People should read St. Augustine’s confessions for a better understanding of time. I think it’s Book VIII (8) or something closely thereafter that gets into Augustine’s concept of time. His notion is that time is constantly present.
There is the past present, the present present and the future present. I haven’t read the book in about a year, but that’s what I remember. Augustine scholars, correct me if I’m wrong. His concept of time is VERY philosophical and deep. I’m just skimming the top.
Don’t know if I’m still being Augustinian here:
Time is God’s creation, like the universe. And, like the Earth, it will pass away. Time was created to serve God’s plan. But unlike God, time is temporal, and God is not bound by time. This is why we can pray for the dead. God, who is outside of time, hears our prayers before we say them. The human mind likes to think chronologically, but as Jeremiah and numerous other places in the Bible illustrate, “Before I created you in the womb, I knew you.”
This is why it seems as if God acts so slowly when we pray. God has the full knowledge of time, God exists in eternity, and God sees us 5 years from now in the same fashion as he sees us today. All of time is present to God. So pray for those people you said you’d pray for 10 years ago, even if they are dead now. God hears your prayers, and 10 years ago, he knew you would say them today. Why would an all-powerful God who created time be subservient to it? That would make time God to God. But we know that God is God of all. We know that:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (Jn 1:1-2).
Notice it does NOT say, “in the beginning became the Word”. The very structure of the opening passage of John implies that there was a beginning, but that God and His Word (Jesus) existed before that.
Same with the beginning of Genesis: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…”
It does NOT say that “In the beginning, God came to be, and he then created the heavens and the earth.”
By its very structure, Gen. 1:1 implies the existence of God *before *the beginning came to be, just like John 1. John and Genesis, though millennia old, illustrate a very profound concept: Time has a beginning, God does not. The Bible also illustrates that time will end, but God will not. In fact, many Biblical references refer to the end of time, or “end time” as the “Day of the Lord.” Just one day? No, the end of days. One eternal Day.