Yet, if God’s Spirit is eternal, and if those Spirits gone to be with the Lord — soon to be reencapsulated in a new body — are also eternal, doesn’t that at least suggest that Spirit is also timeless? Would not those intersections of the Spirit with this realm in which our corruptible bodies reside have at least the possibility of affecting a determination of time that has passed?
I’ve been in worship where an hour seemed like a minute.
Would the sacred space where Jacob had his head on a rock and dreamed of a Stairway to Heaven be affected by that Stairway as much as was Jacob? Would it not require an altar be built there eventually? And was it set aside space, sanctified space?
I believe that, as the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit is absolutely timeless, or more properly to say, Eternal.
But I do not see how it necessarily follows that His relations with us in Time — and I imagine since the Resurrection of Christ, He is the only Person of the Triune Godhead who has direct relations with human souls while we are still in finite, mortal bodies — is much concerned with "affecting a determination of time that has passed."
The work of the Holy Spirit is toward affecting our future (from our point of view) Salvation. It is here that I believe that the great poet, T. S. Eliot, was truly inspired; for he wrote:
Man lives at the intersection of time and timelessness.The work of the Holy Spirit — God with us (if we let Him through the door) — is to teach us how to live in faith, and hope, and love, to shine God's Light on our path ahead, that we may humbly, faithfully follow our Lord Jesus Christ. He is about the salvation of souls, not about instructing us about time that has passed, or of any other aspect of temporal human knowledge....
At least, that is my belief — for I know Him, in all humility....
I keep a clean, well-swept room in my Heart for Him, that He may abide with me according to His Will. And I cannot begin to describe to you the misery, the anguish I feel, when He is absent.... As sometimes happens. It is then that I truly feel alone, abandoned ... a stranger in a strange land.
For what it's worth, dear brother in Christ.
Thank you so much for writing!
I very strongly agree that God is timeless which is also to say that the Spirit is timeless.
Indeed, time is part of the Creation and not a property of, or restriction, on the Creator of it.
That God uses light as a metaphor so often in the Scripture underscores the point perfectly (of course.)
The photon is timeless which is to say it has no mass and travels at top speed (speed of light.)
For the photon as observer no time elapses at all. That is called a "null path."
Conversely, the observer of a photon, from his perspective, would sense time passing.
God uses that imagery in explaining His glory to us:
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. - John 1:5
For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light: - Ephesians 5:8
Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; - Hebrews 1:3