No, I’m not. You really did misunderstand what I said.
Or perhaps you misunderstand predestined.
Since we are temporal beings we look at all events, including eternity, as before X, during X, and after X. Therefore a person who thought in a temporal way might believe that God, just like His creatures, experienced existence in a before, during, and after way —that he ‘predestined’ a creation, then ‘made’ the creation, and then ‘looked back’ at the creation because He had ‘seen it all’ and so He ‘knew before He created’.
But God is NOT a being who exists ‘in time’. He CREATED time. What I describe for eternity as a kind of continuous ‘now’ is itself limited by the idea of ‘now’ which is itself a temporal construct, but we do not have any idea of what it is like to live ‘outside of time’ since we aren’t God. A kind of ‘continuous now’ thus is about as close as we can get to acknowledging that there is definitely existence itself, but that it is not some span of ‘year after year after year’ in which people have a constant ‘before, during, and after’ experience, I.e., ‘time’. We know that we will ‘do’ things, and here on earth, doing something involves TIME. That’s why there used to be things like a ‘year’s indulgence’ prayer for remission of ‘time in purgatory’ because, again, people knew eternity didn’t mean ‘not existing’ but they had not fully grasped the idea that God was not limited to Time and Space. And again, there is going to be SOME kind of existence experience for eternity. God gives us ‘time’ here on earth, so in eternity there will be something analogous, but our minds can’t grasp it.
Look at an unborn child, surrounded by amniotic fluid and attached to his mother via an umbilical cord. That child is alive and growing, can hear, etc. Then after birth, he is still alive and growing but he can use his lungs, he can see, he can taste and smell, etc. The existence outside the womb is almost totally unlike existence in the womb, but both existences, depending on the development of the child, were perfectly adequate and necessary. One would not put even a 2 day old child back into a woman’s uterus and attempt to reattach the cord and think the child would thrive; no more would one, except in modern times and with the use of many medical tools and advancements, take even a 36 week old child in the womb and ‘bring him out’ and expect him to thrive, and of course, the younger the gestational age, the more likely the child would simply die outside the womb.
Well, wouldn’t heaven be something like that? Wouldn’t it make sense that on the earth we would be like children in the womb, growing and thriving, hopefully, getting ready to be ‘born’ into a world where things would seem very strange and new, where we would suddenly use organs we never even knew we were developing, but which during our time on earth through our actions for God and others we were in fact honing to perfection?
