If time only exists insofar as it can be measured, then it is not too difficult to imagine the absence of time. For certainly in eternity there is movement and succession of events.

It is written in Genesis that the heavenly bodies were placed to measure dates and seasons–that is, time. So the absence of time is not something mystical if it simply means that there is no repetition or cycle by which to define it.

All this is but vain speculation.

If time is the succession of physical events, i.e., if all motion should stop then time also would be suspended, then it is not too difficult of a problem to understand that there was no time before creation. For as soon as God commands that something physical ‘be’, and it ‘is’, then time begins. For otherwise there is no physical motion to be time.