Chapter 19

The Psalms and Wisdom Literature

“From Everlasting to Everlasting”

Introduction: Songs, Prayers, and Proverbs — Where Israel Worshipped the God of All Ages

We have now spent several chapters looking at how God acts within time in the stories of the Old Testament — creating, calling, making covenants, relenting, judging, and rescuing. In Chapter 17 we examined the creation account in Genesis, where God acts in a clear temporal sequence. In Chapter 18 we saw God's genuine temporal interactions in the historical narratives — His grieving, His relenting, His covenant faithfulness unfolding across real history. Now we turn to a different kind of biblical literature: the Psalms and Wisdom Literature.

Why do the Psalms and Wisdom books matter for the God-and-time question? Because these are the texts that defenders of divine timelessness most often cite. When someone wants to argue that God exists outside of time — that He has no "before" and "after," no sequence, no succession in His experience — they almost always turn to the Psalms. Psalm 90:2, with its soaring declaration "from everlasting to everlasting, you are God," has been used for centuries as a proof-text for timelessness. Psalm 102:25–27, which contrasts God's endurance with the perishing of creation, has been read as teaching divine atemporality. Malachi 3:6, "I the LORD do not change," has been taken as a declaration of strict ontological immutability — and from immutability, timelessness is thought to follow.

But do these passages actually teach what the atemporalist claims? When we read them carefully — in their original Hebrew, in their literary context, and against the backdrop of the biblical worldview — do they really say that God exists outside of time, experiencing no succession, no sequence, and no before-and-after? I do not believe they do. In fact, I believe these passages teach the very opposite. They teach that God endures through all of time. They teach that God's temporal experience is qualitatively different from ours — richer, deeper, more expansive — but it is still genuinely temporal. And they teach that God's faithfulness, His moral consistency, and His covenant reliability are what do not change, not that God is metaphysically frozen in a timeless state of absolute immutability.

This is the thesis of this chapter: The Psalms and Wisdom Literature present a rich and complex portrait of God's relationship to time — affirming both His enduring faithfulness through all ages and His genuine temporal involvement with His people — and the key Hebrew terms (olam, tamid, ad) support everlastingness rather than philosophical timelessness.

Let us now turn to the key passages, one by one, and see what they actually say.

I. Psalm 90:2 — "From Everlasting to Everlasting, You Are God"

Psalm 90 is traditionally attributed to Moses and is one of the oldest psalms in the Hebrew Bible. It is a prayer that reflects on the brevity of human life compared to the vastness of God's existence. The psalm opens with a declaration of God as Israel's dwelling place across all generations, and then makes this stunning statement:

"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." (Psalm 90:2, ESV)

This verse has been cited by theologians for centuries as evidence of divine timelessness. But does it actually teach that God exists outside of time? Let us look carefully at the Hebrew.

The key phrase is me-olam ad-olam (מֵעוֹלָם עַד־עוֹלָם), which the ESV renders "from everlasting to everlasting." The Hebrew word olam (עוֹלָם) is the most important word in the Old Testament for expressing the concept of eternity or everlastingness. As we discussed in Chapter 3 — where we examined the biblical vocabulary of time and eternity in detail — olam does not mean "timeless" or "outside of time." Standard Hebrew lexicons like the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (BDB) and the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT) give its semantic range as "long duration," "perpetuity," "ancient time," or "age."¹ It points to temporal duration — an indefinitely long stretch of time — not to the absence of time.

The phrase me-olam ad-olam uses the prepositions min ("from") and ad ("to" or "until"), creating a temporal span: "from perpetual duration to perpetual duration." As R. T. Mullins points out, this "from/to formula" is a common formula in Scripture used to denote a span of time. The word olam is used twice in this verse to refer to the span of God's life, and it quite literally means "from perpetual duration in the indefinite past to perpetual duration in the indefinite future."² This is a deeply temporal portrayal of God. It tells us that God has always existed and will always exist — that His life stretches backward into the indefinite past and forward into the indefinite future. That is everlastingness. It is not atemporality.

Notice what else the verse says: "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world." The word "before" (beterem, בְּטֶרֶם) is an explicitly temporal word. It means "prior to" or "before in time." The psalmist is saying that God existed temporally prior to creation. As Mullins observes, one would be hard pressed to say that this is not a temporal "before," since the language employed is explicitly temporal.³ The Old Testament scholar Gershom Brin confirms this point, noting that "the earliest time mentioned [in Scripture] is that of the reality prior to the Creation."⁴

Nicholas Wolterstorff, one of the most important defenders of divine temporality, is blunt about this passage. He writes that one is "amazed that this passage would ever have been cited in support of divine timelessness." What it says on the face of it is not that God is timeless but that God existed before creation, indeed from everlasting to everlasting. How could God exist before creation and yet be timeless?⁵ Wolterstorff's point is simple but powerful: the very concept of "before" requires time. If God existed "before" the mountains, "before" the earth was formed, then God has a temporal relationship to creation — He existed at a time prior to it. That is not atemporality. That is everlastingness.

