How long is God’s Eternity? How can we conceive it?  How can we describe it?  How anyone explain it? But, on the other hand, in Ecclesiastes 3:11we read that God “made all things beautiful in their proper time.  Also, eternity he put into their hearts without which man will not find the accomplishments that God made from the beginning to the end.”  The Hebrew noun translated, “eternity,” here is ‘olam which means a long-time duration in both past and future – antiquity and futurity; for all time, forever; long time ago, the dim past and unforeseen future.  (Although, the meaning, “world,’ did first occur in post-Biblical Hebrew, as “The LORD of the World” or “The Lord of the Universe,” even throughout Judaic liturgy.)

Only by faith and divine revelation can we begin to perceive and understand something that one might call God’s “Eternal Now” in what one might call our God-given “sanctified imagination.” God planned out everything in this world and has given people descending from Adam some picture and understanding of His Eternal Now, otherwise without that people would not see what God is doing from when time began to the end of time except by divine revelation.

In an effort to try to picture “God’s Eternal Now,” one might think about a present instance of “Now,” and then wait, and then the next instance of “Now,” and then wait, and then the next instance of “Now”.  Then take all these “separate Nows” and put them all, as simultaneous, as one and the same, in God’s Eternal Now, where one perceives them all at once with no past and future, no cause and effect, no time but just space and “Now.”  One could picture, even specify, this “Eternal Now”, as a “Universal Simultaneity” or a “Panorama Simultaneity” of all things in objective reality existing and occurring, as spaceless and timeless.

Within this “Eternal Now” God the Son created a Space-Time Continuum, as the sum-total of the objective reality of space and time, called the world, the cosmos, the universe, and studied, as “nature” according to John 1:3.  Since in Hebrews 13:8, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and today and forever”, God the Son, as Jesus Christ, is always eternal and immutable within His Eternal Now inside and outside of space and time.

This creation of nature specifically would be “the accomplishments that God made from the beginning to the end” in Ecclesiastes 3:11. Outside of this created Space-Time Continuum, called “nature”, is the supernatural of God in Heaven, though now His Third Heaven, as mentioned by Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:2, “I knew a man…caught up into the Third Heaven.”  Within this Space-Time Continuum of our world we are accommodated with a thinking of eternity, as an “eternity past” and an “eternity future,” when actually it may simply be a timeless eternity outside of the Space-Time Continuum of our world, our universe. 

The beginning point this Continuum is when “God created the heavens and the earth” in Genesis 1:1, and its end point will be at the close of the end-times, when “…the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up” in 2 Peter 3:10.  However, what exists before Genesis 1:1 and after the events in 2 Peter 3:10 exists, as one and the same thing together, that is, God’s Eternal Now.  Within this Eternal Now all things of objective reality exist: God, angels, spirits, people, souls, thoughts, words, salvation – all things at once.

The fascinating application, as a purpose for all of this picture, is for us to have a way of perceiving God’s Eternal Now existing out there somewhere and see our world…our universe…our history…our future…are all a part or within this Eternal Now, existing, as we live even now. So, one might picture that those in the third heaven are looking down at us in a created Space-Time Continuum looking at the second heaven’s space and light AND our here-now AND Hades and ending with The Great White Throne Judgment all in one grand omniscient and omnipresent view of one simultaneity, where outside of this created space-and-time Continuum will exist or rather does exist Gehenna AND the (new) heaven, (new) Earth, (new) Jerusalem., where the “new” is only God’s accommodation for us within this space-and-time Continuum.  So, in that regard the things described in Revelation 21 may not so much be in the future but in the present for God’s Eternal Now.  Thus, one may not think of Heaven’s “streets of gold”, as only a future thing but as a present thing in Heaven, albeit the Third Heaven that is outside of space and time.

