Well, we’re gender bound too, and there are languages that are less so than others. 
Experience shapes language and language use in society (discourse) can shape concepts, but no linguist I know holds to a really strong view of linguistic determinism that says our ability to conceptualize things is bound by our language. We can develop concepts we don’t have labels for in our language and create labels for concepts that are new. What humans experience and observe, they can express, no matter how the grammar of their language is structured. People aren’t more or less “time-bound” because of the language they speak.
Language also helps us with train and bus schedules. QM, space-time, etc are certainly interesting features of our natural world, but they don’t have much to do with the context of the ANE relative to understanding how they understood the cosmos. The gods all used language, words with meaning that were agreed upon by their culture. Yahweh was no different in that regard. He communicated with words. Words purified 7 times at that!
As far as I know, there are no ANE texts, the Jewish scriptures included, that define time any different we do (when it comes to the aforementioned train and bus schedules). Speaking of space-time continuum, to an ANE people would draw an ocean of blank stares. It doesn’t help us catch the train of bus either.
- God is rather large and rotates.
- With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
- The Earth has a radius of 6,371 kilometers. If we assume that the body in question is a perfect sphere, then its circumference would be 40,075 kilometers. To rotate once in 1000 Earth years, the body would need to have a circumference of at least 40,075 kilometers. This means that the body would need to be at least 12,758 kilometers in radius. For comparison, Jupiter has a radius of 71,492 kilometers, which is more than five times the radius of the Earth. Therefore, a body would need to be at least as large as Jupiter in order to rotate once in 1000 Earth years.
- However, it is important to note that this is just a theoretical calculation. In reality, the body would not be a perfect sphere, and its rotation would be affected by other factors such as its mass and composition. Therefore, the actual size of the body required to rotate once in 1000 Earth years could be slightly different.
- With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
“Define time” is slippery. People in many non-Western cultures including the ANE probably conceptualized time as a wheel not a line, cyclical as opposed to linear. Also not all cultures conceptualize time as a commodity to be saved, spent, borrowed, invested, wasted, etc. But all cultures experience time as past, present, and future. I think what @dale was alluding to is that ancient Hebrew is an aspect dominant language and the verbal system does not have past, present, and future tenses like English and other tense dominant languages. This means translators have to make choices when rendering verbs from Hebrew to English and some people make a very big deal about the verbs in Genesis and how the Hebrew aspect compares to the English tense. I’m not convinced there are all these secrets to unlock there.
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You give me more credit than I deserve. 
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Jesus needed no convincing; that was the whole reason the Word became flesh in the first place!
Yes, we are baptized in God.
I read the Greek text.
The significance of the presence and lack of the definite article in Greek is not the same as that in English. There are structures in Greek where a noun is more definite when it lacks the article, a classic example being John 1:1.
That’s why it’s “the Holy Spirit”: the Holy Spirit is spoken of as a Person in both the Old Testament and the New, and don’t recall ever encountering a single instance of when we ought to write Holy Spirit; there is no generic “holy spirit” because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God and is a Person.
No, it’s a fact: most Christians lack the education necessary to do even mildly serious theology. We are just too far removed from the original culture and language.
That’s why so many people think Jesus didn’t claim to be God: they’re reading the scriptures from a modern English worldview instead of a first-century Jewish Aramiac/Greek worldview – when you have a decent grasp of that first century worldview the amazing thing about the Gospels is that Jesus didn’t get crucified before His first year of ministry was over/
The Bereans had the advantage of being two thousand years closer to the original context.
Its total arrogance to think that without any training or actual study a modern reader can just open a translation and get more than a basic sense of things; it’s especially arrogant when a reader doesn’t even grasp that there’s such a thing as a different worldview from his/her own.
No – that’s linear binary thinking. God can see what we’re going to choose without it nullifying the freedom of choice. If God was trapped within the timeline as we are, you’d be correct, but He isn’t; the God the timeline is just a line going through a multidimensional space and He sees it all at once, all the freely-made choices laid out before Him.
That Jesus is called the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” tells us that He was always Plan A; He was slain before there was such a thing as human being.