Even William Lane Craig, whose own hybrid view holds that God was timeless "before" creation and temporal "after" creation, acknowledges the force of the biblical data here. Craig concedes that "it is indisputable that the biblical writers typically portray God as engaged in temporal activities" and that "when they speak directly of God's eternal existence they do so in terms of beginningless and endless temporal duration," citing Psalm 90:2 as his primary example.⁶ After surveying the biblical data, Alan Padgett concludes that "the Bible knows nothing of a timeless divine eternity in the traditional sense," a judgment Craig takes seriously even if he does not fully agree.⁷

Garrett DeWeese provides additional linguistic confirmation. In his analysis of olam, he notes that the word "never occurs independently but only as the object of a preposition indicating direction ('since,' 'until,' etc.), as an adverbial accusative of direction, or in a genitive construct." Perhaps the basic meaning is "most distant times," either past or future, depending upon the syntactical context. But certain usages favor a meaning of "indefinite duration, perpetuity." The word, DeWeese emphasizes, "does not in itself contain the notion of limitless duration," as shown by its use to refer to definite periods in the past.⁸ Given this semantics, when olam is used attributively of God, a notion of everlastingness or perpetuity — sempiternity, meaning everlasting duration in time — rather than atemporality is intended.

The idea that God existed temporally before creation is an important biblical theme. As Mullins notes, it "looks strikingly like what the temporalist wishes to say about God."⁹ This matters because — as we argue in Chapter 26 — the intra-Trinitarian relations (the dynamic, loving, relational life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) generate a form of "divine time" even apart from creation. Physical time may have begun at creation, but God's own temporal life did not. Psalm 90:2 is perfectly consistent with this view: God exists from everlasting to everlasting — His life stretches across an infinite temporal duration that includes both the time before creation and all the ages that follow.

This brings us to an important distinction that Mullins develops at length: the difference between physical time and metaphysical time. Physical time is the measured, clock-time of our universe — the time that began when the Big Bang brought spacetime into existence, the time that can be measured by localized internal clocks, the time governed by the laws of physics. Metaphysical time is a broader category: it is the kind of temporal succession that exists wherever there is genuine causation, genuine sequence, genuine before-and-after. One could hold that physical time began at creation while also holding that metaphysical time — grounded in the dynamic life of the Trinity — has always existed. That is precisely what Psalm 90:2 seems to describe: a God who existed "before" the physical creation, in a mode of time that predates the measurable time of our universe.³⁸ The psalmist is not merely being poetic. He is describing a theological reality: God's life extends infinitely backward before creation and infinitely forward beyond it. This is the everlasting God — the God of all ages — not a static, frozen, atemporal deity.

It is also worth noting how Psalm 90 as a whole reinforces this temporal portrait. The psalm moves from God's eternity (vv. 1–2) to the brevity of human life (vv. 3–6) to a meditation on divine anger and human mortality (vv. 7–12) and finally to a prayer for God's compassion and favor (vv. 13–17). In verse 13, Moses pleads: "Return, O LORD! How long? Have pity on your servants!" The Hebrew word shuvah (שׁוּבָה, "return") is a temporal request — the psalmist is asking God to change course, to turn back, to act now in mercy rather than continuing in judgment. "How long?" (ad matay, עַד־מָתָי) is an explicitly temporal question — it asks about duration, about how much more time must pass before God acts. These are not the prayers of a community addressing a timeless, immutable God. These are the cries of a people who believe God hears, responds, and acts in real time.

II. Psalm 90:4 — "A Thousand Years in Your Sight Are Like Yesterday"

Immediately after the magnificent declaration of verse 2, the psalmist makes another striking claim about God's temporal experience:

"For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night." (Psalm 90:4, ESV)

This verse is often cited to support the idea that God is outside of time — that He sees all of time at once and does not experience temporal duration the way we do. But that is not what the verse says. Look closely at the language. The psalmist does not say, "A thousand years do not exist for God" or "God has no experience of time." He says a thousand years are like yesterday. That word "like" (ki, כִּי, used in a comparative sense) is crucial. It is a simile — a comparison. The psalmist is comparing God's temporal experience to ours, not denying that God has temporal experience at all.

What does the comparison tell us? It tells us that God's experience of temporal duration is qualitatively different from ours. For us, a thousand years is an almost unimaginable stretch of time. For God, it is like a single day — or even like a watch in the night, a period of just a few hours. God's temporal experience is not eliminated; it is compressed. Time is not absent from God's life; it is experienced differently.

Wolterstorff makes this point with characteristic directness. He notes that the psalmist is saying that "as God sees things, a long time is in retrospect like a day, or like a night watch. Rather than supporting divine timelessness this seems, if anything, to do the opposite." For evidently, to God's experience, there is a felt temporality — God has a perspective on time, and from that perspective, long stretches of creaturely time seem short.¹⁰ A timeless God would have no perspective on temporal duration at all. A timeless God would not experience a thousand years as "like" anything — because a timeless God does not experience duration. The very fact that the psalmist uses a comparison implies that God does experience time, but His experience of it is vastly different from ours.

I want to be clear here: I am not saying that NDEs prove anything about God's temporal experience. The argument is analogical, not demonstrative (as we discuss at length in Chapter 33). But the NDE data do show us that temporal experience is not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Time can be compressed, expanded, or qualitatively transformed — and this is precisely what Psalm 90:4 seems to be describing about God. God's experience of a thousand years is "like yesterday" — compressed, not eliminated. This fits beautifully with the position I am defending in this book: dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access. God genuinely experiences time, but His temporal experience transcends our creaturely clock-time in ways we can barely imagine.

