A Being Who creates time and space must be beyond both space and time, inhabiting eternity, able to simultaneously experience all of time and space at once. (Ep 4:10) If there are 10 dimensions, or more, God has designed each one and exists within, through and outside them all (Ro 11:36), being both ever-present and omnipresent.
The Word gives us glimpses, windows into His unimaginable infinitude. As Christ walks the earth, He is yet in the heavenlies (Jn 3:13) holding everything together. (Col 1:17) He has already trodden down all who err from His statutes (Ps 119:118), as if the Day of Vengeance has already come and gone. (Is 63:3-5) In other words, anything and everything God will ever experience … He may have already experienced it, and He may always experience it.
This includes that mysterious moment nearly two millennia ago when Jesus Christ cried out: “My God, My God, Why hast Thou forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46) If any moment in all eternity is the most dreadful, the most intense, the most awesome and wondrous, perhaps it is when the deepest eternal communion within the very Godhead is disintegrating, breaking, being disrupted and marred by sin. This is the moment God is pleased to bruise His Son, to put Him to unspeakable grief, to make His Holy soul an offering for sin. (Is 53:10)
This darkest hour, when Christ became our sin, as He was treated as a sinner, as an abomination by His own Father, would certainly be an hour He might never want to experience again, ever, for all eternity. Yet, if this is Love, born of and revealing Love, the highest possible form and expression of Love, why would God forget it?
The fact that God is Love itself (1Jn 4:16) suggests that God accepts this infinite suffering as part of His eternal experience, ever mindful of the dreadful price He has paid to ransom us. It is immeasurable suffering on our behalf; we can never fully comprehend it.
So, when Paul claims Christ was crucified among the Galatians, decades after He rose from the dead (Ga 3:1), while he certainly wasn’t being literal in the sense that Christ had came back down to Earth to die again, it seems Paul may not have been entirely metaphorical either: there’s evidently a very real sense in which the atonement of Christ may a timeless, ongoing event from God’s perspective, though He has only offered up Himself once. (He 7:27)
And herein, within the infinitude of God, we may find the mystery of the Gospel laid out for us afresh and anew, how God can be angry with unbelievers, condemning them for their unbelief (Jn 3:18) and holding them guilty for breaking His laws (Ro 3:19) long after the Cross, yet assure all who believe on Christ that He bore our sins in His own body on the cross (1Pe 2:24), such that Christ cleansed us from all our sins long ago. (He 1:3)
To acknowledge this, as the scripture clearly states, is to admit that the atonement of Christ is both limited to those who have already believed (Is 53:11), yet also available to anyone (1Jn 2:2) who is willing to seek after God until they do believe. (Mt 7:7-8)
So it is, in the wisdom of God, how unbelievers remain condemned in their sin (Ja 5:19-20), how David believes on Christ long before Christ comes as if He has already died, such that sin is no longer imputed to him (Ro 4:6-8), and how we find all our sin laid on Christ only as we believe on Him, well after His work is completed. All this can only be true if the work of the Cross itself persists outside of time in some mysterious way.
Before the foundation of the world, Christ is slain (Re 13:8), and He lives this out over time in every holy sacrifice offered up in faith before the Cross itself, in all who see the Lamb of God taking away their sin. (Jn 1:29) It continues even now, with and without the visual aid of animal sacrifice, unto the end of the world, as each elected soul grasps the efficacious miracle of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, until the very last believer is welcomed, sin-debt paid in full, and the Bride of Christ is complete, new heavens and new Earth blaze with the ever-present glory of the greatest act of Love the universe has ever known.
