Visualizing Time from God's Point of View

2 Peter 3:8 But do not forget one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

There will always be arguments that arise due to God's foreknowledge of everything including our futures. I know that people may say "If God knows what will happen already in the future, why pray...besides God already even knows what you will pray for." I used to get brain cramps over these ponderings until I took part in a study of my own on the concept of TIME. I read several books on TIME written by some of the most magnificent minds of our time including Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Paul Davies. I wouldn't recommend this type of study to anyone who isn't firm in their faith because as interesting as these books were, they are oftentimes written by atheists who assume we all agree with their beliefs (or the lackthereof). The following is what I gathered from all these writings as well as from the Bible. I want to warn you that as mystical as some of this sounds, it is real science and agreed upon by most top scientific figures.

God does know all and he does know every bit of our future, and scientifically, this is acceptable and understandable when you place God outside of time. This may not seem like anything important, but Albert Einstein proved that we do not live in a 3 dimensional universe, but rather a 4 dimensional universe. He not only proved that time was a dimension, he also proved that it had the same attributes as any of the spatial dimensions. Time could be stretched, shrunk, and is even affected by gravity and velocity. These theories of his were not proven through experiment until many years later, but they were all proven without a doubt. Keeping in mind that time is not just something on our calendars or our clocks, but rather a real physical dimension of our universe, we can better imagine placing God outside of time.

Also, see this exert from A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking:

Perhaps the best known are the equivalence of mass and energy, summed up in Einstein's famous equation E=mc² (where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light), and the law that nothing may travel faster than the speed of light. Because of the equivalence of energy and mass, the energy which an object has due to its motion will add to its mass. In other words, it will make it harder to increase its speed. This effect is only really significant for objects moving at speeds close to the speed of light. For example, at 10 percent of the speed of light an object's mass is only 0.5 percent more than normal, while at 90 percent of the speed of light it would be more than twice its normal mass. As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there.

I include this to show two oddities that occur and are agreed upon with two of the most intelligent scientific minds. In the above exert, we see that when you reach the speed of light, your mass becomes infinite (something quite unimaginable). Also, not included here is that it has also been proven that when you approach the speed of light, time slows down and eventually stops at the speed of light. I won't go any deeper into science now that I have laid the foundation of my argument.

The idea of God existing outside of time is easily imaginable because we live in an expanding universe. If you expand our universe, you expand all dimensions... expand space between all the stars (which has been observed and proven) and expand time (causing the forward flow/aging). The big bang theory fully agrees with the Bible, so I won't go into more detail here. Just see that every bit of our universe is tied together and when God chose to create our universe, he did not have to exist in time to do so and he still doesn't have to (though he did as Jesus Christ).

Returning to the initial argument about God already knowing everything, this would be scientifically understandable to our God unbound by time. The moment God creates a flowing universe in time, he creates the whole thing instantly - beginning to end. This means the whole time was laid out before him instantly like a movie reel unrolled from Genesis to Revelation. This may seem awful - almost like we never stood a chance to live out our lives or that our lives were predetermined, but this isn't the case. God may have created it and laid it out, but we lived it all out as we do today. We made our decisions and prayed for help when we needed it. We choose our goods and bads, and we do have free will. God hears our prayers and his mind can be changed (this can be verified in Genesis 18:16-33 when Abraham changes God's mind with prayer). God does intervene, but the movie reel that played out instantly in the beginning did immediately show all of this including our decisions and prayers. Imagine it like this: we fully (and normally) lived our lives as we do with choices and decisions like regular people, and centuries from now, after the movie of humanity is "filmed", it is sent back in time to God the Creator. This is all symbolism to explain why God can see everything from beginning to end, yet we took our own sweet time moving through the flow and praying to our Lord. We could be driven crazy just thinking about it, but I hope I made it a little clear.

To top it all off, the snippet from Stephen Hawking shows that at light speed, our mass is infinite...but also remember that time stops. Basically, at the point where we are timeless, we encompass all of creation and can see ALL. Isn't it odd that science keeps revealing God? Isn't it weird that this shows that someone outside of time would be "all encompassing" and "timeless"? Is it so unreasonable that God has always been this way and science just keeps on verifying these biblical truths?

As I often say, please do not accept this as Gospel. I am just a person studying, praying, and sharing what I have found - but in the end, these are opinions of a less-than-perfect person. The only thing you should accept as Gospel is the Bible and everything else is just opinion.