One of the things that makes us human is our awareness of time. That is, we are locked into a specific experience of time. While we do understand how the passage of time can be slowed or accelerated in our subjective sense of awareness, we are utterly incapable of reasoning and thinking about existence without that relentless ticking of the moments in linear succession.
I can go farther and describe how our Western cultural sense of time is radically different from other cultures. Ours is the one civilization that seems inherently afraid of time passing, as if it were some commodity to be carefully guarded and metered out. We try desperately to cram more into it and strive mightily to prevent the obvious effects of aging. Westerners are obsessed with time.
So while I cannot say for certainty that Eden before the Fall had no time factor in the objective sense, I do know that Adam and Eve in their innocent state did not experience time as we do now. I can also say with some certainty that God most certainly does not experience time at all. He created it and nothing about it constrains Him.
A huge collection of bogus notions of God keep trying to pull Him down into the constraints of time. So very many debates about such things as predestination hinge on a false understanding on all sides that somehow time is a universal factor that limits what God can know or do. We have virtually no capability for processing this simple fact: God can know all time — past, present and future — as His current reality. That is, His knowing of the future is not limited to a prerecorded video kind of thing, but is far above that. He knows it as One who is familiar with every particle of our existence in the first place. There is nothing God does not know, but you can be sure those words are mere indicators of something far beyond our ken.
And it’s all because we have this damned instinct in our heads to deny the Fall, to deny that there are any limits to what our human reason can fathom. Our reason is loaded with arrogance, and the hardest thing for any human is to truly and actively surrender to a higher power that is not subject to our reason.
