Perhaps the most common view—widely considered the orthodox view—of God in modern Christianity is God is outside time. Divine timelessness is generally taken to mean:

• God does not experience nor recognize any sequence of moments in time
• God experiences every event in what humans call “history” as eternally present

More formally, God is atemporal. One problem divine atemporality faces is passages like Jeremiah 31:34—

“For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

This passage contains two problems:

• What does it mean for there to be a moment before which God forgets Israel’s sin and a moment after? This is the temporality problem.
• What does it mean for God to “forget” Israel’s sin? If God is omniscient, all knowledge is present to God, including Israel’s sin and his forgetting of Israel’s sin.

To resolve these problems and build a stronger understanding of God’s relationship to time, let’s begin with some problems with divine timelessness and then consider some problems related to anthropomorphisms.

Problems with Divine Timelessness

Philosophers divide time into two different views:

• A series, in which times are described in relation to other times. “Yesterday,” “tomorrow,” and “next week” are all relative to “today” rather than being fixed points in time.
• B series, in which times are described as fixed points along some measuring system. “The 12^th of Never at 10 pm” describes a unique point in time regardless of whether it happened in the past or will happen in the future.

You can only describe time in relative terms if you have entered into the moment you are using as a reference. For instance, if you say: “I went to the river yesterday,” your listener can only understand your statement if you are both in the same reference frame—today. It is impossible, however, for a timeless being to “enter into today,” sharing a frame of reference with a listener, to coherently use relative time references. All points in time are equally present to a timeless being.

And yet, God uses relative time references regularly throughout the Scriptures. For instance:

For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.
Genesis 7:4

The LORD said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.”
Genesis 18:10

The LORD says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.
Psalm 110:1

There are two obvious solutions to the problem of God speaking as if he has entered time in these passages:

• These are anthropomorphisms, as well. This solution places virtually every narrative in the Scriptures into the category of anthropomorphism, treating every narrative as less than a literal description of historical events.
• Every instance of human-divine interaction in the Scriptures is actually a pre-incarnate Jesus. While we know this is true in some cases, broadening this to all cases seems problematic. Further, holding that the Father cannot enter time while the Son can opens a vast gulf between these two. Taking Trinity as three beings with one essence and taking it that these three beings are different enough to have vastly different relationships with time moves the problem rather than resolving it.

This argument can be broadened to a more general problem: If a timeless being cannot enter time to use relative references about time, how can a timeless being interact with time at all? There is no clear answer to this problem.

And, once again, the problem can be shaped in a different direction. If we have learned anything from modern science, it is this: space and time are intertwined. Movement in space is movement in time, and movement in time is movement in space. To be present in a location is to be present in time.

And yet God is often present in the physical world.

• He is present at every location in space, creating and upholding the world.
• He was present in the Shekinah Glory in Exodus 19:16–18.
• He was present with Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre.
• He was present with Joshua outside the walls of Jericho.
• He was present with the Disciples on the road to Emmaus.
• He was present with Thomas, even telling Thomas to feel his scars.

We use omnipresent to describe God’s relationship to space. God is not “outside space.” He is “in all of space,” and even able to manifest himself in specific locations whenever he chooses.

Problems with Anthropomorphisms

As noted in the discussion above, it is always possible to say: “It’s anthropomorphisms all the way down.” We can call every mention of God, in every passage where God is mentioned as being related to time, and anthropomorphism. But does this solve the problem?

Consider, for instance:

And in the morning watch the LORD in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down on the Egyptian forces and threw the Egyptian forces into a panic.
Exodus 24:24

Clearly, this is an anthropomorphism—God does not have eyes. However, the primary argument for anthropomorphisms is that God uses them to describe the indescribable or make “the operations of the divine intelligible.”

Even that rich storehouse of apparently crude anthropomorphisms, the OT, when it ascribes to Deity physical characters, mental and moral attributes, like those of man, merely means to make the Divine nature and operations intelligible, not to transfer to Him the defects and limitations of human character and life.[1]

In the case of God staring out of the pillar of fire, what unintelligible thing is being made intelligible? Either:

• God did, in some way, “look down on the Egyptians,” but the physical event was beyond what can be described in human language.
• God did not physically “look down on the Egyptians,” and God is using physical language to describe a spiritual event.

Either way, we can understand both of these options without the anthropomorphism. The anthropomorphism adds drama and color, but it does not add any information that we could not otherwise understand in this case.

