Chapter 22

The Apostolic Witness

Paul, Peter, and the Early Church on God and Eternity

Introduction: Why the Apostolic Writings Matter for Our Question

We have spent several chapters now walking through the Old Testament's witness to a God who acts, responds, remembers, plans, and lives in real relationship with His people. We have seen in the creation account a God who speaks, separates, evaluates, and rests in sequence (Chapter 17). We have watched Him make and keep covenants over long stretches of history, relenting in response to intercession, and sorrowing over human sin (Chapter 18). We have listened to the psalmists declare that He is God "from everlasting to everlasting" (Chapter 19), and we have heard the prophets insist that He alone, because He truly knows the future, is the real and living God (Chapter 20). In Chapter 21, we followed the Incarnate Son as He was born at a particular moment, grew in wisdom and stature, learned obedience through suffering, died, rose again, and ascended.

Now we come to the writings of the apostles — the letters of Paul, Peter, John, James, Jude, and the anonymous but magnificent Epistle to the Hebrews. Together with Luke's second volume (the Acts of the Apostles) and Revelation (which we will treat in Chapter 23), these texts form the second great wave of New Testament reflection on who God is, what He has done, and what He is still doing. They were written by men who had been stunned by the resurrection of Jesus, who had watched the Spirit come at Pentecost, and who now had the task of explaining to the early churches — many of them newly planted among Gentiles — how the God of Israel had accomplished something utterly new and utterly continuous with what He had been doing all along.

My thesis in this chapter is straightforward, but it is one I want to prove carefully from the texts themselves rather than simply assert. The apostolic writings consistently portray God as a temporal agent who acts within history, plans salvation across the ages, and will bring all things to consummation in the future. This is not incidental or decorative language. It is the very substance of how the apostles proclaim the gospel. And it coheres naturally with divine temporality while sitting awkwardly — often impossibly — with strict divine timelessness.¹

That thesis needs a fair and careful defense, because we know from earlier chapters that the atemporalist tradition has long argued the opposite. Paul Helm, for instance, takes the view that the biblical data are indeterminate on this question — that Scripture does not settle whether God is timeless or temporal, and that we must do the work of deciding philosophically.² William Lane Craig, also a defender of divine timelessness (at least "without creation"), argues that the apostles sometimes speak of God's existence "before" the ages began, and that such language, taken seriously, implies a phase of divine existence prior to time itself.³ These are not careless readings. They deserve to be heard and answered.

But I will argue — and I think the evidence supports this strongly — that the dominant, unmistakable pattern of apostolic teaching is temporal. When Paul tells us that God "foreknew" and "predestined" and "called" and "justified" and "glorified" (Rom 8:29–30), he is not describing a single eternal instant in which everything happens at once. He is describing a sequence of saving acts, with logical and temporal order, that unfold in the economy of redemption. When Peter tells us that with the Lord "a day is as a thousand years," he is not ascribing timelessness to God. He is contrasting our small patience with God's vast patience. When Hebrews declares that Jesus Christ is "the same yesterday and today and forever," it is a sturdy tri-tense frame — not a denial of temporal succession, but a celebration of moral and relational constancy across time. And when Paul speaks of God's plan for "the fullness of the times," or when 1 Timothy calls God "the only one who has immortality," the language is temporal through and through.

In this chapter, I want to take you through six passages that the atemporalist tradition has sometimes cited, and sometimes quietly ignored, to see what they actually say. These are: Hebrews 13:8, 2 Peter 3:8, Colossians 1:15–17, Romans 8:29–30, Ephesians 1:3–14, and 1 Timothy 6:15–16. Along the way, we will touch briefly on a cluster of other apostolic passages that bear on our question. My hope is that by the end, you will see not just that the apostles used some temporal-sounding language (everyone concedes that), but that their entire way of speaking about God, salvation, and the ages is built on the assumption that God is a living, acting, responsive, temporal Agent.⁴

Hebrews 13:8: "The Same Yesterday and Today and Forever"

We begin with the most famous single sentence on divine constancy in the New Testament. It is short, memorable, and often quoted to prove that Jesus (and by extension the Triune God) does not change. Here is the verse in full:

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Heb 13:8, ESV).

The Greek is even tighter than the English: Iēsous Christos echthes kai sēmeron ho autos kai eis tous aiōnas (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ἐχθὲς καὶ σήμερον ὁ αὐτὸς καὶ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας).⁵ Three adverbial markers frame the constant subject: echthes (ἐχθές, "yesterday"), sēmeron (σήμερον, "today"), and eis tous aiōnas (εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, "unto the ages"). The predicate that binds them together is ho autos (ὁ αὐτός, "the same").

Now, I want us to stop and really look at that sentence, because a great deal depends on how we read it. If we are not careful, we can slip into thinking that "the same yesterday and today and forever" means something like "unchanging in a strictly metaphysical, timeless sense" — as though the author of Hebrews were saying that Jesus stands outside of time altogether, equally present to every moment without experiencing any succession. But that reading gets the grammar and the rhetoric exactly backwards.

A Temporal Frame, Not a Denial of Time

Think about it this way. If I said to you, "My friend John is the same man he was yesterday and today and will be tomorrow," you would not hear me saying that John is timeless. You would hear me saying that, across the days of his life, John has a consistent character. The very point of the sentence is that time has passed — yesterday was one day, today is another, tomorrow is another still — and yet John's identity, integrity, and commitments have not shifted. The temporal frame is the canvas on which the constancy is painted. Remove the canvas, and the painting disappears.

