01/04/2021 – Day 232 – John 7 – 9 // Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM”
Jesus is saying as He says multiple times in this reading that He is one with the Father. When Moses asked God who he should say sent him, God replies: “I AM”. Jesus didn’t say: “Before Abraham was, I was.” He is timeless, eternal, the “uncaused cause of all that exists”, the “First Cause.”
Listen to what my “Handbook of Christian Apologetic” by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K.Tacelli says on page 93 under “God is Eternal”: “God cannot be subject to time. For God is the Creator of everything that changes, everything that raises a question about its own being. All beings subject to time raise that question. God cannot be like that.
This unboundness of time is called “eternity”. Boethius’ famous definition of eternity goes like this: Life without limits, possessed perfectly and as a simoultaneous whole. His words are very suggestive. But they clearly convey one essential thing: God is not bound by the kind of changing being which time measures. That is what we mean in the first place when we say that God is e-ternal (nontemporal).
The Incarnation does not contradict this, rather, it presupposes it. The Incarnation means that God took upon himself , in Christ, a human nature, which included time, space and matter. This presupposes that the divine nature is different from human nature. Part of the difference has traditionally been seens as God’s not being limited by time, space,and matter. Only if a bird doesn’t swim in the ocean but flies in the air can it enter the ocean from above; only because God is not temporal, can he become temporal.”