Random thoughts on time on a Tuesday afternoon

 Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted that the space-time around Earth

 would be not only warped but also twisted by the planet's rotation. Gravity Probe B showed this to be correct. 

Credit: NASA and taken from this Space.com article

I've been cooking in my kitchen (gluten-free chocolate granola among other things) and listening to talks on YouTube this afternoon. One assertion that a particular interviewee made was that the angels had to have been created before the six days of creation, because there was not enough time for any of them to "go bad" otherwise.

It was at that point that I lost track of the talk entirely, because I started thinking about time. I am not a physicist. I am not even a scientist, but there are few things that have stuck in my brain. One, sort of, is Einstein's idea that space and time are connected. What does that mean? Who knows? But, one of the things that it apparently means is that not all observers of time experience it the same way. Another thing that people who understand it better than me declare is that mass and time are connected. Without mass, there is no time.

Do angels have mass? No, they do not. They can appear to us as having mass. They seem to be able to take on many different forms. However, they are spirits:

Who makes His angels spirits,
His ministers a flame of fire.

Psalm 104:4

That word for spirit is ruwach, and in some places in the Bible, it's also translated "wind." Like wind, a spirit has no mass. Therefore, a spirit has no time. Now, that's a terribly hard thing for us - trapped IN time as we are - to wrap our minds around. One second or one hundred million years are both the same, and both meaningless to someone who has no time. How does that even work? I have no idea. I'm hoping my resurrected, outside of time brain will get it a little better. 

For our argument here, though, the point is that angels have no mass. Therefore, angels have no time. Therefore WHEN they were created is completely meaningless. 

Does your soul have mass? If you take all your thoughts, dreams, experiences, loves, hates and everything that makes you, YOU, and put it on a scale, what does it weigh? It weighs nothing of course. Your soul has no mass. What truly makes YOU is not your body - it is your soul that inhabits your body for a space of time. Do you know what that means? It means your soul has no time. Your soul, like it or not, is eternal. For a bit of time, your soul inhabits a physical, earthly body. That body is subject to decay and disease and injury and death. Your soul, however, is forever, and only God can direct what happens to your soul when it is released from your body.

God is not subject to time. He is outside of time all together. For Him, the past, the present, the future are all the same. Some people describe time or history like a train. For us, the cars move past one at a time. There are cars that are already past. There are cars still to come, that we haven't seen yet. For God, it's like being far overhead the train and seeing it all at one time. Someday, when we enter eternity, time will be meaningless for us, too. Eternity is not lots of time - an endless train that stretches in both directions forever. No, eternity is being outside of time all together. And how cool will that be? Maybe, in our resurrected bodies (specially made by God to be as eternal as our souls), we will not only be able to explore the universe - but also explore history itself.

That whole "time" thing leads to lots of random thoughts. Time is also connected to speed. The closer you get to the speed of light (which was once much, much faster according to the latest research), the slower that time goes in comparison with someone standing still. Now, that's a brain twister. And what does that mean for Bible interpretation? Just that 6,000 years on earth, give or take and 16 billion apparent years of starlight, could actually be the same thing. A post for another day. 

  

NOTE: Angels can apparently manifest in a physical body (Genesis 6, for example). Since that would (obviously?) have mass, I have no idea how that works. They would be "in time" for at least that point, right? And yet could go back to being spirit? And does spirit equal interdimensional? And, if so, is that a physical body that just has the capability of popping in and out of different dimensions? Would that kind of body be subject to time? Random thoughts that counter my previous random thoughts?