The author of Hebrews is doing exactly that with Jesus. The preceding verse (13:7) says, "Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith." The following verse (13:9) warns, "Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings." In between these two exhortations stands our verse, functioning as a theological anchor.⁶ Your leaders have come and gone — some have died in the faith (v. 7). New teachings will come and go — some will try to lead you astray (v. 9). But Jesus Christ, the one in whom these leaders trusted and the one whose gospel you must not abandon, is the same yesterday and today and forever. His character is stable. His saving work is unchanging. His promises hold.

Notice what the verse is not about. It is not about abstract metaphysical immutability. It is not about whether Jesus can experience any sequence. It is not about whether He has a "now" in which He hears prayer. Those are later philosophical questions that the author of Hebrews is simply not addressing. What he is addressing is the pastoral reliability of Christ for a wavering congregation. He is telling them: the Christ who saved you yesterday, the Christ who upholds you today, is the same Christ who will preserve you forever. Trust Him. Do not drift.⁷

What Echthes, Sēmeron, and Eis Tous Aiōnas Actually Mean

Let me take a moment to unpack each of the three temporal markers.

Echthes means "yesterday" — literally, the day before today. In Hebrews, "yesterday" likely refers to the completed saving work of Christ: His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and especially His once-for-all sacrifice that the epistle has been expounding at length (Heb 7–10).⁸ Jesus has already done something. That work stands behind us as accomplished. The "yesterday" of Christ is a real, past, historical achievement.

Sēmeron means "today." It is the present moment — the moment in which the reader is living, the moment in which Christ's work is being appropriated by faith. Throughout Hebrews, "today" has been a theologically loaded word (see especially Heb 3:7, 13, 15; 4:7, where the author repeatedly presses, "Today, if you hear His voice…"). Today is the day of faith, the day of obedience, the day of perseverance.⁹ Christ's ongoing high priestly ministry is a "today" reality (Heb 7:25 — "He always lives to make intercession for them").

Eis tous aiōnas means "unto the ages" — that is, "forever" in the extended, durational sense of "for as long as there are ages to come." This is the same kind of temporal-plural expression we find elsewhere in the New Testament (for instance, Rom 11:36, "to Him be glory forever [eis tous aiōnas]," and Jude 25, "glory… both now and forever [eis pantas tous aiōnas]").¹⁰ It extends the temporal horizon forward without ending. It does not collapse time into a single instant.

So what we have is a three-fold temporal frame — past, present, future — with Jesus affirmed as the reliable constant across all three. This is precisely the kind of language that a thoroughly temporal Being could use about Himself, and it is precisely the kind of language that a timeless Being — in the strictest sense — could not coherently use, because for such a Being there would be no "yesterday" and no "today" to distinguish.

The Parallel in Hebrews 1:10–12

There is a wonderful confirmation of this reading earlier in the same letter. In Hebrews 1:10–12, quoting Psalm 102:25–27, the author addresses the Son directly:

"You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment, like a robe you will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end" (Heb 1:10–12, ESV).

Here too we see the same pattern. "You are the same" (su de ho autos ei, σὺ δὲ ὁ αὐτὸς εἶ) sits alongside "your years will have no end" (ta etē sou ouk ekleipsousin, τὰ ἔτη σου οὐκ ἐκλείψουσιν). The Son's unchanging fidelity is expressed in terms of His enduring years. His constancy is a constancy through time, not above time. If we assumed strict timelessness, "your years will have no end" would be a strange and misleading statement — a timeless Being has no years at all.¹¹

Hebrews is a richly temporal book. It speaks of God having "in these last days" spoken "by His Son" (1:2); it emphasizes the "once for all" (ephapax, ἐφάπαξ) nature of Christ's sacrifice (7:27; 9:12; 10:10) — a notion that loses meaning apart from a real temporal sequence of events; and it looks forward to a coming rest, a coming city, and a coming Savior (4:9; 13:14; 9:28). The Christ of Hebrews is the eternally living High Priest who nevertheless has a history — a history into which He still enters on behalf of His people today.

2 Peter 3:8: "One Day as a Thousand Years"

Our second passage is probably the single most frequently quoted New Testament text in the atemporalist literature. It has been taken to prove — or at least to hint at — that God exists outside of time. Let me give you the verse in context, because context is everything here:

"But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Pet 3:8–9, ESV).

The Greek of verse 8 is: mia hēmera para kyriō hōs chilia etē kai chilia etē hōs hēmera mia (μία ἡμέρα παρὰ κυρίῳ ὡς χίλια ἔτη καὶ χίλια ἔτη ὡς ἡμέρα μία). Notice carefully the little word hōs (ὡς), which means "as" or "like." It is a comparison word. It signals a simile, not an identification.¹²

Reading the Verse in Its Actual Context

The first thing to notice is what Peter is actually talking about. He is not launching into an abstract metaphysical discourse about divine eternity. He is responding to a concrete and pressing pastoral problem: the scoffers.

Verses 3–4 describe them: "Scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, 'Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.'" In other words, the scoffers are mocking the Christian hope of Christ's return. The years have gone by. Nothing has happened. So — they sneer — where is this great coming judgment you keep talking about?

Peter responds in two ways. First (vv. 5–7), he reminds them that a previous judgment has already happened (the flood) and another is coming (the final fire). The scoffers' complacency is built on willful forgetting. Second (vv. 8–9), he addresses the question of why God seems to be delaying. And here is where our verse comes in. Peter invokes Psalm 90:4 ("a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night") and applies it to the current situation.¹³ His point is pastoral and theological: what looks slow to us does not look slow to God, because God's temporal horizon is vastly larger than ours. And God's delay is not indifference; it is patience aimed at repentance.