Beyond death’s door believers enter into “the presence of the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8) into the Third Heaven (2 Cor. 12:2 also Paradise in v. 3) where they will “know, as they are known” omnisciently by God (1 Cor. 13:12). One may picture them and God, as they are looking down upon us into this created Space-Time Continuum and seeing God’s created “Second Heaven”[1] of the universe in darkness then in light with a created “First Heaven” of the atmosphere around the earth AND our present here and now AND The Great White Throne Judgement. Thus, believers after their death or after their translation at the Harpage/Rapture in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 enter into the timelessness of God’s Eternal Now, even though time continues to exist on earth and in God’s Space-Time Continuum.  This even with God’s trumpet call initiates The Day of the Yahweh, The Day of the LORD with what will be a time of Tribulation for 7 years on earth. They will continue in this Eternal Now state, even when they return back on earth during the Regeneration of the future Millennial Reign of Christ in a rulership capacity according to Matthew 19:28.

Indeed, a corollary of God’s Eternal Now would be His omniscience, in that His knowledge would span all the details of His Space-Time Continuum, which would then have a correlation between His omniscience and omnipresence.  Thus, His “Eternal Now” would corollate with His eternal “Everywhere Here” within which He created His “Space-Time Continuum” of both.  Imagine God being right here and on the earth’s moon and on the planet Pluto and Polaris and even Earendel [“The Morning Star”] all at the same time, including of course every point on our planet Earth.

Perhaps one could illustrate a “picture” of this “Eternal Now” in a Multiplex Movie Theater complex of several theater screens and rooms with projectors using the old celluloid plastic film strips on reels with individual frames of images with “captions.”  Imagine all the projector rooms filled full with all the film strips unwound lying haphazardly all around each room up to the ceiling for a person to wonder around and look at the images and words contained in the film strips in a random and disheveled arrangement, as apparently “time standing still.”  One would see a universe of things and activities in seemingly still views.  This is a very homely and mundane way to try to perceive this “Eternal Now,” but it does give one an avenue toward a model – a way – a picture – to illustrate God’s forever and forever of past and future, along with His omniscience and omnipresence.

Another somewhat simplistic picture of this might be as follows: Picture yourself in a canoe floating in a river going through some fast rapids.  You steer where you can, always going down stream, and watch people on the shore and know that there will be some end to the river down the miles. God’s Space-Time Continuum is the river with the rapids.  We are in the canoes moving rapidly.  God’s Eternal Now is the shore that does not seem to be moving.  The people all milling around on shore back and forth are the angels and saints who have gone on through death’s door before us. Time-to-time a canoe will get go to the shore, and the person will get off and join the others on shore.

Much of this about looking outside of time is difficult to understand, since within time our minds are somewhat a slave to time.  It is practically impossible for us to see and understand reality outside of time.  But that reality does exist…for God and believers after death.

Eternal God exists in His Eternal Now or, perhaps, His “Forever Present,” as a Supratemporal or Hyper-temporal Present, depicted in the lyrics:

When we’ve been there ten thousand years

Bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,

Than when we’ve first begun.

This was or is the state of His eternal decrees and predestination. Before the foundations of the world is God’s Eternal Now!  God’s Eternal Now is unique to His triune existence alone with His omniscience, omnipotence, sovereignty, and eternality, where we and all of creation are not within His Eternal Now but are in a Space-Time Continuum until Rev. 21, when “time shall be no more.”  Augustine: “In the Eternal...nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present. But no temporal process is wholly simultaneous...all time past is forced to move on by the incoming future...all the future follows from the past; and that all, past and future, is created and issues out of that which is forever present. Who will hold the heart of man that it may stand still and see how the eternity which always stands still is itself neither future nor past but expresses itself in the times that are future and past?”—Confessions.

God’s Eternal Now is a divine reality of existence outside of the present Continuum of space-and-time that co-exists with the present Continuum of space-and-time, which God created in Genesis 1:1, in which Triune God has always existed and created angelic beings, among which a third fell.  Hence, since their fall was in this Eternal Now there is no opportunity within present space and time for repentance, as will be those lost in Gehena. 

