Because God is timeless, He is also timely, at least from the perspective of us creatures. Since He is not bound by time, He is free to work in it as He pleases. Since He sees it all from the outside, He is not taken by surprise, not caught off-guard, not left trying to scramble to correct something that went wrong.

“From everlasting to everlasting, you are God.” This declaration of the eternal nature of our God ends one of the most notable opening verse couplets to any of the Psalms. Moses, in Psalm 90, declares the excellencies of the God of Israel, contrasting the eternal nature of God with the extremely fleeting and temporal nature of His creation. “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” God’s eternal nature means that before He created the universe, before He had even created time itself, God existed perfectly and fully in Himself. God is truly timeless; He is not subject to the rules of time and space like His creation. He does not experience that succession of moments, that droning on of seconds and minutes and hours like we do. He is outside of time, able to view all of the reality of time and space as one succinct and timeless reality. Even more, time itself gets its reality from God, with all things being born out of God’s very existence. As Steve Unthank noted quite rightly in his article on God’s immutability, God, as pure actuality, gives rise out of the perfect abundance of His nature to all things that are not pure actuality, things that are by definition subject to change, things that are subject to time.

And time in a fallen world is actually quite depressing for us creatures. Moses makes this abundantly clear in verses 9-10: “For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sign. The years of our life are seventy or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” Each of us feels the weight of the passing of time in a myriad of ways. Parents often love to sit and talk about how it felt like just yesterday that their kids were toddling around in diapers and now they are sending them off to college.

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