The parallel passage in 2 Peter 3:8 — "With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day" — adds another dimension. Peter reverses the comparison: not only are a thousand years like a day for God, but one day is like a thousand years. This bidirectional comparison reinforces the point that God's temporal experience is qualitatively different, not that God lacks temporal experience altogether. As we note in Chapter 22, where 2 Peter 3:8 receives its full exegesis, Peter's point in context is about God's patience — God is not slow in keeping His promise, as some count slowness. A timeless God, as Mullins argues, cannot patiently wait — patience is an inherently temporal quality.¹¹ The everlasting God does not count slowness the way scoffers do. A thousand years is a long time for us, but not for a God who exists from "everlasting to everlasting." Peter's description of God's temporal patience is profoundly inconsistent with a timeless deity.

III. Psalm 102:25–27 — "You Are the Same, and Your Years Have No End"

The next key passage comes from Psalm 102, a lament psalm in which the psalmist cries out to God in distress. He feels his life slipping away — his days are "like an evening shadow" (v. 11) and he is withering "like grass" (v. 11). But then the psalmist lifts his eyes from his own frailty and contrasts it with God's enduring permanence:

"Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end." (Psalm 102:25–27, ESV)

This passage is cited in Hebrews 1:10–12, where it is applied to the Son, underscoring God's permanence in contrast to the transitory nature of creation. Defenders of divine timelessness have sometimes read this passage as teaching that God is immutable in a strict ontological sense — that God cannot change in any way whatsoever — and from there they infer that God must be timeless, since change requires time and a timeless being cannot change.

But what does the psalmist actually say? Let us read the passage with fresh eyes.

The contrast the psalmist is drawing is between creation and God. Creation perishes. Creation wears out like an old garment. Creation passes away. But God? God remains. God endures. God is the same. And — here is the crucial detail — God's years have no end.

Do you see what just happened? The psalmist used the word "years." God has years. Years are units of time. A being who has years is a temporal being. A timeless being does not have years — timelessness means existing outside of time altogether, with no succession, no duration, no before-and-after. But the psalmist says God has years, and those years never run out.

Wolterstorff highlights this point with great precision. He acknowledges that the psalmist is making a genuine ontological or cosmological point — but that point is not ontological immutability. Rather, "whereas God's creation is transitory, God abides. For God, unlike the creature, does not wear out; God's years are without end. What the writer says is not that God is ontologically immutable but that God is everlasting; God endures. God has years, indeed, but to those years there is no end."¹²

The phrase "you are the same" (attah hu, אַתָּה הוּא) has sometimes been taken as a declaration of strict metaphysical immutability — God cannot change in any respect. But in context, the point is not about the impossibility of any change whatsoever. The point is about reliability and permanence. Creation changes — it wears out, it decays, it passes away. But God does not decay. God does not wear out. God does not pass away. He remains who He has always been. His character, His covenant, His faithfulness are constant. That is a far cry from the philosophical claim that God experiences no succession, no sequence, no intrinsic change of any kind.

Furthermore, the Hebrew word for "change" here (chalaph, חָלַף) in verse 26 refers to the kind of change that creation undergoes — wearing out, being replaced, being exchanged for something new, like changing an old garment for a new one. The psalmist is not making a philosophical statement about whether God can have new thoughts, new emotional responses, or new interactions. He is making a poetic and theological statement about God's permanence in contrast to creation's transience. As we argue in Chapter 30, there is an important difference between qualified immutability (God's essential nature, character, and purposes do not change) and strict ontological immutability (God cannot change in any respect whatsoever). The Psalms teach the former, not the latter.

The context leading up to these verses adds further weight to the temporal reading. In verse 24, the psalmist cries out: "O my God, do not take me away at the midpoint of my life, you whose years endure throughout all generations." Notice the language: "at the midpoint of my life" — a temporal reference to the psalmist's mortality — and "your years endure throughout all generations." Generations are inherently successive. They come one after another. A God whose years endure through all successive generations is a God who persists through time, not a God who exists outside of it.

IV. Psalm 139:16 — "In Your Book Were Written, Every One of Them, the Days That Were Formed for Me"

Psalm 139 is one of the most beloved passages in all of Scripture. It describes God's intimate, all-encompassing knowledge of the individual person — knowledge that extends from the psalmist's inmost thoughts (vv. 1–4) to his whereabouts anywhere in the universe (vv. 7–12) to his formation in the womb (vv. 13–16). In verse 16, the psalmist makes a remarkable statement about God's foreknowledge:

"Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." (Psalm 139:16, ESV)

This verse teaches that God knew the psalmist's entire life — all the days of his existence — before a single one of those days had occurred. God saw the psalmist's "unformed substance" (golem, גֹּלֶם — a Hebrew word used only here in the Old Testament, meaning an embryo or unfinished mass). God's knowledge of the psalmist extends back to before his birth, before his body was fully formed, and encompasses every day of his life.

What are the implications for God's relationship to time?

First, this passage powerfully affirms divine foreknowledge. God knows the future. He knows it in detail — not just the general contours of history, but the specific days of an individual person's life. This is not a vague awareness of what might happen. It is detailed, exhaustive knowledge of what will happen. As Craig observes, the psalmist envisages himself as surrounded by God's knowledge — God knows everything about him, even his thoughts. The knowledge described here is "too wonderful" for the psalmist to comprehend, far beyond his ability to attain.¹³

Second, this foreknowledge is presented in a way that is entirely compatible with God being temporal. The text does not say that God sees all the psalmist's days timelessly, in a single eternal now. It says God knew the psalmist's days before any of them existed — which is a temporal statement. There was a time (before the psalmist was born) when God already knew all the days of his life. That "before" is temporal. It implies that God's knowledge of future events precedes those events in time — which is exactly what simple foreknowledge claims.