Do you see what is happening? The verse is not about God being outside of time. It is about God having a different and much larger experience of time than we do. Richard Bauckham, in his classic commentary on 2 Peter and Jude, makes this exact point: "The intended contrast between man's perception of time and God's is not a reference to God's eternity in the sense of atemporality… The point is rather that God's perspective on time is not limited by a human life span."¹⁴

A Timeless God Cannot Wait

Here is what I think is the decisive point against the atemporalist reading of 2 Peter 3:8. The whole argument of the passage collapses if God is timeless. Consider: Peter is saying that God is patient. He is waiting. He is delaying the final judgment so that "all should reach repentance" (v. 9). Each of these is a temporal activity. To wait is to experience a "now" in which the desired event has not yet arrived and a future in which it will. To be patient is to endure across time without giving up. To delay is to let time pass.

A strictly timeless Being — one who has no past, no present, no future — cannot be patient in any meaningful sense. A timeless Being cannot wait. For such a Being, there is no "not yet" that will eventually become "now." There is only the eternal tota simul, the whole at once. As R. T. Mullins pointedly observes, "A timeless God cannot be patient."¹⁵ But Peter says God is patient, and the whole pastoral force of his argument depends on that patience.

So when atemporalist readers have tried to read 2 Peter 3:8 as an allusion to a philosophical doctrine of timelessness (as the twentieth-century Reformed theologian Louis Berkhof suggested¹⁶), they have gotten the text exactly backwards. Peter is not saying that God is outside of time. He is saying that God is supremely and richly inside time — with a perspective, a patience, and a purposefulness that we, with our short lives, can barely imagine.

Why the Simile Actually Supports Temporality

We should also notice something subtle in the simile itself. Peter says one day with the Lord is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like one day. In other words, both directions of comparison are employed. A "day" of divine experience corresponds to a vast human span; a vast human span is like a "day" of divine experience. The equivalence works both ways, and that tells us something important.

If God were timeless, neither direction would work. We could not say "a day with the Lord is like a thousand years," because a timeless God has no "day." And we could not say "a thousand years is like a day for the Lord," because a timeless God has no "day" to compare it to. The whole simile requires that God have some kind of temporal experience in which durations occur, even if the scale of that experience is very different from ours. A similar point is implicit in Psalm 90:4, which Peter is clearly echoing (cross-reference Chapter 19).¹⁷

What we have in 2 Peter 3:8, then, is not a hint of timelessness but an affirmation of a richer, longer, more patient divine temporal experience. God's "time" is not our time — He is not anxiously watching the clock. But it is time — He experiences sequence, He exercises patience, He delays with purpose, and He will act when the hour comes. This fits beautifully with the position I have been defending in this book: dynamic divine temporality, in which God genuinely experiences sequence while also transcending the creaturely limitation of being locked into the present moment.

Colossians 1:15–17: Christ "Before" All Things

Our third passage takes us to the breathtaking Christ-hymn of Colossians 1. Paul writes (or quotes):

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together" (Col 1:15–17, ESV, emphasis added).

The key phrase for our purposes sits in verse 17: "He is before all things" — in Greek, autos estin pro pantōn (αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων). That little preposition pro (πρό) is the hinge on which much turns.

What Does Pro Mean?

Pro is one of the most common Greek prepositions for expressing priority. It can be spatial ("in front of") or temporal ("before, earlier than"), and context usually makes clear which is meant. In this text, "before all things" is most naturally read temporally. The Son existed prior in time to the creation of everything that is not God. His priority is not merely a priority of rank or dignity (though it certainly includes that); it is a priority of existence.¹⁸

Now, William Lane Craig has pointed out a whole cluster of similar pro-expressions in the New Testament — phrases like "before the ages" (pro tōn aiōnōn, 1 Cor 2:7), "before age-long time" (pro chronōn aiōniōn, 2 Tim 1:9; Titus 1:2), and "before the foundation of the world" (pro katabolēs kosmou, John 17:24; Eph 1:4; 1 Pet 1:20).¹⁹ Craig takes these expressions to suggest that God's existence is in some sense "before" time itself. Taken in a certain direction, this could support a doctrine of divine timelessness "without creation" — namely, Craig's own hybrid position that God was timeless before creating and became temporal at creation.

I have addressed Craig's hybrid view at length in Chapter 8, where I argue (with Mullins) that the "two-phase" model is philosophically unstable — because a transition from timelessness to temporality itself requires temporality, and because a timeless "phase" is a contradiction in terms.²⁰ Here I want simply to note that the pro-expressions in the New Testament can be read with full seriousness without requiring divine timelessness. The apostles are expressing the Son's priority — His existence in real temporal sequence prior to the ages and the world. That priority fits perfectly with a dynamic, temporal God who has always existed, whose life generated its own form of divine time through the perichoretic relations of Father, Son, and Spirit (cross-reference Chapter 26), and who then at a particular moment created the physical, measured time of our universe.

The Son's Pre-Existence Requires Temporality

Look again at Colossians 1:17 and the surrounding verses. The Son is "before all things," and "by Him all things were created" (v. 16). The act of creation is itself temporal — things that once did not exist came to be "by Him." The Son was actively involved in bringing the cosmos into being. That involvement is temporal activity. Whatever else "before all things" might mean, it cannot mean that the Son exists in a frozen, timeless instant from which creation somehow emerges without any divine sequencing.

