Question:
I believe 100%. I saw an angel when I was young and my
brother had one come out in front of him when he was driving at night stopping
him from having an accident. My Babcia has Jesus come to her in a dream when
she was in one of the camps during the war and he told her not to worry that
she’d be on the ship that was coming and she was – on the same ship as her
dream. I also heard the angels sing when Pope John Paul II died. It was the
most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
What I’ll never understand is how God has just always been.
Also how he hears our prayers when we say them in our head.
Answer:
I love this question, it’s great! It can get scientists and
theologians equally tied up in knots trying to explain it.
The root of it is asking what was there before Creation? At
the point of Creation, when nothing existed yet and then that moment later when
things DID exist, what was around at that moment before? Physicists have come
up with all manner of things to try and explain it, and most of them don’t
actually answer the question but instead just push the question further back.
·
Some say that before the Big Bang was a
singularity that existed within nothingness that became unstable and then
exploded, creating our universe – but where did the singularity come from?
·
Other theories suggest that the universe is
eternal, that there was no beginning of time and it just always has been – but
again the question still has to be asked, then who or what created the
universe? Time being eternal does not explain away the question, it just tries
to define a Creator out of existence.
·
Another theory states that Earth was seeded by
aliens, or possibly that spores from another planet landed on earth and began
life here. Again, this doesn’t answer the question of Creation, it just pushes
it away to another world, but you still have to answer the question of how life
got to that other planet in the first place?
Eventually it comes to that question of: what was there when
nothing existed? Or another way to state it is: before our universe existed,
what was there?
The answer to that is God. God exists outside of matter,
space, energy, and time. I covered this in an earlier post you can find here.
The important take away here is that we have to realize that God exists outside
of our ability to perceive, or another dimension if you will.
If you want a really good analogy for this, read Flat Land1.
I’ll try to sum it up quickly here – imagine a world when everyone is two
dimensional shapes; circles, squares, triangles, and the like. Everything lives
in only two dimensions. If you were to go down to the realm of only one
dimension, everything there would be perceived as points, or dots on a line if
you were from the second dimensional land. See, it wouldn’t matter if you were
a circle, a square, or rhomboid of any kind, the people of Point Land (one
dimensional space) cannot see you in any other way – they would just see dots
on a line.
Moving back up to second dimensional space, you can see
everything in the shapes they contain. But now imagine that a three dimensional
being comes in – what would you see? Again, you would have no way of imagining
what they really look like. All you can see is two dimensional shapes! So, if
I, as an observer looking down in Flat Land, were to reach three fingers in to
help you, what would you see? You would see three separate beings – three
circles, or if you were looking at it from the side as a single dimension,
three lines. I am only one person, but people in smaller dimensional
perceptions would see many of me in different forms.
This is the same analogy for God, and it also helps to
explain the Trinity a little, too. Human beings are three dimensional beings,
and we’re stuck in that perception. God exists outside of matter, energy,
space, and time! What would that equate to? A fourth dimensional being? Fifth?
There are some theologian physicists who think God is more like a tenth
dimensional being. Regardless, it doesn’t matter if it is fourth, tenth, or
ninety-ninth, we cannot perceive it. We can only imagine it.
So how does He hear our prayers that we only think in our
minds? Well, that’s a little like trying to explain to a person from Flat Land
what a space ship is – there is just no frame of reference we can use to
describe it accurately. How do you tell a flat square what any three
dimensional object is, and tell them how it flies into three dimensional space,
with combustible fuel, and can land on the moon? For that matter, how would you
describe the moon to someone in Flat Land? It isn’t really possible – there is
an entire vocabulary that doesn’t exist for people in Flat Land when trying to
describe anything in our three dimensional space. God exists in a completely
different dimension. Maybe He can see and read our thoughts? Maybe He doesn’t
have to – maybe He is pure energy and looks at some kind of cosmic vibration
that our thought patterns make, and it translates to Him perfectly what we are
thinking?
And how has God always been? Well, remember that He exists
outside of Time; He has to in order to have been responsible for creating it.
(I will add here that there are competing theories about the beginning of Time
and the Universe itself, so I am summarizing only the one that I feel makes the
most sense both scientifically and theologically.)2 If He exists
outside of Time, then the same concept as above applies. How does a being from
a higher dimension try to explain what they perceive outside of our perception?
It isn’t really possible – again, we can only imagine it. From our perspective
we have a limited view of time in a single direction. For example, we cannot go
backward in time, or stop time; we are trapped in the steady progress of time
going forward. God, however, is not constrained by time – He conceivably exists
at every point in time from beginning to end equally, and before Time began.
It is a mind bender, no doubt! Once you start trying to
think of that existence in higher terms, though, at least it can begin to ease
the mind that while we cannot fully comprehend, we can be confident that God
knows what’s going on.
References
1 - Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
2 - The Origin and Meaning of Time by the Ravi Zacharias
institute, https://www.rzim.org/read/just-thinking-magazine/the-origin-and-meaning-of-time
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