This is the model of divine foreknowledge I defend in this book: simple foreknowledge through transcendent temporal access (developed fully in Chapter 25). God knows the future not because He determines every event (as Calvinism claims), not because He knows what every creature would do in every possible scenario (as Molinism claims), and not because the future is a frozen "block" that He views from outside time (as the timelessness view implies). God knows the future because He has a unique capacity — grounded in His nature as the omniscient Creator — to access and see events that, from the creaturely perspective, have not yet occurred. His foreknowledge is like a person standing on a mountaintop who can see what is around the next bend in the road, even though the traveler walking on the road cannot. The traveler's freedom is not compromised by the mountaintop observer's knowledge; the observer's knowledge tracks reality rather than determining it.

Third — and this is often overlooked — the rest of Psalm 139 is saturated with temporal language about God. God "searches" and "knows" (v. 1). God "discerns" the psalmist's thoughts (v. 2). God is "acquainted with all" the psalmist's ways (v. 3). God "besets" him "behind and before" (v. 5). The psalmist asks where he can flee from God's presence — if he goes to heaven, to Sheol, to the far side of the sea, God is there (vv. 7–10). The psalmist was "knitted together" by God in his mother's womb (v. 13). All of this language is dynamic, active, and temporal. God searches, discerns, acts, creates, and knows — these are activities of a temporal being, not the static awareness of a timeless one.¹⁴

A further dimension of Psalm 139 is worth noticing. In the final verses of the psalm, the psalmist invites God to search his heart: "Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!" (vv. 23–24). This is a prayer — a present-tense request directed to a God who can hear and respond now. The psalmist is not addressing a timeless deity who has already timelessly known his heart from all eternity. He is asking God to search him, to try him, to lead him. These are temporal activities that require a God who is present and active in the moment.¹⁵

V. Ecclesiastes 3:1–11 — "A Time for Everything" and "Olam in the Human Heart"

The book of Ecclesiastes is unique in the Hebrew Bible. It is the most philosophical of the biblical books, wrestling with questions about meaning, purpose, and the human experience of time in a way that no other biblical book does. The famous poem in Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 is one of the best-known passages in all of literature:

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance ..." (Ecclesiastes 3:1–4, ESV)

The Hebrew word used throughout this poem is et (עֵת), meaning "time" in the sense of an appointed or appropriate time — a season, an occasion. The poem presents a vision of human life in which every activity has its proper moment. There is a rhythm to existence, a God-ordained ordering of events in time. The poem does not suggest that time is an illusion or that the sequence of events is unreal. Quite the opposite: it insists that the timing of things matters, that there is a real difference between the right time and the wrong time for every human activity.

But the passage that matters most for our discussion comes a few verses later, in the enigmatic verse 11:

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." (Ecclesiastes 3:11, ESV)

The key word here is olam (עוֹלָם), the same word we encountered in Psalm 90:2. The ESV translates it as "eternity," but as we have seen, olam does not inherently mean timelessness or atemporality. DeWeese notes that while it is "not uncommon to find interpreters who take 'eternity' in this text as a reference to the realm of the atemporal, in contrast to the realm of the temporal (the present world), such an understanding does not accord good sense to the saying."¹⁶

James Barr, the distinguished Oxford linguist whose work on biblical vocabulary remains foundational, suggests taking olam here in the sense of "perpetuity," thus translating the text as: "He has done everything well in its time; he has also set perpetuity in their heart — yet so that man cannot find out the action which God does from the beginning to the end." Barr explains that the reference to perpetuity would mean the consciousness of memory, the awareness of past events. The predicament of humanity is that we have this awareness of the larger sweep of time, and yet we cannot work out the total purpose of God. Barr adds that this reading "avoids the artificiality of the old rendering 'eternity,' understood as the consciousness of another world beyond this one."¹⁷

DeWeese concurs, noting that "even here, in the only context in the Tanakh where 'eternity' stands as an independent object, a sempiternal rather than an atemporal understanding fits better."¹⁸

What, then, does Ecclesiastes 3:11 teach us about God and time? I think it teaches us several things. First, God has made everything "beautiful in its time" — which implies that timing matters to God, that He orders events temporally, and that His creative work unfolds within a temporal framework. Second, God has placed in the human heart an awareness of something beyond the immediate moment — a sense of the larger sweep of time, a longing for something that transcends the fleeting present. Whether we translate olam as "eternity," "perpetuity," or "a sense of transcendent duration," the point is that human beings have an instinct for something bigger than the now. Third, despite this awareness, humans cannot fully comprehend God's purposes "from the beginning to the end" — which is itself a temporal phrase. God's work has a beginning and an end, a temporal arc, and human beings can glimpse it but cannot fully grasp it.

None of this supports divine timelessness. If anything, it reinforces the picture of a God who works within time, who orders events temporally, and whose purposes unfold across a temporal span that stretches from beginning to end.

Before leaving the Wisdom Literature, we should note that the broader wisdom tradition consistently assumes a temporal framework for God's relationship to the world. The book of Proverbs, for instance, personifies Wisdom as present with God at the creation: "The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth" (Proverbs 8:22–23). The language here is saturated with temporal terms: "beginning" (reshit, רֵאשִׁית), "of old" (me-az, מֵאָז), "ages ago" (me-olam, מֵעוֹלָם), "at the first" (me-rosh, מֵרֹאשׁ), "before" (miqadmey, מִקַּדְמֵי). As R. N. Whybray has noted, the author piles up every available synonym to press home Wisdom's unimaginable antiquity.³⁹ Craig observes that these expressions emphasize not merely Wisdom's antiquity but that there was a beginning, a departure point, at or before which Wisdom existed — a departure point not merely for the earth but for time and the ages.⁴⁰ Whether one reads this passage as implying that physical time began with creation (as Craig argues) or that God's own time preceded creation (as I would argue), the point remains that the wisdom tradition thinks about God's relationship to the world in fundamentally temporal categories.