The Greek Aorist Aspect [as opposed to tenses involving time] can portray God’s Eternal Now very well. It is described in Genesis 1:1 and Revelation 20:11-22:5 [except for John 1:1-2] and notable in 2 Peter 3:8 and 13 with a transition in vv. 10-12 and has a focus in v. 9.  With God’s creation of time events of this world began and are recorded in Genesis 1:2 through Revelation 20:10, 22:6-21.

The reality of the salvation, as eternal, for those actually born-again and saved exists in God’s Eternal Now.  In fact on the cross when the sins of all of humanity was placed upon Jesus from the 6th hour to the 9th hour in Mark 15:33, Jesus announced in John 19:30 – “It is finish” – the debt of sin is paid in full by Jesus, as Paul explained in 2 Corinthians 5:21,  how God made Jesus “…who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” This can be partly understood, when one sees how all the sins of humanity exist in God’s Eternal Now within which is God’s created Space-Time Continuum. Such sins, as all the sins of humanity (since Adam through the Millennial Kingdom) were committed this Space and over Time.  In God’s Eternal Now all such sins can be and are addressed in an instant within those three hours during which Jesus was made sin for us.

God exists both in His Eternal Now transcendently and throughout His created time-and-space immanently, and our salvation exists both in His Eternal Now timelessly with predestination and in time-and-space with a call and justification, then His Eternal Now forever in glorification. 

From God’s vantage point:

In His Eternal Now God knows us and predestines our salvation. 

In His time-and-space God foreknows us and calls us to and justified us in salvation.

In His Eternal Now God glorifies us in salvation with our resurrection.

From Our vantage point:

In God’s Eternal Now we have been known and predestined by God for salvation.

In God’s time-and-space we are called to and justified in our salvation.

In God’s Eternal Now we will be glorified in transcendently perfect bodies the same, whether at our death and the resurrection and the New Jerusalem. 

We naturally think of God’s Eternal Now, as in “The Past” and a part of “The Eternal Past” with “Divine Decrees” by God for our salvation, hence for each of our individual existences.  But this is erroneous picture in our finite understanding of eternity. What we regard as “Eternity Past” and “Eternity Future” is not separate but one in the same, as “Eternity Now.”  Each of our individual existences not “were” but “are” a part of God’s Eternal Now, however in God’s created time-and-space we “come into existence” at our conception withing our mother’s womb. But this is to accommodate our thinking within God’s Space-Time Continuum, where in His Eternal Now all of humanity exists simultaneously. (However, we can avoid the heresy of supposing that some kind of “human spirit beings existing in heaven” prior to conception that provides for a human life or spirit to enter a zygote at conception to create a human life on earth. Mormon theology grossly temporalizes all of this with its grotesque placement of time, as we know it, into God’s Eternal Now, accounted as the Past for us and physicalizes procreation by God, with their teaching that we were pre-existing spirit beings in heaven who were brought to earth and put into our earthly bodies at conception, even as God physically did with Jesus Christ for Mary.)

This is the biblical understanding of predestination in the eternal security of our salvation, as God’s elect.  Our salvation is ultimately within God’s Eternal Now. Paul explained in 2 Timothy 1:9, how God the Father is the one “saving us and calling us by a holy call, not according to our works but according to His own purpose and grace, the One given to us in Christ Jesus before time of the ages.” God himself has saved us and invited us with his special, divine invitation to salvation.   This salvation was not something for which we can work but something that he planned by his unmerited favor toward us by placing us within Christ Jesus from before time began…was created…in God’s Eternal Now…before Genesis 1:1 and during John 1:1. This “created time” existed from Genesis 1:1 and will end in Revelation 20:10 which is referenced in 2 Peter 3:10.

God’s Eternal Now – Rom. 8:29-30 – With God there is no time.  He is above our “Space-Time Continuum.”  This is the basis of “if saved, always saved.”  Salvation in God’s “Eternal Now” cannot be changed nor lost in time.

