Time Travel

Do you believe time travel is possible? I don't, but it is a fun science fiction story line.

Today, as I was taking my walk at lunch, I began wondering if there was anything we, as Christians could do, in the form of prayer, to affect the past? Quasi spiritual time travel, where we would not directly impact the past by traveling through time there but God would impact it as a result of our prayers.

Here's the premise, the foundation for this question. God is not constrained by time. He is eternal and He created time. He works within time by His own choosing but is not bound by it. He has the complete plan of all that He wants to happen and that will happen.

Here are some verses that help support this premise, though some people may say some of these are a stretch:

• Psalm 139:4, 16: God knows of what we will say, before we say it; God has all of our days planned before we are born.
• 1 Peter 1:1-2: God has chosen Christians based on His foreknowledge of how we would respond to His calling.
• Genesis 21:33: The LORD is the Eternal God. Time is meaningless if you are eternal and would not have been needed before the world was created.
• Genesis 1:3-5, 14-19: God creates light and calls it "day" and separates it from darkness, calling the darkness "night", on the first day of creation. On the fourth day, God creates the sun, moon and stars, one of the reasons being that they are to "serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years". Time was a creation of God.
  
• John 17:24: God the Father and God the Son interacted in relationship before the world was created.
• Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8-9: How God sees or interacts with the passage of time is different that how we do.
• 1 Corinthians 2:7; Ephesians 1:4; 2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 1:2; 1 Peter 1:20: All these verses speak of God making decisions and plans before the world was even created.

I cannot take claim for this illustration, or at least the general idea for it, but it is one I use to try to help me wrap my mind around what God's view of time is. Imagine that the history of the world, the time line of the world is like a yardstick. At one end is the creation and at the other end is the end of time, when all that God's Word has prophesied will have been accomplished. God is able to stand above that yardstick and see the whole scope of all that has already happened and all that is yet to happen. Each point on the yardstick represents a specific point in time. Not only can God see the whole time line, but He can "zoom" in on any one of these points and interact with all that is happening at that point in time. He can look back or forward from that point in time and knows how everything will turn out. He also has His plan, which He works out, making sure the right things happen at the right times to bring about the fulfillment of His plan.

All right, the premise should be fairly well set. So let me reiterate the question I was pondering. Can Christians impact what is the past to us, through prayer? Let me pose a couple of scenarios against which to apply this question.

• Say you have a friend who has an important presentation to make at 10:00 a.m. Your friend asks you to pray for them at 10:00 as they are making the presentation. At 9:30 a.m. or so, you get pulled in to a small crisis at your work and completely forget about praying for your friend. Around 11:15 a.m., when the crisis has been resolved, you return to your desk and realize that you completely forgot to pray for your friend. You decide to go ahead and pray for your friend's presentation, that they would do their best and honor God, as if you were praying at the actual time, at 10:00 a.m.
  
• Take the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theater in 1865. You decide that it would have been better if he had not died, so you pray and ask God to spare his life.
  

For both of these scenarios, I had to ask the questions 1) Could God answer a prayer request with respect to something that happened in the past? and 2) Would God answer prayer in a way that impacts the past (i.e Would God treat the prayer for the friend the same as if you had actually prayed on time? Would God spare Abraham Lincoln's life in 1865 and so rewrite what we know as history?)? By answer, I mean granting the thing for which we are asking. A "No" answer is still an answer but that answer would prevent any speculation as to the answer to the overall question.

For both scenarios, I would answer "Yes" to question 1, God could answer a prayer request with respect to something that happened in the past. He is Almighty God and not constrained by time (see premise).

For question 2 (would), my answer, after all this long-windiness, is "I don't know." Psalm 139:4 says that God knows our words before we speak them. How soon before? Is it just a split second before? No, God knew them before the creation of the world. So at that point in the past He knew we were going to pray for this person or event. Does that mean He will take that into account at that point? I don't know. I would like to think He would. In my opinion, based on nothing but my opinion, I think God may be more likely to answer the prayer request in the first scenario because it is happening within the life of the person praying and they don't yet "know" what the result of the situation was, whereas in the second scenario, the event was far before the person's life and the results are already recorded in history.

Of course, the omnipotence and omniscience of God come into play in ways I will never understand. I believe God knows everything and His plan accounts for everything. He also has the power to do anything. So the way known events in history occurred could be the answer to prayers from the time of the events as well as prayers made before and after the events. Who knows but God.

This was basically an exercise that had little practical application but it was fun to consider God and His power outside the normal realm in which I think of Him. I hope I was able to communicate my rambling thoughts fairly clearly and that this has not left you scratching your heads too much.