Moreover, the very idea of "firstborn of all creation" (prōtotokos pasēs ktiseōs, πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως) in verse 15 conveys priority and primacy. The Son is not a creature (as the Arians mistakenly read this verse); the whole flow of the hymn insists that He is the Creator of everything. But He stands in a position of temporal and ontological priority to all that has been created.²¹ The picture is of a divine life that precedes — in real, existent, prior-ness — the origination of the created order.

Let me put this more plainly. If the Son is timeless in the strict sense, then there is no "before" for Him. He has no prior-ness. He cannot be "first" anything in any temporal sense. But Paul is emphatic: He is before all things. The grammar of the verse (estin, "is"), together with the logic of creation's coming-into-being, places the Son in a prior temporal position relative to the ages. That is perfectly consistent with dynamic divine temporality. It is strained at best under a strict atemporalist reading.

And there is a further payoff. Paul says that "in Him all things hold together" (ta panta en autō synestēken, τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν). The verb synestēken is in the perfect tense — "have come to cohere and continue to cohere." The Son is the ongoing, sustaining cause of the universe's coherence. That sustaining activity is not a one-shot event; it is a continuous, moment-by-moment holding together of all things. Sustenance is temporal activity par excellence. It requires a sustainer who is present in every moment, upholding the cosmos in its being.²² A timeless Son could not "hold together" anything in any genuine temporal sense.

Romans 8:29–30: The Golden Chain of Salvation

We turn now to what has been called, in the Reformed tradition, the "golden chain" (catena aurea) of salvation. Paul writes:

"For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom He predestined He also called, and those whom He called He also justified, and those whom He justified He also glorified" (Rom 8:29–30, ESV).

Five verbs, all in the Greek aorist tense: proegnō (προέγνω, "foreknew"), proōrisen (προώρισεν, "predestined"), ekalesen (ἐκάλεσεν, "called"), edikaiōsen (ἐδικαίωσεν, "justified"), and edoxasen (ἐδόξασεν, "glorified"). Paul has arranged them in a sequence that moves from eternity past ("foreknew," "predestined") through history (" called," "justified") to eschatological glory ("glorified," spoken of with the certainty of the aorist as though already accomplished).

A Logical-Temporal Sequence of Divine Action

The question for us is: what kind of temporal logic does this sequence assume?

The atemporalist might try to read the sequence as merely logical — that is, a series of steps that stand in a conceptual relationship to one another but that are, from God's standpoint, all simultaneously and timelessly true. On this reading, God "foreknows," "predestines," "calls," "justifies," and "glorifies" in a single eternal act that appears to us as a sequence because of our limitations.

But I do not think this reading is plausible. Here is why.²³

First, the "pro-" prefixes (pro-egnō, "fore-knew"; pro-ōrisen, "fore-ordained") explicitly assert temporal priority. The pro in these verbs means "before," "in advance," "ahead of time." It presupposes a "before" and an "after" in God's activity. Whatever God foreknew and predestined, He did so prior to something else — prior to the person's coming into being, prior to the call, prior to the response. The prefixes assume temporal sequence in God's own agency.

Second, the historical verbs in the middle of the chain — "called" and "justified" — are temporal events in the life of the saved person. A sinner is called at a particular moment (she hears the gospel, she responds); a sinner is justified at a particular moment (she puts her faith in Christ, and God declares her righteous). These are real, temporal, concrete events. The passage is not describing an eternal instant. It is describing a process that unfolds over the course of a human life — and a divine engagement with that life.²⁴

Third, the final verb — "glorified" — though grammatically aorist, looks forward to the eschatological future. Paul speaks of it as secure, as already as good as done, but in narrative reality it remains future to the present experience of the Roman Christians. The whole chain, then, begins in the deep past of God's counsel, runs through present history, and concludes in the future at the resurrection. It is a temporal arc. It cannot be compressed into a single tenseless instant without losing its very meaning.²⁵

What Is Simple Foreknowledge?

Now, the word "foreknew" (proegnō) deserves a moment of attention, because it connects directly to one of the most important philosophical arguments in this book. I develop the full case for simple foreknowledge in Chapter 25, so here I will only summarize.

Simple foreknowledge is the view that God knows, with absolute certainty and exhaustive detail, what will happen in the future — not because He determines it (Calvinism), not because He knows what every creature would freely do in every possible circumstance (Molinism), but because His unique transcendent access to all of time allows Him to see future events directly.²⁶ In my position (dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access), God experiences genuine temporal succession — He has a real "before" and "after" — but He is not limited to the creaturely present the way we are. He can access future events and know them as future.

The verb proegnō in Romans 8:29 fits beautifully within this framework. God "foreknew" in the sense that His knowledge of the saved individual — and of her eventual faith and salvation — stood in His mind before that individual's earthly story unfolded. This foreknowledge is not causal in the hard deterministic sense (God did not determine the person's free response to the gospel), but it is real and precedes the historical events.²⁷ "Predestination" follows logically and temporally from foreknowledge: on the basis of what God knew in advance, He set apart and marked out those whom He foreknew for conformity to the image of His Son.

I want to be careful here. I am not reading Paul's verse as a technical philosophical treatise. Paul is not writing epistemology. He is comforting persecuted Christians by assuring them that God's saving purposes for them are not fragile, not accidental, not up for grabs. From "foreknew" to "glorified," the whole chain is secure. But the way he expresses that comfort — through a temporal sequence of divine acts, anchored in fore-knowing — presupposes exactly the kind of God that dynamic divine temporality describes. A strictly timeless God, for whom there is no "fore" and no "after," cannot literally foreknow anything. At best, He can timelessly know — which is a different concept.²⁸

The Flow of Salvation as Temporal Drama

The broader context of Romans 8 reinforces this reading. Paul is building toward one of the great climaxes of the New Testament: "If God is for us, who can be against us?" (v. 31). Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ — not tribulation, not distress, not persecution, not famine, not nakedness, not danger, not sword, not angels, not rulers, not things present, not things to come, not powers, not height, not depth, not anything else in all creation (vv. 35–39). The whole argument is about the invincible love of a personal God who has been working on our behalf across time and who will continue to work on our behalf into the future.