In 2 Peter 3:8, Peter is describing something outside our Space-Time Continuum, where for God there is no time and no difference between a day and a thousand years – “But do not have this one thing escape your notice, beloved, that one day with the Lord is, as a thousand years, and a thousand years is, as one day.”  One could refer to this understanding of God, as His “Eternal Now.”  Peter was simply saying that God is outside of space and time and can do in a very short time, such as in a day, what men or nature would require a very long time (if ever) to accomplish.

This is a descriptive example of God’s Eternal Now and not a hermeneutical principle of confusing interpretation, where an exegete takes that God did not mean what He revealed, such as in Revelation 20 and Genesis 1.  Genesis 1:5 and Revelation 20:4 are popularly confused by some who try to connect these two verses with 2 Peter 3:8 by misinterpreting Moses’ “day,” as a thousand years or thousands of years (if not millions) and misinterpreting John’s 1,000 years as simply a single-day event.

Even though they are existing in God’s Eternal Now, they are still in a temporal process awaiting their respective future resurrections.  Jesus’ historical story about Lazarus, Abraham, and the rich man in Luke 16:27-31 describes this very understanding of our immediate state between physical and the resurrection.  As Lazarus apparently listened silently, the conversation between Abraham and the rich man about his five lost brothers still living on earth took place during the life-time of these brothers, as these two in Hades were conscious about these five men on earth during the course of their conversation. The rich man in a physical way was very conscious of his ongoing and future torments in Hades, when he requested Abraham to send Lazarus to cool his tongue with a drop of water (Luke 16:24).

In 1 Samuel 28:3 Samuel had died, but later in 1 Samuel 28:15-19 at Endor he was also very conscious about King Saul and his disobedience.  He was conscious about King Saul’s pending death by God’s judgment, and how Saul would be with him in She’ol “tomorrow” (1 Samuel 28:19). Thus, Hades and She‘ol are not a part of God’s Eternal Now but will come to an end in The Lake of Fire in Revelation 20:14.

However, this future “Lake of Fire” in Revelation 20 can be equated with “Gehenna” that Jesus described in Matthew 5:29; 10:28; and Mark 9:43 and with “the eternal fire” that He described in Matthew 25:41.  This was originally prepared for the fallen angels described in Revelation 12:4, 9, that fell with Satan in Isaiah14:12-17 and Ezekiel 8:12-19.  Apparently, the “Lake of Fire” will be the result of the present universe of the heavens and the earth being consumed in a “fervent [thermonuclear] heat” described in 2 Peter 3:10 to the point that its “space and time” would have no place within the “Space and Eternal Now” of the Great White Throne Judgment and the New Heaven and New Earth and New Jerusalem to come, however all would physically exist.  There may be some initial sense of time for the Lake of Fire, as a part of its horror of torments, as a “second death” beyond the first death.  Satan and these fallen angels will one day be cast into Gehenna, along with that special group of monstrous fallen angels mentioned in Gensis 6:2, as “sons of God,” (according to a common OT expression for angels), who had been consigned to Tartarus according to 2 Peter 2:4 that Jude called “eternal chains under darkness” in Jude 6 and received an announcement by Jesus of his completed, prophesied Messianic mission in 1 Peter 3:18-20.  This Tartarus is somewhere located in some deeper regions of Hades with these demonic “sons of God” awaiting Gehenna in the future “Lake of Fire” where darkness awaits them for eternity.

In Genesis 1:1 from God’s Eternal Now in what would become His Third Heaven He spoke and created out of nothing the two heavens: His First Heaven of blue sky that one can see by day and His Second Heaven of the vastness of the universe black with stars that one can see by night.

God’s Eternal Now is a divine reality of existence outside of the present Continuum of space-and-time that co-exists with the present Continuum of space-and-time, which God created in Genesis 1:1, in which Triune God has always existed and created angelic beings, among which a third fell.  Hence, since their fall was in this Eternal Now there is no opportunity within present space and time for repentance, as will be those lost in Gehena. 