The book of Job likewise assumes a temporal God. When God finally speaks to Job out of the whirlwind (Job 38–41), He does so as a God who acts in time: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" (Job 38:4). The question presupposes a particular moment — a "when" — at which God performed a particular act. God proceeds to describe His ongoing temporal governance of creation: He commands the morning (38:12), sends forth lightning (38:35), provides food for the ravens (38:41), and oversees the birth of mountain goats (39:1). This is a God deeply engaged in the ongoing, moment-by-moment governance of His creation — not a God watching everything from a timeless vantage point.

VI. Malachi 3:6 — "For I the LORD Do Not Change"

We turn now from the Psalms and Wisdom Literature to two passages from the broader Old Testament that have been used as proof-texts for strict divine immutability — and, by extension, for divine timelessness. The first is Malachi 3:6:

"For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed." (Malachi 3:6, ESV)

Taken in isolation, this looks like it might be a straightforward statement of strict ontological immutability — God does not change in any way, shape, or form. And from there, the atemporalist reasons: if God cannot change, He must be timeless, since a temporal being undergoes change by moving from one moment to the next.

But context is everything in biblical interpretation. Let us look at what comes before and after this verse. The prophet Malachi has been confronting the people of Israel with their unfaithfulness. They have turned aside from God's statutes (3:7). They have been robbing God of tithes (3:8). They have spoken harshly against God (3:13). Despite all of this, God declares: "I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed."

What kind of "not changing" is in view here? Wolterstorff puts it with clarity: "Surely the prophet is not here affirming God's ontological immutability but instead saying that God's fidelity to the covenant he has made with his people remains unalterable. The passage affirms covenantal fidelity, not ontological immutability."²⁰

In other words, the "change" that God denies is a change in His covenant commitment. Israel has been unfaithful — they have turned aside, stolen from God, spoken against Him. If God were like a fickle human ruler, He might respond by abandoning His covenant, destroying His people, and moving on. But God is not like that. He does not change in His covenant faithfulness. His commitment to Jacob's descendants remains firm. That is why they have not been consumed — not because God is metaphysically incapable of any change, but because God is morally and relationally constant in His covenant love.

This reading is confirmed by the verse that immediately follows: "Return to me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts" (Malachi 3:7b). This is an invitation to repentance — and it implies that God will respond to Israel's return with His own responsive action. A strictly immutable God who cannot change in any respect would not "return" to anyone, because returning implies a change in relational orientation. But a God who is faithful in character and responsive in relationship — a God whose moral nature does not change but whose relational interactions do — can both "not change" in the covenantal sense and "return" to a repentant people in the relational sense.

As we argue in Chapter 30, the doctrine of qualified immutability — God's essential character, nature, and purposes never change, but His relational states, emotional responses, and temporal interactions can and do genuinely change — best accounts for the full range of biblical data. Malachi 3:6 supports qualified immutability, not strict ontological immutability, and therefore provides no evidence for divine timelessness.

VII. Numbers 23:19 — "God Is Not Man, That He Should Lie"

A related passage, often cited alongside Malachi 3:6, is Numbers 23:19:

"God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?" (Numbers 23:19, ESV)

This verse comes from the mouth of Balaam, the pagan diviner whom Balak king of Moab hired to curse Israel. Instead of cursing, Balaam blesses Israel — because God has commanded him to do so, and God's word cannot be overridden by a human king's wishes. Balaam's point is not that God is metaphysically incapable of any kind of change. His point is that God is not like a human being who says one thing and does another, who makes promises and breaks them, who changes his mind out of fickleness or fear.

The Hebrew verb here is nacham (נָחַם), the same word that appears in the "divine repentance" passages we examined in Chapter 18 — Genesis 6:6 (God was "sorry" He had made humanity), Exodus 32:14 (God "relented" from the disaster He had spoken of), Jonah 3:10 (God "relented" of the disaster He had said He would do to Nineveh). As we discussed at length in Chapter 18, the Old Testament uses nacham of God in two different ways: sometimes it says God does not change His mind (as here in Numbers 23:19 and in 1 Samuel 15:29), and sometimes it says God does change His mind (as in Genesis 6:6 and Exodus 32:14). How do we reconcile these?

The key lies in context. When the Bible says God does not change His mind, it is talking about God's firm decrees, His settled purposes, His covenant commitments. God is not like a fickle human being who says "yes" today and "no" tomorrow out of weakness, inconsistency, or deception. When God makes a promise, He keeps it. When God declares a purpose, He fulfills it. But when the Bible says God does change His mind — relenting from a declared judgment when people repent, or grieving over a situation that has gone wrong — it is describing God's genuine responsiveness to changing creaturely circumstances.²¹

DeWeese provides helpful clarification. In a detailed study of the nacham passages, Robert Chisholm discerns two distinct uses and distinguishes different statements or contexts of intention. There are statements of God's firm, unconditional intention — where God will not change His course — and statements of God's conditional intention — where God announces what He will do unless circumstances change, and then adjusts His course when they do. Both kinds of statements are genuine. God is both reliable in His promises and responsive to His creatures.²²

At most, as DeWeese observes, texts like Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29 "only support a concept of God who does not change, not a God who cannot change. This is a somewhat weak understanding of the nature of immutability."²³ The distinction is subtle but important. There is a difference between a God who does not change (in His essential character and covenant commitments) and a God who cannot change (in any respect whatsoever). The former is consistent with divine temporality and qualified immutability. The latter is the strict ontological immutability that leads to divine timelessness — and it is not taught in Numbers 23:19.