Paul's God groans with us in our weakness (v. 26). Paul's God hears the Spirit's intercession (v. 27). Paul's God searches hearts (v. 27). Paul's God is Christ at the right hand of God, interceding for us (v. 34). Every one of these divine activities is temporal. They are things God does, now, in response to our real situation, unfolding through time. This is not the portrait of a timeless God; it is the portrait of an intensely active, relationally present, temporally engaged God who walks with His people.²⁹

Ephesians 1:3–14: God's Plan for the Fullness of the Times

Our fifth passage is Paul's great benediction at the opening of Ephesians. It is one long sentence in the Greek, and it is stuffed with theological riches. I will quote a fuller portion than usual, because the temporal architecture of the passage is what matters most:

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will… making known to us the mystery of His will, according to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph 1:3–5, 9–10, ESV).

"Before the Foundation of the World"

Verse 4 contains the striking phrase pro katabolēs kosmou (πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου), "before the foundation of the world." As I noted earlier in our discussion of Colossians 1, this is one of a small but important family of New Testament expressions that speak of God's acts or decrees "before" the world, "before" the ages, "before" time began.³⁰

Now, for our purposes, the important question is this: What does it mean to say God "chose" (exelexato, ἐξελέξατο) us before the foundation of the world? Three possibilities exist.

(a) Strictly timeless choice. God's choice is an atemporal act that has no "before" or "after" in itself; the language of "before the foundation" is accommodative — our way of expressing a timeless reality using temporal words.³¹

(b) Pre-creation temporal choice (Craig's hybrid view). God was timeless before creation, and the "choice" is a boundary event — the last moment of timelessness, the first moment of time. Taken literally, the "before" is a logical rather than a temporal "before."³²

(c) Pre-creation temporal choice (dynamic divine temporality). God's life has always been temporal, grounded in the perichoretic relations of the Trinity. Before the foundation of the physical cosmos, God existed in divine time — a qualitatively different form of temporality, but temporality nonetheless. His "choosing" was a real act that took place in that divine time, "before" He created the world. The language of "before" is literal.

Option (c), which is the view I defend in this book (cross-reference Chapter 7 and especially Chapter 26), allows us to take Paul's language at face value without resorting to accommodation theories or awkward "boundary" metaphysics.³³ God really did choose us before the world was made. That choice was a divine act in divine time. Creation followed, bringing with it physical, measured, clock-time. And now we live within that clock-time, awaiting the "fullness of the times" when God's plan will come to its consummation.

"A Plan for the Fullness of the Times"

The second great phrase in this passage is verse 10's oikonomian tou plērōmatos tōn kairōn (οἰκονομίαν τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν), "a plan for the fullness of the times." Let me unpack each word.

Oikonomia (οἰκονομία) literally means "household management" — the administration or stewardship of a household. Paul uses it to describe God's administration of the whole cosmic order. God is, as it were, the Steward of creation, carrying out a carefully planned administration through history.³⁴

Plērōma (πλήρωμα) means "fullness" or "completion" — that point at which something has reached its intended capacity. Kairoi (καιροί) is the plural of kairos (καιρός), which can mean "times" or "seasons" in a qualitative sense (the right time, the appropriate time), as distinct from chronos (χρόνος, chronological time). "The fullness of the times," then, is that climactic moment when all the preparatory times of history converge and ripen into the consummation God has been working toward.³⁵

Do you see what this language assumes? It assumes that God's plan is temporally extended — that it has been unfolding across successive ages, building toward a culmination. It assumes that time itself has a trajectory, that the times can become "full," that there is a moment toward which everything is moving. This is not a timeless God gazing at an already-completed pageant. This is a God who is moving His plan forward through real history, and who will bring it to fullness at the appointed moment.³⁶

The Verbal Sequence of Ephesians 1

Notice too the sequence of verbs in the passage:

"Chose" (v. 4) — exelexato, before the foundation of the world. "Predestined" (v. 5) — proorisas, in love. "Lavished" (v. 8) — eperisseusen, in all wisdom and insight. "Made known" (v. 9) — gnōrisas, the mystery of His will. "Will unite" (v. 10, future sense) — anakephalaiōsasthai, all things in Christ.

Each verb carries its own temporal location. Some point to the deep past (choosing, predestining). Some point to the present or recent past (lavishing, making known). Some point to the eschatological future (uniting all things). The whole passage traces the sweep of divine activity from eternity past through the present to the future consummation.³⁷ This is temporal architecture on a grand scale.

A strictly timeless God cannot author this architecture. He can only be, timelessly, the eternal decree in which all times are somehow simultaneously present to Him. But that is not what Paul says. Paul says God chose us (past), lavished His grace (past), made known the mystery (past), and will unite all things (future). The past-future distinction is essential to the passage.

1 Timothy 6:15–16: The God Who "Alone Has Immortality"

Our sixth and final primary passage is found in Paul's doxology near the end of 1 Timothy:

"He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen" (1 Tim 6:15–16, ESV).

The key word for our purposes is "immortality" — in Greek, athanasia (ἀθανασία). Literally, it means "deathlessness" (a-, "not" + thanatos, "death"). God alone, Paul says, has athanasia.

