Quantum physicist pioneer Niels Bohr once said, “It’s very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future. Studying the stock market, the experts can tell you everything about the most minute details of stocks, bonds, equities (P/E ratios, short selling, Actual EPS, CPS, or DPS, you name it) except the one thing that they want to know: what the price will do in the next twenty minutes, much less, over the next year. Over and over, the experts get the future wrong. “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out,” said a Decca records executive in 1962. About the Beatles. Just one of two famous examples; the IBM executive saying, in in 1943, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” being the other.
The future is as beyond our reach as is the past. And that’s because we are immersed in time; we are caught up in it and can’t escape it any more than we can escape space. In a purely materialist existence, space and time are the universe, the very fabric of existence, so what could possibly exist outside of them?
The biblical view of the universe, however, isn’t so limited. It posits a God greater than time, greater than space, a God who stands above and beyond not just space but time as well because He’s the one who created them both. Transcendence is not just the idea of God standing above the world and watching everything that happens on it at any given moment, like someone looking down at a fish aquarium. Transcendence includes time, a God outside of time, above time, and who can thus see the past, the present, and the future not only as discrete moments but at once, just as he can see all the earth at once.
However dark the future might seem (especially now), we have these promises of the future: “Remember the former things of old,/ For I am God, and there is no other;/I am God, /and there is none like Me,/ Declaring the end from the beginning,/And from ancient times things that are not yet done,/ Saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,/ And I will do all My pleasure,’” (Isaiah 46:9-10) And, what is His pleasure?
“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4).