The passage we started with is a harder case if God is truly outside time:

“For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Jeremiah 31:34

God is speaking “within a time-bound reference frame” in this passage. There will be a time before he forgets Israel’s sin and a time after. If God is outside time, then the implied “before” and “after” are anthropomorphisms—they are describing, in human terms, the way God interacts with Israel’s sin.

But here is a key point: If we can describe what we think God means without the anthropomorphism, we must either believe:

• We can understand the meaning behind the anthropomorphism. We are more intelligent and, hence, better able to understand the truth behind the passage than Jeremiah.
• Jeremiah understood the anthropomorphism just as well as we do and uses this phrasing for reasons beyond conveying literal truth.
• This passage is not an anthropomorphism; there will be, in some way, a moment before God forgives Israel’s sins and a moment after.

The question is not whether there is mystery here, but rather where to place the mystery.

The Omnitemporal Solution

If the problems with divine timelessness seem unresolvable, and just shouting anthropomorphism does not resolve all the problems we face when reading these passages, are there other options?

Let’s return to the relationship between God and space to see if we can find guidance. We say God is omnipresent, which we take to mean:

• God created matter and space (ex nihilo); before creation, these things did not exist
• The universe is accidental to God and necessary to humans
• God is present everywhere, upholding the world
• God can also be specifically present in one place, accomplishing some particular task

While it’s a quibble, omnipresent does not seem to describe God’s relationship to time fully. God is not only present everywhere, but God can somehow be in a specific place. Omnispatial is probably a better term for God’s relationship to the physical world.

If God is Omnispatial, and time is intertwined with space, we can add omnitemporal to omnispatial. Omnitemporal means three things:

• God created time when he created matter and space (ex nihilo)
• Time is accidental to God and necessary to humans
• God is always present in every moment, upholding everything
• God can also be specifically present at one time, accomplishing some particular task

Grant describes God’s relationship to time in this way:

God’s temporal attributes are comparable to His spatial attributes. Just as He is omnipresent in space, so He is also “omnipresent” in time. This is a particularly attractive view since modern physics regards the universe as a space-time continuum. If God is omnipresent, then He must exist in every inertial reference frame. And since time and all time-related concepts such as simultaneity are reference frame dependent, God must exist at every instant in every reference frame.[2]

There is still mystery beyond the human mind here. How can God be present everywhere and at a particular place simultaneously? We don’t need to know the answer to these questions to accept that this is what the Scriptures describe.

Conclusion

Does moving from divine timelessness to omnitemporality help us understand our original passage better?

“For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Jeremiah 31:34

If God is omnitemporal, he can enter into time at the moment he forgives Israel, creating a moment before he forgives Israel and a moment after. There are two problems in this passage, however:

• The spatial aspects—what we have been considering thus far
• The “forgetful” aspects—how can an omniscient being “forget?”

The second problem is mostly a matter of semantic range. What does the word “forget” actually mean? A word study from Logos is helpful:

The primary meaning of the word used for “remember” in this passage is to mention or profess. God is not forgetting in the human sense but rather promising that he will no longer mention Israel’s sins in the future (given the idea of past and future moments). Perhaps an even stronger reading would be that God will no longer legally hold Israel’s sins against them.

To recapitulate the argument given here:

• Divine timelessness presents us with several scriptural and philosophical problems, particularly the many passages that imply there is “before” and “after” for God
• Treating these as anthropomorphisms creates as many problems as it solves and often moves the problem from one place to another rather than solving it
• Instinctively calling any difficult-to-understand passage an anthropomorphism weakens our view of the Scriptures, making the literal spiritual, and invites laziness
• Treating God as omnitemporal, in the same way we hold God is omnispatial, resolves at least some of these anthropomorphisms to simpler literal readings, leading to a stronger hermeneutical stance

Even when God is treated as omnitemporal, there are still instances of anthropomorphism in the Scriptures. These are not, however, always cases of “making the unintelligible intelligible.” Sometimes, writers use anthropomorphisms to add depth of meaning or clarity to a text; other times, they use anthropomorphisms to describe something that would otherwise be indescribable.

Jeremiah 31:34 is best understood if we assume God is omnitemporal rather than atemporal.

 

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[1] James Lindsay, “Anthropomorphism,” ed. James Orr et al., The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (Chicago: The Howard-Severance Company, 1915).

[2] Charles T. Grant, “Our Heavenly Father,” Emmaus Journal 11, no. 2 (2002): 221–80.