Immortality Is Not Timelessness

This is a point that is easy to miss but immensely important. Deathlessness and timelessness are two entirely different things. Deathlessness is the absence of an endpoint to life — the positive reality of continued existence without ever ceasing to be. Timelessness is the absence of temporal experience — no past, no future, no sequence, no succession.

These are not the same. In fact, they are almost opposites in a certain respect. Deathlessness presupposes ongoing life through time; timelessness negates the very temporal framework in which "ongoing" has meaning. A timeless God cannot live "forever" in the ordinary sense, because "forever" refers to unending temporal duration.³⁸

Greek had perfectly good words for "timeless" or "beyond time." Words like achronos (ἄχρονος, "timeless") and atempos (which would be a Latinate construction, but the idea could be expressed in Greek with ou en chronō, "not in time") were available to philosophers who wanted to make that point.³⁹ Paul did not use them. Instead, he used a word that means "deathless" — a positive predicate affirming continued, unending life. That is a significant choice.

Moreover, the phrase "to Him be honor and eternal dominion" at the end of verse 16 gives us another temporal word: aiōnion (αἰώνιον, "age-long," "eternal"). Paul's closing blessing is that God's dominion be "age-long" — that is, extending through all the ages that are to come. Again, this is enduring temporal existence, not atemporality.

"Unapproachable Light" and the Transcendence Motif

The middle phrase of the passage — "who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see" — does convey a strong sense of divine transcendence. God is not a creature like us. He is not visible, approachable, or graspable in the way finite realities are.

I fully affirm this divine transcendence. But here is the critical distinction: transcendence is not the same thing as timelessness. God can transcend creaturely categories in countless ways without being outside of time altogether. He transcends physical location without being "non-spatial in every sense" (after all, He fills heaven and earth, Jer 23:24). He transcends human understanding without being utterly unknowable (the Son has "made Him known," John 1:18). In the same way, He transcends creaturely, measured, clock-time without being outside of time in the strict atemporalist sense.⁴⁰

The God who "dwells in unapproachable light" is the God who sent His Son to become visible in the flesh (John 1:14). The God whom "no one has ever seen" is the same God whom Moses spoke with face to face (Exod 33:11, though with qualifications). Divine transcendence and divine personal, temporal engagement with the world are not opposed. They are held together in the mystery of God's being.

Other Apostolic Witnesses to Divine Temporality

Although the six passages we have just examined are my primary focus (following the specific texts highlighted in the chapter specifications), it is worth noting that they are not alone. The broader apostolic witness is saturated with temporal language about God. Let me gesture toward some of this material briefly.

Paul's Temporal Gospel

Consider the cluster of Pauline expressions we have already touched on in passing. In 1 Corinthians 2:7, Paul speaks of God's wisdom "which God decreed before the ages (pro tōn aiōnōn) for our glory." In Titus 1:2, God "promised before age-long time (pro chronōn aiōniōn)" but has now "manifested" His word. In 2 Timothy 1:9, Paul speaks of "His own purpose and grace, which He gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began (pro chronōn aiōniōn)." Each of these constructions presupposes temporal priority in God's activity. Each places divine deliberation and decree in a "before" that precedes the visible unfolding of salvation history.⁴¹

Now, I want to be honest. William Lane Craig has argued, plausibly, that these expressions imply that there was a phase of divine existence prior to the beginning of time itself, and that during this phase God must have been atemporal (since there was no time for Him to be "in").⁴² I disagree with that reading of the phases, but not with his honest acknowledgment that the expressions are temporally loaded. What I want to point out is that the expressions themselves are temporal — they are in the form of "before X," and "before" is a temporal preposition. To read them as implying timelessness requires a substantial philosophical argument about the nature of time and creation (which Craig provides), not a direct exegetical inference. The plain sense of the expressions is: God's choice, God's grace, God's purpose preceded (in time) the ages and the world.

This is exactly what dynamic divine temporality affirms. God's decrees are prior — in divine time — to the creation of physical, measured time. There is no need to posit a timeless phase of God to make sense of these expressions. We need only acknowledge that God has always had a temporal life, shaped by His Trinitarian relations, and that His plans for creation were formed within that life.

Peter's Temporal Gospel

Peter's letters are equally saturated with temporal language. In 1 Peter 1:20, Peter says that Christ "was foreknown before the foundation of the world" (proegnōsmenou pro katabolēs kosmou) "but was made manifest in the last times (ep' eschatou tōn chronōn) for the sake of you." The structure is past-future: foreknowing precedes manifestation, and manifestation occurs at a specific temporal moment ("the last times"). Peter's Christology and his doctrine of redemption are embedded in a temporal framework.⁴³

Or consider 1 Peter 1:3–5, the opening thanksgiving: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." "Has caused us to be born again" — a past event. "Are being guarded" — a present activity. "Ready to be revealed in the last time" — a future event. Past, present, future, all folded into Peter's picture of the God who saves. Every verb is temporal.

John's Temporal Gospel

Though we are saving a fuller treatment of Revelation for Chapter 23, it is worth noting that the First Letter of John operates within the same temporal framework. "And now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears we may have confidence and not shrink from Him in shame at His coming" (1 John 2:28). "Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him" (1 John 3:2). The not-yet character of the future revelation is essential to John's pastoral argument. We are already God's children; we are not yet what we shall be; the revelation is coming. This is utterly temporal.⁴⁴

Hebrews's Temporal Gospel

Hebrews itself, beyond just 13:8, is a tour de force of temporal theology. "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son" (Heb 1:1–2). "Spoke… has spoken": aorist followed by perfect, past followed by past-with-present-effect. God's communication has a history, a development, a climax. "As long as it is called 'today'" (Heb 3:13); "Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts" (3:15; 4:7). The "today" of Hebrews is the kairos-moment of decision, a temporal category par excellence.⁴⁵ And the eschatological expectation of Hebrews — the Sabbath rest that remains (4:9), the city that is to come (13:14), the "second time" Christ will appear to save those who eagerly wait for Him (9:28) — is all future-oriented, temporally forward-looking.

