosophy exactly backward.⁴¹

Second, the accommodation strategy proves too much. As we noted in Chapter 16, if all temporal language about God is merely accommodative, then virtually everything the Bible says about God becomes suspect. God's love is described in temporal terms — He loves His people in response to their need. God's anger is described in temporal terms — He responds to sin with judgment. God's speech, His commands, His promises, His faithfulness — all of these are described in thoroughly temporal ways. If we dismiss the temporal language of Genesis 1 as merely accommodative, we must do the same with all of these other descriptions. And if we do that, we are left with a God about whom we can say almost nothing at all. The accommodationist strategy, taken to its logical conclusion, empties Scripture of any real content about God's nature and activity.⁴²

Third, the sequential structure of Genesis 1 is not incidental — it is theologically essential. The order in which God creates is not arbitrary. Light comes first, then the expanse, then dry land and vegetation, then celestial bodies, then sea and air creatures, then land animals, and finally human beings. This order reflects a theological progression: God prepares the environment before placing creatures in it; He creates the habitat before creating the inhabitants. The sequential structure serves a theological purpose — and if we dismiss it as mere accommodation, we lose that purpose. The narrative's structure is not a disposable wrapper around a timeless truth. It is the truth. The sequential, temporal character of God's creative work is part of what the narrative is teaching us about God.⁴³

Fourth, the accommodation strategy fails to account for the specific details of the narrative. If God's creation were really a single, timeless act, why would the narrative go to such elaborate lengths to describe it as a six-day sequence? Why not simply say, "God created everything" and leave it at that? The fact that the author of Genesis chose to present creation as an ordered sequence of days, with specific acts assigned to specific days, and with evaluative pauses and a climactic rest, strongly suggests that the temporal structure is not a mere literary convention but reflects something real about how God creates. The narrative is not just describing creation — it is revealing the character of the Creator. And what it reveals is a God who works in time.

What Was God Doing "Before" Creation?

If God is temporal — if He has always experienced genuine succession and has never been timeless — then what was He doing before He created the world? This is one of the oldest questions in Christian theology, and it has received some creative answers over the centuries.

Augustine's answer, as we noted, was that the question is meaningless because there was no "before" creation — time began with the universe. But if we reject the Augustinian framework and affirm that God has always been temporal, the question becomes both meaningful and important.

Craig, who holds a hybrid view (God was timeless before creation and became temporal at creation), argues that before creation, God existed in a timeless state. There was no sequence, no change, no "before and after" in God's pre-creation existence. God was simply there — timelessly, changelessly, without duration. Then, at the moment of creation, God entered time. Craig believes this transition is possible because the creation of the first temporal event is itself the beginning of time, and God is "drawn into" time by creating a temporal world.⁴⁴

I have significant problems with Craig's hybrid view, which I have detailed in Chapter 8. But the relevant point here is that Craig's solution — a timeless God who becomes temporal — is philosophically problematic. As DeWeese argues, the conjunction "God is (tenselessly) timeless AND God is (present tense) temporal" appears to be a contradiction. If God was ever truly timeless, it is hard to see how He could become temporal without undergoing the very kind of change that timelessness is supposed to exclude.⁴⁵

I believe the better answer, following Mullins, is that God has always been temporal. Before creating the physical universe, God existed in a form of "divine time" generated by the intra-Trinitarian relations. The Father has always loved the Son. The Son has always responded to the Father. The Spirit has always proceeded from them both. These dynamic, relational activities involve genuine sequence — a before and after — even though they occur apart from any physical universe or any form of measurable clock-time. This pre-creation "divine time" was qualitatively different from our created time — there were no days, no seasons, no celestial bodies marking its passage — but it was genuinely temporal in the sense that it involved real succession and genuine relational activity.⁴⁶

So what was God doing before creation? He was living the dynamic, relational life of the Trinity. The Father was loving the Son. The Son was glorifying the Father. The Spirit was proceeding from them both, binding them in the fellowship of mutual love. This life was not static or frozen — it was alive, dynamic, and temporal. And at some point within this divine temporal life, God freely decided to create the world — to bring into existence something other than Himself, something that would share in His goodness and reflect His glory. That decision was itself a temporal act — it involved a "before" (the deliberation) and an "after" (the decision and its execution). And the execution of that decision is what we read about in Genesis 1.

I want to be careful here. I am not claiming that I can describe in detail what God's pre-creation temporal life was like. There is deep mystery here — we are talking about the inner life of the infinite, triune God before the existence of any created thing. Our language and concepts are limited, and we must hold our speculations loosely. But I do think we can say at least this much: God's pre-creation life was dynamic and relational, involving genuine sequence and succession, and it was from this life that the decision to create arose. The full argument for this position is developed in Chapter 26, where we examine how the perichoretic life of the Trinity generates divine temporality. For our purposes here, the key point is that the creation narrative presupposes a God who exists temporally before, during, and after the act of creation.⁴⁷

The Bible Does Not Teach That God Created Time

It is worth pausing to emphasize a point that is easy to overlook but enormously important: the Bible never says that God created time. This claim — so common in classical theology — is simply not found in Scripture.

The Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1). It says that God created the sun, moon, and stars "for signs and for seasons, and for days and years" (Gen 1:14). It says that "in the beginning" God created (Gen 1:1). But it never says that God created time itself. The idea that God created time comes from Greek philosophy, not from the Bible.⁴⁸

This is a crucial point because the entire case for divine timelessness in the Christian tradition depends heavily on the assumption that time is a created thing. If time is a created thing, then God exists beyond it, outside of it, unconstrained by it. But if time is not a created thing — if it is an attribute of God's own being — then the foundation of the timelessness doctrine crumbles.

As Ryan Mullins points out in his analysis of the biblical evidence, the Genesis account gives no indication that the processes of decay and dissolution are inherent features of time itself. Death, disease, and disorder entered the world through sin (Gen 3), not through the mere passage of time. At least six days passed before any negative consequences were introduced, which demonstrates that temporal sequence is not inherently hostile to divine existence or creaturely flourishing. Time is not the enemy. Sin is the enemy. Time is the arena within which God acts, creates, loves, and redeems.⁴⁹

Engaging the Counterarguments

In the interest of fairness, let me briefly engage with several other objections that defenders of divine timelessness might raise against the reading of Genesis I have presented.

Objection 1: "The days of Genesis 1 are not literal 24-hour days." This is true — many evangelical scholars hold to a variety of interpretations of the "days" of Genesis 1, including day-age views, framework views, and analogical day views. I am not committed to a particular interpretation of the length of the days. But regardless of how we interpret the days, the sequential structure remains. Whether the "days" are 24-hour periods, long ages, or literary frameworks, the narrative still presents God's creative work as an ordered sequence of acts with a beginning, middle, and end. The temporal character of the narrative does not depend on the literal length of the days — it depends on the sequential, progressive structure of God's creative activity.⁵⁰

Objection 2: "Genesis 1 is a theological text, not a scientific or philosophical one." Agreed. I am not reading Genesis 1 as a scientific textbook or a philosophical treatise on the nature of time. But the fact that Genesis 1 is theological does not mean it tells us nothing about God's nature. Quite the opposite — as a theological text, Genesis 1 is our primary source of divine revelation about how God creates and relates to His world. And what it reveals is a God who acts temporally. The theological character of the text strengthens, rather than weakens, the temporal reading.

Objection 3: "Other biblical passages suggest divine timelessness." As I have argued in Chapters 3 and 16, the passages most commonly cited in support of divine timelessness — Psalm 90:2 ("from everlasting to everlasting"), 2 Peter 3:8 ("one day as a thousand years"), and Malachi 3:6 ("I the LORD do not change") — are better interpreted as descriptions of God's everlastingness (endurance through all time), His qualitatively different temporal experience, and His moral constancy, respectively. None of them teaches the philosophical doctrine of divine atemporality. (See Chapters 19 and 22 for full exegesis of these passages.)⁵¹

Objection 4: "If God is temporal before creation, does He have an infinite past?" This is a legitimate question, and I address it more fully in Chapters 7 and 26. Briefly: if God has always been temporal, then there is a question about whether His past stretches back infinitely. Craig, through the kalam cosmological argument, argues that an actually infinite past is impossible. But DeWeese and Mullins have responded that God's pre-creation temporal life may not involve the kind of discrete, measurable successive events that the kalam argument targets. Divine time before creation may be amorphous and unmeasured — genuine succession without clock-time. I believe this is a genuine mystery that we may not be able to fully resolve, but it does not undermine the case for divine temporality. The alternative — a timeless God who somehow creates a temporal world — faces far more severe problems than the question of an infinite divine past.⁵²

Sin, Decay, and the Goodness of Time

Before we close, I want to address one more implication of the creation narrative that is often overlooked in discussions of God and time. The Genesis account makes clear that the created world — including its temporal structure — is good. "God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen 1:31). This includes the temporal order — the days and nights, the evenings and mornings, the seasons and years. Time, as God created it, is a good thing.

This stands in sharp contrast to a strain of thought that runs through much of the classical tradition, influenced by Greek philosophy, which views time as inherently deficient — a mark of finitude, change, and decay. For Plato, the temporal world is a mere shadow of the eternal, changeless world of the Forms. For Plotinus, time is a "falling away" from the perfection of the timeless One. And for much of the classical Christian tradition, influenced by these thinkers, time is something that God transcends — not something that characterizes His own life.

