“Surely one of the most difficult things for us to understand about God is His eternal nature. We are limited to time. We experience reality as a series of events- past, present and future. Our language is based upon our experience of time. We have past tenses, and present tenses, and future tenses. We think in a temporal, time-based way.
But God does not exist as we do. We have seen that He is unique, and one of the greatest ways in which this is seen is His relationship with time itself. When we speak of God as eternal, what do we mean? Are we simply asserting that God has always existed and will always exist? While that may be true, God’s eternal nature is not limited to simply exhaustive existence for a very long, long time. We are speaking of God’s actually transcending the boundaries of time, of existing outside of the realm of time!
“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.” -Isaiah 40:28
Jehovah is the eternal, everlasting God. Yet, if He is limited to an existence within time, then we have to believe that time existed prior to God. Is time an absolute that is higher than God? Is God subservient to time? Does time exist outside of God, beyond His control, and is He limited to it? Or is time itself a creation of God, defined and directed by Him? I believe the Bible clearly teaches the latter position, despite the difficulty we have in understanding it! God is the Creator of all things, including time itself, and is therefore not bound to an existence that is marked by the “past–present–future” mode of being.
What this means is, quite obviously, mind-boggling for us creatures. God has never once predicted the future. What I mean by this is that God does not simply sit here in the present with us and, through some strange power, peer into the future so as to be able to predict future events with uncanny accuracy. No, God does not “look into the future” because He is already there! He is with the first and the last of the generations as Creator, and all that takes place in time does so at His sovereign command… God’s knowledge of the future, then, is based not upon predictive powers, but upon the simple fact that God created time, and is already present in that future that exists solely because He decreed it to be so.” – Dr. James White, God’s Sovereign Grace