It may be that a great proportion of the reality and substance of is this created Space-Time Continuum is what astrophysicists describe, as Dark Matter and Dark Energy.  These two may be a part of this created Space-and-Time Continuum but detected only, as gradational fields and not having any electro-magnetic fields. In other words, Dark Matter was theorized to seek to explain some source gravity for why fast rotating distance galaxies remained intact and were not flying apart, and Dark Energy with its absence of any electromagnetic energy, called light, was theorized to seek to explain why the university appears to be continually expanding by some source of energy, when gravity alone would be causing observed galaxies to be contracting back to some center of the universe. Oddly, then Dark Matter would account for a greater proportion of all existing matter, and dark energy [in its absence of light] would account for a greater proportion of all existing energy.  But then again, this theorized Dark Energy and Dark Matter thus far undetected may God’s Eternal Now. The physical interplay of space-and-matter with time-and-energy in nature is a study that we are only beginning to conceive, when our detectable Space-Time Continuum is seen from the “hyper-physical” and “supernatural” vantage point of God’s Eternal Now.

God's Eternal Now can be seen, as a variation from our “time,” somewhat like such a variation in time is found in Relativity’s Time Dilation, where GPS satellites need to have their “faster time” adjusted to fit the “slower time” referenced on earth. Subatomic particles studied, when their velocity approaches the speed, have a longer “half-life” than normal. Gravitational time dilation is an actual difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers differently situated from gravitational masses, in regions of different gravitational potential. The stronger the gravitational potential (the closer the clock is to the source of gravitation), the more slowly time passes. Albert Einstein originally predicted this effect in his theory of relativity, and it has since been confirmed by tests of general relativity.  According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the closer you get to the speed of light, time past and time future disappear and only the present exists. 

In the timeless and spaceless Eternal Now of God there is no construct of a triad of dimensions or time with duration and chronological sequences but only a singularity of total coincident.  Thus, space and energy exist, as created entities, in that anything of our perceived Space-Time Continuum must be created and be finite within some apparently infinite and real physicality, albeit a “hyper-physicality.” Beyond this perceived, present created Space-Time Continuum of ours, God the Son has created other “pockets” of Space-Time allowing for sequential events, such as in creation of angels. Various events of the past regarding their creation and the volition-process of their remaining holy and the fall of some angels into sin occurred within what we perceive, as our past-time. 

There is an interesting note of some kind of “time-sequence” in regards to crop-growth The Tree of Life on the New Earth in Revelation 22:2. This inordinate rapidity of growth may infer some kind of  “hyperspace” beyond our own observable Space-Time Continuum.  This we perceive and label, as eternity being an Eternal Now, where God accommodates us by helping us to picture this with “the eternity past of forever and the eternity future of forever”, which may be posed as some kind of “hypertime” or “hypertemporal” outside of time that we have and can observe.

More specifically, space is connected with mass of matter, and time is connected with energy, in that energy in its connection with matter.  But without time energy would not exist, since kinetic energy involves the square of the velocity (distance over time), and gravitational force connected with motion involves a “gravitational constant” connected to time. Even nuclear energy is calculated, as the mass of certain matter times the speed of light squared [E=mc2], that involves time.  Electromagnetic energy is associated with the frequency of the waves, such as light waves, that involves time.  Thus, energy would not exist without its association with time.

On the other hand astrophysicists’ speculations about Dark Matter and Dark Energy offer some portals for us to discern or, perhaps, imagine, God’s divine revelation about the supernatural beyond our perception.  The “In the beginning” is a part of this.  The New Heaven and New Earth and New Jerusalem are a part of this Eternal Now. Gehenna is also a part of this Eternal Now.  Each of us came into existence within this God-created Space-Time Continuum, but we exist [not existed nor will exist] but exist in this Eternal Now with non-sequential consequences of our decisions in our life on earth.  This is how one tries to understand God’s omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence and eternal security of the predestination of our eternal salvation. 

[1] From Heaven in Genesis l:1 God created “the two heavens and the earth” where the Hebrew word for “heaven” Is not in the Hebrew singular nor in the Hebrew plural but in the Hebrew “dual.”