Timshel: God isn't a linear God

Recently, a particle dubbed "neutrinos" was said to travel faster than light. It turns out the measurements were wrong and Einstein was right again: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Why is this important? This not only vindicates Einstein's theory of relativity, it also vindicates God. Whoa there, you might say. But it's really simple: God isn't tied down to the time/space fabric. Confused?
Yesterday, we had our weekly worship with the 7th floor gang (and a few others.) In these conversations we sit and talk about a subject (last week was faith--read Andrew Stevens' blog for that one) and this week we delved into scripture and talked about the importance of knowing all sorts of sciences and arts to understand the Bible better and about Genesis. We talked about God's character, and we used the story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1-16) as the catalyst.
What this all boiled down to was verse seven, which says ⁷ If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” (NIV) and ⁷If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. (KJV). We took Lee's East of Eden approach to this verse and discussed why the King James Version (and others) said "you shalt rule over him" (him meaning sin) and the NIV (and others) said "you must rule over it." Shall is a promise that he would conquer sin (which didn't happen) and "must" is an order to conquer sin (which also didn't happen.) It turns out that the word there is Timshel, which also can be translated "you mayest." As in, "if you want to, you can."
It's not "can I go to the restroom?" when you're little, it's "may I?" And the teacher said, "you may." God here is giving Cain the choice: if you want to, you can. It's our choice to defeat sin. This gives us room to fail.
After we went through this, we talked about free will, and we all had our theories on it. However, one of us said that they couldn't wrap their head around the fact that if God knew what we were going to do next it wasn't really our choice. We all tried explaining but nothing satisfied him, except that God chooses not to know.
We ended like this because we have these conversations not to convince each other that I'm right and you're wrong, but to understand each other's viewpoints. But this intrigued me, and another night was spent thinking instead of sleeping. I thought about how if God chose not to know, He wouldn't know how or when to intervene because He would be just as blind as us.
Then I remembered the importance of knowing all sorts of sciences and physics.
I'm going to skip all the ways relativity works because I would probably get lost and this post would be five times as long, but one of the things that stuck with me was that if you were to travel faster than the speed of light, weird things start to happen. All of a sudden, were you watching a fighting couple, you would hear someone say "ow!" before they get slapped. Insane, right? But I think this explains the whole dilemma: God is outside the time/space continuum, which means he doesn't live in a linear timeline: he's outside it, he sees everything at once, making hearing the "ow!" before the slap very possible. We usually think of God as setting a path, but with him it's not a path--it's not linear.  The issue of thinking that if God knows what I'm going to do is thinking that He goes through time as us: except he has the ability to see ahead and we can't. But God doesn't deal that way: we are tied down to time, God is not.
C.S. Lewis explains this nicely in Mere Christianity: "Suppose God is above the time line. In that case what we call "tomorrow" is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call "today." All the days are "Now" for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not 'forsee' you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never suppose that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way--because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already "Now" for Him."
For God, it is at once 1948 and 2012 and 2048.
And then, I finally fell asleep. He truly says Timshel to us: it's our choice whether to live for Him or not.