GOD IS TIMELESS
I am told that God is timeless. God lives outside of time. He can see the beginning and the end of our universe. He is the alpha and the omega. As a result, He is omniscient. He knows everything that was, that is, and that is to come. To Him, our entire universe at all times is completely clear to him.
Many people have trouble understanding what this means. It is a foreign concept. We use the past tense when we say that God parted the Red Sea in 1500BC. But to God there is no past. It's more accurate to say that the Red Sea is parted by God at 1500BC. Likewise, it's misleading to use the future tense to say that God will send us the Messiah (Christ) someday. To God there is no future, so we should say that the Messiah is sent by God on some day. To God, there is no past and there is no future. There is only the present.
An analogy might make this more clear. Suppose you're looking at a bookshelf. There is no reason that you have to look at the books from left to right. You could start by looking at the last book (the one on the right), then look at the third book, then the seventh, etc. You can look at any book more than once, and there may be a book that you never look at even once.
This is how God sees our timeline. It's all spread out in front of Him. He can look at each time in our universe in any order He wants. There is nothing requiring Him to start from the beginning and go through it all at the rate of one second per second. He might look into the future to see what will happen, and then go back to the past to tell a prophet about it.
You may have noticed that there's a problem with that last paragraph. When I say He can look at our timeline in any order, that suggests that He also lives in time. If He can do something first and then another thing second, it's impossible for the first thing to come before the second thing unless time exists. If there's no time, then there's no concept of "before," "order," "start," or "then."
However, this might still be okay. Even if God is moving through a time dimension at the rate of one second per second, that time dimension that he's moving through is different from the time dimension that we're moving through. So, I have a theory that there are two time dimensions. We're stuck in one of them, and God is stuck in the other. But God is not stuck in our time dimension. He can go through it at a rate of 2 seconds per second, where the "second" in the numerator refers to our time dimension, and the "second" in the denominator refers to His time dimension. And we can't see His time dimension at all. (Though if we could, we would see all of His time dimension simultaneously and always. But we wouldn't be able to look at any time point alone. We would be forced to see all of His time whenever we tried to look at any of it.)
With two time dimensions, it begins to get easier to understand how God can live outside of time. And it also gives us a way to answer the determinism vs. free will question. God can make a change in our space-time, and then we have the free will to decide how we will react to that change. Let's try another analogy.
Imagine that you have created a one-dimensional universe. Think of a very thin transparent hollow tube that runs straight up from the floor to the ceiling. Everything that is in that tube is in that one-dimensional universe. Let's imagine that there's no gravity in that universe, so that the people can move up and down the tube whenever they want.
Now, as the creator of this universe, you have the power to put a rock in there near the bottom of the tube. If you live outside of that universe's time dimension, then you don't just see the rock as it is right now. You see it as it is at all times. It's not terribly interesting, because the rock never moves. But you can clearly see that the rock never moves.
I'll use a graph to represent what you see, where the y-axis is the 1-dimensional universe, from bottom to top, and the x-axis is that universe's time. When the universe is completely empty, the graph looks like this:
Now we create the rock:
But that's not really what we see. What we actually see is the rock at all times beginning with the time at which we created it.
You shouldn't imagine a black line slowly growing from right to left. Instead, the instant you create the rock, you see the above diagram all at once.
Okay. Now let's create Adam.
Except we don't see that. What we really see is:
Yeah, Adam's a pretty boring guy. He just sits there staring at the rock until the end of time. But the point is that we get to see the beginning from the end. Adam has to wait for time to pass, but we see all of time all at once. That is, we see all of time in Adam's universe.
Let's see if anything interesting happens when we create Eve. The instant we create Eve, the picture changes to:
Adam and Eve run into each other's arms and live happily ever after until the end of time! Now note that they decided to do this with their own free will. You merely created Eve. You didn't do anything to cause them to move. They could have run away from each other. You didn't know what would happen before you created Eve. Then, once you created Eve, you suddenly saw her entire life laid out in front of you. However, Eve is stuck in her time, moving at a rate of one second per second. She has to wait until she sees Adam before running toward him. So you know Eve's decision before she makes it. And yet, the decision is still Eve's to make.
But now that you know what happens, you can be cruel by creating another rock to prevent the lovebirds from meeting each other. Instantly, the picture changes to:
Unfulfilled love... How bittersweet. But isn't it interesting that you can make a change based on Adam's decision. Adam won't even remember hugging Eve, because in his memory, it never happened.
Hopefully this gives you some idea of what my theory is. The only difference is that God is looking at and manipulating a three-dimensional universe, instead of a one-dimensional universe.