God's eternity and our time
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 happen 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.
Living this truth of our faith will surely fill us with 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.
‘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.’