VIII. James 1:17 — "No Variation or Shadow Due to Change"

We now turn to the one New Testament passage assigned to this chapter. James 1:17 is perhaps the passage most commonly cited in support of divine immutability in the New Testament:

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change." (James 1:17, ESV)

The Greek phrase translated "no variation or shadow due to change" is par' hō ouk eni parallagē ē tropēs aposkiasma (παρ' ᾧ οὐκ ἔνι παραλλαγὴ ἢ τροπῆς ἀποσκίασμα). The word parallagē (παραλλαγή) means "variation" or "change," and tropēs aposkiasma (τροπῆς ἀποσκίασμα) means "shadow of turning" or "shadow due to change." Some ancient manuscripts read "no variation due to a shadow of turning," which amounts to the same basic meaning.

James appears to be working with an astronomical metaphor. He calls God "the Father of lights" — a reference to God as the creator of the heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, and stars. Unlike these celestial lights, which cast shifting shadows as they move across the sky (the sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes, the seasons change), God does not shift. He is like a constant, unwavering source of light.

But what exactly is James saying does not change about God? Let us look at the context. The surrounding verses make this clear:

"Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures." (James 1:16–18, ESV)

James has just told his readers that when they are tempted to do evil, they must not ascribe that temptation to God: "God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one" (James 1:13). His argument is about God's moral character. God is the source of every good and perfect gift — and only good gifts. God never sends evil. God is like a constant source of light that never casts a shadow of darkness. In moral terms, God never shifts from good to evil, never wavers between generosity and cruelty, never tempts and then punishes. He is unwaveringly, unfailingly good.

Wolterstorff's analysis is careful and balanced. He notes that the most likely reading is that "God is unchangeable in that God is never the source of evil, only and always of good — which falls far short of affirming ontological immutability." While the context does not entirely rule out the possibility that James was alluding to something broader, the specific point of his argument is about God's moral constancy. Wolterstorff concludes: "Obviously this passage cannot be used as a proof text for ontological immutability."²⁴

Mullins reinforces this point in his broader survey of the biblical data. He observes that various classical theologians have tried to use James 1:17 as a proof-text for divine timelessness, but the passage simply does not carry that weight. It does not contain anything resembling a "without succession" clause. What it teaches is God's moral consistency — that God is always and only good — not that God experiences no temporal sequence.²⁵ The passage has a clear, limited scope: God's goodness does not waver. To read into it a full-blown metaphysical doctrine of divine timelessness is to import philosophical categories that the text does not contain.

IX. Additional Psalmic Evidence: God's Temporal Actions in the Songs of Israel

Before we move to our conclusion, it is worth stepping back from the individual proof-texts and noticing a broader pattern in the Psalms. The Psalms are not primarily philosophical treatises about God's metaphysical nature. They are songs, prayers, and liturgical poems — the worship book of ancient Israel. And what do they tell us about how Israel actually worshipped God?

They tell us that Israel worshipped a God who acts — and acts in time. Consider just a sampling of the temporal language about God in the Psalms:

In Psalm 33:6, "By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host." God made the heavens at a point in time — He spoke, and creation came into being. In Psalm 44:1, "O God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us, what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old." God's deeds were performed "in" days — particular historical moments. In Psalm 77:11–12, the psalmist says, "I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your work, and meditate on your mighty deeds." The psalmist remembers God's past actions — actions that happened at particular times and can be recalled. In Psalm 103:6, "The LORD works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed." God "works" — an ongoing, temporal activity. In Psalm 145:13, "Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations." The phrase "all generations" is explicitly temporal — generations are successive, and God's dominion persists through each successive generation.²⁷

The Psalms also portray God as having temporal emotional responses. God is angry at the wicked (Psalm 7:11), God delights in His people (Psalm 18:19), God hears prayer (Psalm 34:17), God answers (Psalm 65:5), God remembers His covenant (Psalm 98:3), God laughs at the scheming of nations (Psalm 2:4). Every one of these actions presupposes temporal sequence — you must first perceive something before you can respond to it, and response implies a "before" (the stimulus) and an "after" (the response). As we argue at length in Chapter 28 (and in the companion book, The Heart of God), genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond to anything, because response requires temporal sequence.

The Psalms also contain numerous instances of God making and keeping promises over time. Psalm 105 recounts the entire salvation history of Israel — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Egypt, the Exodus, the wilderness, the promised land — as a story of God's faithfulness to His covenant across generations. Psalm 136 rehearses these same events, adding the refrain "for his steadfast love endures forever" (ki le-olam chasdo, כִּי לְעוֹלָם חַסְדּוֹ) — His covenant love endures for the indefinite future, through all ages. This is everlastingness language, not timelessness language.