My older brother the mathematician & computer expert (systems and software both) says that free will and foreknowledge seeming to be incompatible is a failure of mathematical imagination, that in multi-dimensional geometry (i.e. more than four) they’re not incompatible at all – and yes, omnipresent and omnitemporal are just two aspects of the same thing.
Why would you expect NOVA to be about “biblical truth”? I think the point of referencing the video is to address the very limited concept of time and causation that most people muddle along with.
God doesn’t have to “travel” to the past or future, He lives there. God isn’t stuck in time as we are; He stands outside of it by necessity since He invented it. We exist in what some physicists say is an eleven-dimensional world, but we only have three degrees of freedom, the physical dimensions; we move in time but not at will and the other seven dimensions aren’t even accessible to us – but if this is indeed an eleven-dimensional universe then God has at least twelve degrees of freedom; He can move in any and all of those dimensions plus whatever others there may be in heaven.
So God actually has a clearer idea of “now” than we do, since He can compare various “nows” at once, while we are stuck actually not even in a “now”; our awareness actually lags behind the universe.
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I think you are absolutely correct about not reading the scriptures with our modern West point of view. I wouldn’t necessarily call it arrogant. Maybe just uninformed? In any case, given that you understand the need to get into the heads of the 1st century person, I’m a bit surprised that you’d say the logos is God. Even without a formal education in the scriptures, it’s not hard to ascertain that they thought of the logos as something much different than a person. One need look no further than Strong’s Concordance.
G3056 λόγος logos (lo’-ğos) n.
- a word, something said (including the thought).
- (by implication) a saying or expression.
- (by extension) a discourse (on a topic).
- (informally) a conversation (on a topic).
- (thus) a matter.
- (also) a reasoning (of the mental faculty).
- (hence) a reason (i.e. a motive).
- (negatively) a rationalization (i.e. application of plausible reasoning on a faulty premise).
- (by further extension) a calculation, computation, or an account (as an accounting of).
- (hence) a reckoning or an inventory (as called to account).
- (of asking) a question.
I also think those folks understood the difference between the giver, God, aka The Holy Spirit, and the gift He gave to born again believers, holy spirit, which gift has nine different ways of manifestating God’s power for the betterment of mankind.
1 Cor 12:7,
But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.
I agree with you 100%. You just say it much better that I! Thanks.
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Really? (I’m more than a bit surprised. ; - )
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:1
(John 1:1 Interlinear: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God;)
Do you really believe that God can only talk to humans through the Judeo-Christian scriptures? I know from personal experience that God talks to me in many ways, via people around me saying things that lead me to understand something about God. And one place to look for Jesus is anyone who needs help, or comfort. Another place to look, as we are told in the bible, is at the universe that God created. Here we can believe that God is the author for sure, the One who made it the way it is.
I do believe the bible was inspired by God; that still leaves several significant steps in order to understand what any passage written thousands of years ago, in a very different cultural, scientific, linguistic, political, and religious environment, means for us today.
I do believe that God still comes to us today, where we are, not demanding that we come to Him where He lives.
As for contradicting scriptures, I agree with that as stated, but I do know for a fact that there are many interpretations of what some people think scripture means for us today that are just flat out false. So if something from our modern scientific knowledge contradicts an interpretation of scripture, that doesn’t mean to me that it contradicts scripture, just that it shows that we didn’t really understand what that particular scripture means.
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More so today. Although providence probably runs a close second.
I do appreciate Heiser’s work on the divine council and the possibility that opens for angelic messengers in pre-Christian civilizations. Messengers that inevitably failed as their judgement indicates, but capable of conveying truths about the world nonetheless. The medicine men of tribal societies is probably the best example I know of.
If the assertion Peter made is true, then it is not limited to that context. He isn’t saying, “Well, on this topic time is sort of slippery for God”, he’s stating a general principle and applying it to the specific situation.
If he were writing today, Peter might have said, “God’s experience of time is totally different from our experience of time, so don’t try to hold Him to our timeline”.
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“Do not forget this one thing” sounds like it stands by itself pretty well.
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I think you are right. Maybe it was in that post or maybe some other, but I did clarify in saying that, yes, we can get revelation or teachings from others that may contain truth, but they must all be compared to the scriptures. The devil can put ideas into our brains or send false teachers. In that sense the scriptures are the final authority on truth.
