God's Timeline

Have you ever wondered about how God views time? I know that we cannot actually speak on His behalf, except to use answers from the Bible. However, I've often wondered about how to interpret the Bible's use of time.

God is the Alpha and Omega. So He was here when the world was created (duh - He created it), but He will also be here through the end of the world. Or - is He already in the end of the world? If God knows everything that was, is, and will be, then doesn't it seem likely that He is able to live in the past, present, and future all at the same time?

I've often thought of God as an Editor of a film. He has the individual incidents that happen to people cataloged (and quite possibly playing) so that at any given moment, He will bring to view the actions of a person. Each action is one part of the film that is spliced together as a person lives his or her life. But, God also sees the film in its entirety. It's more like 3-D, or even 6-billion-D, because everything plays at the same time and He has the capacity to process everything at once. We thought that Pixar had an amazing set of supercomputers...

So while God can see all of time as it exists on a continuum, it seems that He is also living/reliving every bit of it with us. He knows what's going to happen, but He watches it unfold as if He had never seen it before. It's similar to me watching the Bourne Identity yet again. I know that movie so well that I can quote it, and yet I still sit down and watch it with the attention of child that was just given a piece of candy to chew.

Then comes the nature of God's forgiveness. If He knows all and sees all (past, present, and future), then what does it mean to cast our sins away from Him as far as the East is from the West? Does it mean that He throws the DVD into the other room of His house so that He won't see it? I don't know...I've pictured something like that happening. But I think that a more realistic idea is that He takes the sin out of His general recall memory. It will be recalled on the day of judgement, but for now, it has been tossed aside. He may remember it...but I'm just thinking out loud...