Engaging the Atemporalist Counter-Reading

Having walked through the main apostolic passages, I want to take some time now to engage fairly with the strongest atemporalist counter-readings. I do not want to caricature opposing views, so let me lay out what the serious atemporalist actually says and why, and then respond.

The Atemporalist's Best Case

A careful atemporalist — let us imagine Paul Helm as our conversation partner — would acknowledge that the apostolic texts contain much temporal language about God. She would not deny that. But she would argue that this language is "accommodated" — that is, it is God speaking to us in our creaturely idiom, using temporal categories because we cannot comprehend the timeless reality that lies beneath them.⁴⁶

The atemporalist would point out that Scripture also uses bodily language about God — God's "eyes," God's "arm," God's "face," God's "hand" — and yet we do not conclude from this that God has a literal body. We recognize that these are anthropomorphisms. So (the argument runs) we should recognize temporal language as anthro-chrono-morphisms, or "chronomorphisms" — creaturely expressions for what is in reality a timeless divine being.⁴⁷

The atemporalist would add that certain texts (like the pro-expressions we have been discussing) speak of God's actions "before" time or "before" the ages, and that these expressions are most naturally read as implying a phase of divine existence that is not itself temporal. She would also note the great philosophical tradition (Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Anselm) that has found divine timelessness to be the most coherent way to hold together God's perfection, simplicity, and omniscience.

Why the Accommodation Argument Fails Here

These are serious arguments, and I have engaged them at much greater length in earlier chapters (see especially Chapters 5 and 6 for the full philosophical case against timelessness). Here I want to focus on the specifically exegetical point — the claim that apostolic temporal language is merely accommodation.

My response is twofold. First, the accommodation thesis proves too much. If we say that temporal language is merely accommodative whenever it appears, we gut the passages of their force. 2 Peter 3:8 is the clearest example. If "patient" and "waiting" and "not wishing that any should perish" are merely accommodative human ways of describing a timeless reality in which God neither waits nor is patient, then what is left of Peter's actual argument? His whole point to the scoffers was that God really is patient, really is waiting, really is giving people time to repent. The pastoral substance disappears if we treat the temporal language as metaphorical.⁴⁸

Second, there is a crucial disanalogy between bodily anthropomorphisms and temporal language about God. Scripture itself explicitly denies that God has a body (Deut 4:12, 15–16; John 4:24 — "God is spirit"). Scripture nowhere explicitly denies that God experiences temporal succession. On the contrary, Scripture repeatedly describes God doing things that seem to require temporal sequence: remembering, responding, planning, waiting, becoming. Moreover, bodily anthropomorphisms occur in concrete imagery that is obviously figurative ("the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth"), whereas temporal language about God appears in arguments, narratives, and doctrinal affirmations whose very meaning depends on temporal sequence.⁴⁹

So the accommodation move, while superficially attractive, does not actually work for the temporal data. Either the biblical writers are mistaken about God's temporal life (which no evangelical wants to say), or they are telling us something true — namely, that God does indeed live, act, and respond in time.

What About the Pro-Expressions?

As for the "before the foundation of the world" expressions, I have already touched on these, but let me summarize my response. These phrases do imply that God's activity extends back behind the creation of the world. They do imply that there was a "before" relative to the present world-system. They do not imply, all by themselves, that during this "before" God was existing in a strictly timeless mode.

To infer timelessness from "before the world," one has to add a philosophical premise — something like "time began at the creation of the world" or "there cannot be any time prior to the creation of the physical universe." Those premises are not in the biblical text. They have to be imported from elsewhere.⁵⁰

Now, the premise that time began at creation is defensible in certain forms (the kalam cosmological argument makes a case for the finitude of the past), but it is not a slam-dunk conclusion. R. T. Mullins and Garrett DeWeese have argued persuasively that God's pre-creation existence can be understood as involving a form of "divine time" that is generated by the Trinitarian perichoretic relations — a time that is qualitatively different from the measured, physical time of our universe but is nevertheless time in the sense of involving real sequence.⁵¹ I defend this view at length in Chapter 26.

On this view, the pro-expressions in the New Testament can be taken at face value: God's acts of choosing, loving, planning, and foreknowing really did occur "before" the foundation of the world, in the sense that they preceded (in divine time) the creation of physical time. No appeal to divine timelessness is needed to make sense of the language.

A Synthetic Look: The Shape of Apostolic Theology

Step back for a moment, and let us ask what kind of God the apostles are describing when you take all of this together. I do not think it is possible to read Paul, Peter, John, and the writer of Hebrews and come away with a portrait of a timeless, unmoving, tenseless Deity who is equally present to every moment in a single frozen eternal instant. That is not the God the apostles met, worshiped, and proclaimed.

The God of the apostles is:

— A God who planned salvation before the foundation of the world. Planning is temporal activity; it involves deliberation, anticipation, and decision.⁵²

— A God who sent His Son "when the fullness of time had come" (Gal 4:4). Sending requires a sender, a moment of sending, and a sent one who arrives after being sent.

— A God who raised Jesus from the dead on the third day (1 Cor 15:4). Resurrection is a temporal event occurring at a specific moment in history.