Perhaps most strikingly, the Psalms regularly address God in the second person — "you," "your" — as a personal being with whom the worshipper is in direct, present-tense relationship. "Hear my prayer, O LORD" (Psalm 143:1). "I cry to you, O LORD" (Psalm 28:1). "You are my God; give ear to my pleas for mercy" (Psalm 86:6). This is the language of real-time relationship, of present-tense communication with a God who hears now and responds now. It is the language of divine temporality.

X. The Psalms and Wisdom Literature in Light of Broader Hebrew Temporal Vocabulary

We explored the biblical vocabulary of time in depth in Chapter 3, and I do not want to reproduce that discussion here. But a few additional Hebrew terms are worth noting briefly, because they appear frequently in the Psalms and Wisdom Literature and reinforce the temporal reading we have been developing.

The word tamid (תָּמִיד) means "continually" or "constantly" — it describes ongoing, sustained activity over time. When the Psalms say "I will bless the LORD at all times (bekhol et); his praise shall continually (tamid) be in my mouth" (Psalm 34:1), they are describing sustained temporal activity. When applied to God's ongoing care and presence — "You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory" (Psalm 73:24) — the context assumes a God who is temporally present and continuously engaged with His people.

The word ad (עַד) means "until" or "unto" and often conveys the idea of ongoing duration. In the common phrase le-olam va-ed (לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד), translated "forever and ever" (e.g., Psalm 45:6, "Your throne, O God, is forever and ever"), the addition of va-ed intensifies the temporal extent — an everlasting duration that stretches on and on. Again, this is temporal language describing endless duration, not philosophical language describing the absence of time.

The word netsach (נֵצַח) is sometimes translated "forever" or "perpetuity" (e.g., Psalm 9:18, "For the needy shall not always be forgotten, and the hope of the poor shall not perish forever [la-netsach]"). DeWeese notes that the basic idea of this root seems to be "that which is enduring and strong." In its occurrences in the Old Testament, it consistently conveys the idea of lasting endurance or perpetuity — again, a temporal concept.²⁸

The cumulative weight of this vocabulary is significant. When the Hebrew Bible speaks of God's "eternity," it consistently uses language of temporal duration — ongoing, enduring, perpetual, from age to age, without end. It never uses language that describes the absence of time, the lack of succession, or the simultaneous possession of all moments. As Mullins puts it: "Whenever the Bible talks about eternity it uses temporal terms. Despite this fact, most of classical Christian theology ignores this."²⁹

XI. The Atemporalist Response — and Why It Falls Short

It is important to engage fairly with the atemporalist reading of these passages. I want to present the strongest case the other side can offer, because I believe the temporalist position is strong enough to withstand it.

The most sophisticated atemporalist response comes from Paul Helm, whose Eternal God is the most rigorous contemporary defense of divine timelessness. Helm argues that the biblical language of everlastingness is at least compatible with timelessness — that when the Bible says God is "from everlasting to everlasting," this language does not logically exclude the possibility that God is timeless. The language is underdeterminate, Helm suggests — it does not settle the question one way or the other.³⁰

Helm also raises the analogy between time and space. Just as the Bible describes God in spatial terms (God is "here" and "there," He "comes down" and "goes up") without most theologians concluding that God is a spatial being, so the Bible's temporal language about God need not be taken to mean God is literally temporal. The biblical writers lacked the "reflective context" for formulating a precise metaphysical doctrine of divine eternity, just as they lacked such a context for divine spatiality.³¹

Craig takes Helm's point seriously, noting that Padgett considers it "well-taken" and that "the Biblical authors were not interested in philosophical speculation about eternity." Craig acknowledges that the biblical data on their own point toward temporality but argues that other considerations — philosophical arguments from simplicity, immutability, and the doctrine of creation — might provide reason to adopt timelessness despite the prima facie biblical evidence.³²

How should we respond?

First, Helm is right that the everlastingness language does not logically exclude timelessness. Language about an indefinitely long temporal duration is logically consistent with a being who is actually atemporal, since an atemporal being could be said to encompass all of time from a vantage point outside of it. But logical consistency is a very low bar. The question is not whether timelessness is logically possible given the biblical data. The question is what the biblical data most naturally teach. And here, the evidence is overwhelming: the natural, straightforward reading of the biblical language is everlastingness, not timelessness.

Second, the space analogy is suggestive but ultimately fails. There is a crucial difference between the Bible's spatial language about God and its temporal language about God. The Bible occasionally uses clearly metaphorical spatial language about God — God has "wings" (Psalm 91:4), God's "arm" is not shortened (Isaiah 59:1) — and these are recognized by virtually everyone as anthropomorphic metaphors. But the Bible's temporal language about God is pervasive, consistent, and woven into the very fabric of the narrative. God creates, calls, responds, judges, saves, remembers, promises, and fulfills — and every one of these actions is inherently temporal. To say that all of this temporal language is merely metaphorical would be to undermine the entire biblical narrative of salvation history.³³

Third — and this is the most important point — the burden of proof is on the atemporalist, not the temporalist. As Wolterstorff argues, the biblical text prima facie presents God as a temporal being who has a narratable history of acting and responding. The atemporalist is claiming that we should not accept this representation as literally true. For that claim, we need cogent arguments — and the biblical text itself provides none. Wolterstorff puts it memorably: "The burden of proof remains on them. They are claiming that we should not accept as literally true this aspect of the biblical representation of God; for that we need cogent arguments. Otherwise what's left of the church's confession that Scripture, for it, is canonical?"³⁴

The philosophical arguments from simplicity and immutability — which are the real drivers behind the timelessness position — are addressed and critiqued in Chapters 5, 6, and 30 of this book. I argue there that these philosophical arguments fail on their own terms. But even if they did not fail, they would still need to overcome the strong prima facie biblical evidence for divine temporality — and that is a heavy burden indeed.

