WE need to
understand the relation between God’s eternity
and our time with respect to our creation and our life in
general. We
have to understand that our creation by God, of course,
happens in
eternity, because everything that God wills and does is
all done in
eternity.
In that case,
everything is done instantaneously, if we
have to use our human terminology to describe the
workings of
eternity. In eternity, there is no beginning or end, no
past and
future. There is no change even if there is life and
dynamism, there
are no stages. All happen at the same time and are kept
always in the
present.
But insofar as
we understand our creation by God, it has
to take place in time, since we are always subject to
time because of
our human nature and condition. Time is a creation of God
meant for
us. As his creation, time is also in his eternity.
We have to
understand then that God’s eternity can bear
our time. How that works exactly is a mystery that we
cannot fully
understand. Somehow we get a glimpse of this mystery by
considering
what St. Peter said in his second letter: “With the Lord
one day is
like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one
day.” (3,8)
What we can
draw from this fundamental point about God’s
eternity and our time is that our creation takes place in
the whole of
time, or the whole of one’s lifetime here on earth. In
other words our
creation is a work in progress until it ends with the end
of time or
of our life.
We cannot say
that our creation took place only with the
creation of Adam and Eve, and from there we are pretty
much on our
own. It would lead us to think that God committed a
mistake in
creating our first parents with so good an endowment
which they later
on misused. And from there, God had to make the corrective
measure of
our redemption.
God does not
commit mistakes. Man’s creation, his fall and
his redemption are all lumped up in the eternal, timeless
plan of God
for us. In other words, our creation goes in stages in
time. God
continues in time to create us. His creation of us in our
time
involves putting us into existence and all the events
that happens in
our earthly existence.
He continues to
interact with each one of us, and we
should also try to continue interacting with him. This is
a
fundamental truth that we should always be aware of and
try to live
out as best as we can.
The “finished
product” of our creation is when we are
fully conformed to the resurrected Christ, which is how
God designed
us to be from all eternity—that is, that we be image and
likeness of
God in Christ and children of his.
To achieve
this, we have to cooperate with God’s plan to
the point that we become another Christ, who as the Son
of God is the
very pattern of our humanity and the redeemer of our
damaged humanity
through his passion, death and resurrection.
joy and confidence in spite of all the trials,
difficulties and
failures we can experience in this life. We have no
reason to fear as
long as we are aware of this fundamental truth about
ourselves and are
corresponding to it.
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