But Genesis says otherwise. Time is part of the "very good" creation. And the negative things we associate with time — decay, aging, death — are not features of time itself but consequences of sin. As Genesis 3 makes clear, death entered the world through human disobedience, not through the passage of time. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve lived in a temporal world — days passed, they tended the garden, they interacted with God — without any experience of decay or death. Time was their friend, not their enemy. It was the medium in which they experienced God's presence, enjoyed His creation, and fulfilled their calling.⁵³

If time is good — if it is part of God's "very good" creation — then there is no reason to think that God Himself must be outside of time. A good God can exist within the temporal order He has made without that order being a threat to His perfection. And if time is an attribute of God's own being (as Mullins argues), then it is not merely good but divine — it is a feature of who God is, grounded in the relational dynamism of the Trinity.

Theological Implications: What the Creation Narrative Teaches Us About God and Time

Let me draw together the threads of our analysis and state clearly what I believe the creation narrative teaches us about God's relationship to time.

First, God is a temporal agent. He acts in sequence, creating one thing after another in an ordered progression. His creative work unfolds over time — it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. He speaks, creates, evaluates, and rests, and each of these activities presupposes temporal sequence. A timeless God who exists in a single unchanging "now" cannot meaningfully be said to do any of these things.

Second, God created the physical time-order of our universe. The celestial bodies were made "for signs and for seasons, and for days and years" (Gen 1:14). Measurable, physical, clock-time is a created thing — a feature of the world God has made. But this does not mean that God created time itself, because time — as genuine succession and sequence — is a feature of God's own eternal life, generated by the dynamic relations of the Trinity.

Third, creation ex nihilo implies divine temporality. The transition from "God alone" to "God plus universe" is a genuine change, a real before-and-after, that requires temporal sequence. The classical attempt to avoid this conclusion by positing "eternal creation" or "timeless causation" effectively collapses the distinction between creatio ex nihilo and the co-eternality of God and the world — a distinction the church has always insisted on maintaining.

Fourth, God enters into genuine temporal relationship with His creation. He does not create the world and then step back into timeless isolation. He walks with Adam in the garden. He speaks to His creatures. He commands, blesses, and provides for them. He responds to their needs — as when He sees that the man's aloneness is "not good" and creates a companion for him. From the very first moments of creation, God is relationally engaged with His world in a way that requires temporal presence.⁵⁴

Fifth, the sequential structure of creation is theologically significant, not merely literary. The six-day framework is not a disposable container for timeless truths. It reveals something real about God's creative method — His orderliness, His purposefulness, His progressive building toward a climax. The "very good" of Day Six only has meaning because it follows the "good" of the previous days. The rest of Day Seven only has meaning because it follows the labor of Days One through Six. Strip away the temporal structure, and you strip away the theology.

Conclusion: The God Who Creates in Time

We have covered a great deal of ground in this chapter, so let me summarize our findings.

The creation narrative of Genesis 1:1–2:3 presents God as a temporal agent who creates in sequence, acts in stages, evaluates His work, and enters into genuine temporal relationship with the world He has made. The Hebrew text — from the temporal marker bereshit ("in the beginning") to the creative verb bara ("created") to the evaluative refrain "God saw that it was good" to the culminating rest of Day Seven — is saturated with temporal language that presents God's creative work as an ordered, sequential, progressive process.

The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo — creation out of nothing — powerfully supports divine temporality, because it implies a transition from "God alone" to "God plus universe" — a genuine before-and-after that requires temporal sequence. The classical attempts to avoid this conclusion (eternal creation, timeless causation) either collapse the distinction between creatio ex nihilo and the co-eternality of the world, or they empty the doctrine of its biblical content.

The atemporalist accommodation strategy — the claim that all of this temporal language is merely metaphorical — fails because it proves too much. If we dismiss the temporal language of Genesis 1 as mere accommodation, we undermine virtually all biblical language about God and strip the narrative of its theological significance.

I believe the creation narrative teaches us that God is genuinely temporal — that He creates, acts, evaluates, decides, speaks, blesses, and rests in genuine temporal sequence. This does not make God a prisoner of time. As we have argued throughout this book, God is not bound by creaturely clock-time — He transcends it even while experiencing it. He is the Lord of time, not its captive. But He is genuinely temporal — He experiences real before and after, real sequence and succession, real process and development in His creative and relational life.

In Chapter 18, we will turn to the broader Old Testament evidence for God's temporal actions — the covenants, the exodus, the prophets, the prayers — and see how the same pattern we find in Genesis 1 continues throughout the entire sweep of Israel's history. God is not a timeless abstraction watching history from outside. He is the living God who enters history, acts within it, responds to His people, and moves purposefully toward His goals. He is the God who created the world in time — and who continues to work in time for the good of His creatures and the glory of His name.⁵⁵