There is one more point worth making about the atemporalist appeal to these Psalms passages. It is striking that the atemporalist typically isolates individual phrases from their literary context and then reads philosophical meaning into them that the original authors almost certainly did not intend. The Hebrew psalmists were not writing philosophy treatises. They were composing songs of worship, laments, and prayers directed to a living God. When a psalmist declared that God was "from everlasting to everlasting," he was not formulating a Boethian doctrine of tota simul. He was expressing awe at the sheer vastness of God's life — a life that stretches so far back and so far forward that human language strains to describe it. When a psalmist said "you are the same," he was not defining ontological immutability in the sense of Thomas Aquinas's actus purus. He was finding comfort in the fact that the God who helped his ancestors would also help him, because God is reliable and does not wear out or fade away. We must let these texts speak on their own terms, in their own literary and cultural context, rather than loading them with philosophical freight that the authors never intended to carry.⁴¹

XII. The Psalms and God's Emotional Life — A Connection to Divine Temporality

Before we conclude, it is worth noting one more dimension of the Psalms that bears on our question. The Psalms portray God as a being with genuine emotions — and as we argue in Chapter 28 (and in the companion book The Heart of God), genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality.

The Psalms describe God as angry at the wicked (Psalm 7:11), delighting in the righteous (Psalm 37:23), hearing the cry of the afflicted (Psalm 34:17), showing compassion on the suffering (Psalm 103:13, "As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him"), and grieving over Israel's rebellion (Psalm 78:40, "How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness and grieved him in the desert!"). Each of these emotional responses implies a temporal sequence: God perceives something (an action by a creature), evaluates it (as righteous or wicked, as cause for joy or grief), and responds emotionally. Perception, evaluation, and response are sequential activities. They require a "before" and an "after." A timeless God — who has no sequence, no before and after, no temporal progression in His experience — cannot genuinely perceive, evaluate, and respond. His "emotions" would be eternally fixed, never arising in response to creaturely actions but simply existing timelessly as static features of His being.³⁵

As Mullins argues in his treatment of the divine wrath problem: if God timelessly and immutably has wrath toward sinners, then God is wrathful toward them before they even sin — which is unjust. Genuine wrath, genuine compassion, genuine delight — all require temporal sequence.³⁶ The Psalms portray a God whose emotional life is rich, dynamic, and responsive — and this portrait is most naturally read within a temporalist framework.

Conclusion: The God of the Psalms Is Everlasting, Not Timeless

Let us step back and summarize what we have found in this chapter.

We examined every major passage in the Psalms and Wisdom Literature that has been cited in the God-and-time debate, and in every case, the natural reading supports divine temporality rather than divine timelessness.

Psalm 90:2 teaches that God exists "from everlasting to everlasting" — from the indefinite past to the indefinite future. The phrase me-olam ad-olam is a temporal expression describing the span of God's life. It teaches everlastingness, not atemporality. The word "before" in the verse is an explicitly temporal word, placing God's existence prior to creation in a temporal sequence.

Psalm 90:4 teaches that God's experience of time is qualitatively different from ours — a thousand years are like a day in His sight. This is not the elimination of temporal experience but its transformation. God experiences time, but His temporal experience transcends creaturely clock-time.

Psalm 102:25–27 teaches that God endures while creation perishes. But endurance is a temporal concept — to endure means to persist through time. God has "years," and those years have no end. This is everlastingness, not timelessness.

Psalm 139:16 teaches that God knew all the psalmist's days before any of them existed — a powerful affirmation of divine foreknowledge that is perfectly compatible with simple foreknowledge within a temporalist framework.

Ecclesiastes 3:1–11 teaches that God has ordered all things in their time, that He has placed a sense of transcendent duration (olam) in the human heart, and that His purposes unfold from beginning to end — all temporal language.

Malachi 3:6 teaches God's covenantal faithfulness, not strict ontological immutability.

Numbers 23:19 teaches God's truthfulness and reliability, not that God is metaphysically incapable of any change.

James 1:17 teaches God's moral constancy — He is always and only the source of good — not that God experiences no temporal succession.

In every case, the passage teaches something about God's character — His endurance, His faithfulness, His reliability, His moral consistency — rather than making a philosophical claim about God's metaphysical relationship to time. The philosophical concept of divine timelessness — as developed by Boethius, Aquinas, and the medieval tradition, where God is said to possess all of His life in a single, simultaneous, undifferentiated "eternal now" with no succession whatsoever — is simply not present in these texts. It is a philosophical interpretation imported from Greek thought (as we traced in Chapters 11–13), not a doctrine drawn from Scripture itself.

Mullins summarizes the point well: the Bible consistently describes eternity in temporal terms. One can easily find the claim in the Bible that God exists without beginning and without end, but one cannot find anything that implicitly or explicitly resembles a "without succession" clause anywhere in Scripture.³⁷

That is the God the Psalms celebrate. That is the God wisdom literature contemplates with awe. And that is the God I believe we encounter when we read these texts with open eyes and attentive hearts.

In the next chapter, we will turn to the prophetic literature and examine what it teaches about God's foreknowledge — His ability to declare "the end from the beginning" — and how this foreknowledge is best understood within a temporalist framework.