— A God who pours out the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2). The Spirit's outpouring is a real event at a real time.

— A God who waits patiently for all to come to repentance (2 Pet 3:9). Waiting is temporal.

— A God who works in His people (Phil 2:13), gives them gifts (1 Cor 12), disciplines them (Heb 12), hears their prayers (1 John 5:14), and responds to their needs (Phil 4:19). All of these are ongoing, temporal activities.

— A God who will bring Jesus back (1 Thess 4:15–17), will raise the dead (1 Cor 15), will judge the world (Acts 17:31), and will make all things new (Rev 21:5). The future acts of God are not already complete; they are genuinely future, and they will come to pass at the appointed time.

This is not the God of strict timelessness. This is the living God — the God who is, was, and is to come (Rev 1:8, Chapter 23).⁵³

Objections and Responses

Before concluding, let me take up a few more objections that thoughtful readers might raise.

Objection 1: "Does This Make God Less Than Perfect?"

Some readers will worry that ascribing temporality to God reduces His perfection. After all, is not timelessness a "higher" mode of existence than temporality? Is not eternity in the sense of tota simul (the "whole at once" possession of unending life, as Boethius put it) more glorious than mere duration?

I have engaged this objection in depth in Chapter 6. Briefly: the intuition that timelessness is "higher" comes from a particular philosophical tradition (Platonic and Neoplatonic) that equates changelessness with perfection and change with deficiency. But the biblical witness does not equate temporality with deficiency. The God of the Bible is temporal and perfect — perfect in love, perfect in faithfulness, perfect in wisdom, perfect in righteousness. Temporal existence is not a defect; it is simply what it means to be a living, personal, relational Being.⁵⁴

Objection 2: "Does This Not Make God a Prisoner of Time?"

Another worry is that if God is temporal, He is somehow "bound" by time, imprisoned in the passing moment like we are. This, the objector says, is unworthy of God.

My response is that God's temporality is not like our temporality. My own position (dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access) holds that God experiences genuine temporal succession but is not locked into the creaturely present the way we are. He has access to past, present, and future; He knows all times; He is not confined to the "now" in the restrictive sense that we are. God is Lord of time, not its prisoner. He created physical time, He transcends measured time, and He engages with every moment of time as its Maker and Sustainer.⁵⁵

Objection 3: "What About God's Infinity?"

A final worry: does temporality not compromise God's infinity? If God has a temporal life, does He not have to be finite in some respect?

Not at all. A temporal being with no beginning and no end is infinite in duration. God's temporal life extends forever in both directions (or, in the pre-creation period, through a divine time grounded in His Trinitarian relations). He is infinite not by being outside of time but by never ceasing to be — and by being infinite in every other perfection (love, knowledge, power, presence, wisdom). Temporality and infinity are compatible; they are simply different attributes.⁵⁶

Conclusion: The Apostolic God Is a Living, Temporal God

We come now to the end of this chapter, and it is worth pausing to take in what we have seen. The apostolic writings — Paul's letters, the General Epistles, Hebrews — do not teach a strictly timeless God. They teach a God who is alive, active, responsive, patient, planning, sending, raising, pouring out, waiting, saving, and who will come again. Their entire theological vocabulary is saturated with temporal activity. Even the passages that have sometimes been conscripted to support atemporality — Hebrews 13:8, 2 Peter 3:8, 1 Timothy 6:16 — turn out, on close reading, to teach the opposite. Hebrews 13:8 affirms temporal constancy across a three-tense frame. 2 Peter 3:8 contrasts God's patient waiting with human impatience. 1 Timothy 6:16 describes God as deathless (not timeless), unapproachable yet fully engaged with His world.

What we have, in the end, is a portrait of God that fits the thesis of this book beautifully. God is a living God, in the full biblical sense — living involves life, life involves activity, and activity unfolds in time. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever — not in the sense of being outside of time, but in the sense of being unchanging in moral character and saving purpose across time. God is the King of the ages (1 Tim 1:17) — sovereign over every age, but involved in each age as its Lord. God is the one who foreknew, predestined, called, justified, and will glorify — a chain of saving actions that stretches from eternity past to eternity future and runs straight through the middle of history.⁵⁷

I find this portrait deeply pastorally compelling. When I pray, I want to know that God hears me now — not in a timeless simultaneity that never "arrives" at my moment, but in a real and present attentiveness to my actual, temporally-located request. When I suffer, I want to know that God is with me in my suffering — not gazing at it from outside a timeless tableau, but entering into my moment with genuine compassion and response. When I hope for the future, I want to know that God is really going to do what He has promised — that the promise is not already realized in some eternal instant that I can never access, but that the God who has acted is also a God who will yet act, and whose future action will not disappoint. All of this pastoral reality is what the apostolic witness portrays. All of it requires a God who lives and acts in time.

The next chapter will continue this biblical study by turning to Revelation and eschatology. There we will see that the vision of the age to come, of the return of Christ, of the new heavens and new earth, is also fundamentally temporal. And we will argue that the age to come itself will be a temporal age — glorified, transformed, healed, but still involving genuine experience, relationship, sequence, and growth. Time, we will see, is not a defect to be escaped but a gift to be fulfilled.

For now, though, let us rest in the apostolic assurance. The God of Paul and Peter, the God of James and Jude, the God of the Epistle to the Hebrews — this God is "the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality" (1 Tim 6:15–16). He is deathless, sovereign, transcendent — and He is also the God who has chosen us, who has sent His Son, who has poured out His Spirit, who is patient with us now, and who is coming again. That is a God who lives in time. That is a God who lives with us. And that is a God worth worshiping.