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Well, John does tell is why he wrote his gospel:
John 20:30-31,
30 And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book:
31 But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.
He wrote so that we might believe Jesus is the son of God (No “God” nor “God the Son” here) and that he was the Christ, His anointed one. The rest of John, 1;1 included, must fit with that.
Did you see Strong’s on “logos?” It’s pretty clear the logos is not a person, but that which a person thinks or plans. Big difference.
An attempt at explaining the issue: God, like us, witnesses every event as it happens, and so He witnesses our free will decisions as we make them – the difference being that He is present at every moment from the beginning to the end and He is witnessing the free will decisions at every point in the timeline all at once. It’s not that He’s seeing the future because to Him all moments are the same; He is seeing the present, except that for us we see the present in the moment in which we live, but He sees the present in all the moments there have been and will be.
Just BTW, things that were kept secret for something like seventy-five years have shown that Chamberlain knew exactly what he was doing, and it wasn’t appeasement, it was maintaining the illusion that Britain could have opposed Hitler when he knew that the reality was that the Empire’s military was woefully unready for anything much at all and was buying time in the only manner available, knowing quite well the price in human misery – but having the courage to make that obscene choice rather than let the world know that Britain’s military was a paper tiger at best. The question that remains is whether Hitler saw through the charade, or perhaps some of his generals.
It requires being able to analogize from three dimensions to four and treating time as just another physical dimension as far as God is concerned, and then adding a fifth dimension such that everything in our fourth dimension is present to Him at the ‘same time’, so that He isn’t seeing the future, He’s seeing every moment in the present of that moment. A modern Roman Catholic theologian whose name I can’t recall stated it this way: “All moments are equally present to God”, meaning that all moments are “the present moment” to God, just all at once instead of one at a time.
This echoes what a professor at an independent seminary once said, that cost the seminary a quarter of its students: “God didn’t know Jesus was going to be born”.
As I said then, mathematically that is nonsense: in terms of geometry, a true Creator stands outside the universe due to being prior to it. Since the apostle tells us that God commanded things that “were not” and they came into existence, we know that He is this type of Creator: He didn’t use some pre-existing substance, He didn’t surrender part of Himself, He conceived of things that didn’t exist and by sheer command brought them to existence and thus stands outside the continuum of what exists. We are also told that He “knows the end from the beginning”, where “from” is not a disjunctive but an inclusive, i.e. He knows everything in time starting with the beginning and continuing to the end.
As I noted above, to God all moments are present; He is present at every moment witnessing the choices we make.
God speaks to us in human terms; this is part of grace in that He condescends to talk on our level.
Foreknowledge does not constrain, it only observes what is freely chosen. The apparent constraint comes from assuming that God is lesser than His Creation, specifically that He is subject to time just as we are. He is not only the Alpha and the Omega, He is everything in between. We make this mistake because we only observe the one moment that is (the) present to us, and call it “now”, but to God all moments are present, all moments are “now”.
In a sense the God Who is observing this moment as I type doesn’t know what the next words I choose will be, but that is only an infinitesimal ‘fragment’ of God; God in His wholeness is seeing the future words as I type them. He sometimes speaks as though He is constrained by my “now”, but other times He speaks as though He is observing our future as though it has already happened; the one explanation for this is that He is observing that future as it unfolds.
To modern physics this is not strange; it can be argued that the past still exists, which raises the question of whether the future already exists, since mathematically the two are no different – which is one reason I say that mathematically free will and foreknowledge are not contradictory: in God’s perspective, He isn’t looking at the future, He’s looking at what to Him is present.
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I don’t consider Strong’s to be the final word, but did you check out the final ‘was’ in that verse? The implication, or rather the denotation is that the Logos was (is) God.
Scroll way down on the right to see John 1:1, or [Never mind – it doesn’t go that far] access it maybe more quickly through John 1:1 above, but this is the verb:
Strong's Greek: 1510. εἰμί (eimi) -- I exist, I am
Someone more literate or conversant in NT Greek than I am (it wouldn’t take much! ; - ) could maybe address this. We don’t call Jesus the Word of God for no reason.