What generates the interest in the Lapsarian views, is of course Ephesians 1:4, where it is revealed souls were chosen to receive adoption in Christ before the creation . . which God purposed "in Himself" Ephesians 1:9 and worked out to the glorious event of the Incarnation in the "dispensation of the fullness of times" in Ephesians 1:10
I agree that God is not subject to time or contingent upon anything created, so I ask if you interpret "the foundation of the world" as being something other than creation "in the beginning." Genesis 1:1
This would take some delineation (which would make a great topic during breaks on a nice weekend motorcycle trip if that could ever happen).
The ancient Hebrew mindset was not abstract at all, nor was their language. Creation was more understood as "giving functionality" rather than instantiation. Greek carries much the same connotation, but in a different manner.
"Before" in that (and other passages) is pro (a preposition governing the genitive; and the genitive generally indicates possession - and remember, English doesn't have cases for nouns); used of both place and time. Pertaining to (a) person, particularly "before" the face of someone.
So pro can only be relative to created "whereness" and "whenness" of place and time. So it's a relative reference to creation, and there is apporpriately a "where" and "when" to index relative to timelessness BUT that doesn't govern timelessness.
Creation is more a demarcation separating the eternal (God alone) from all else, including the aeviternal (everlasting, which had a beginning as created).
"Foundation" is katabole (from kataballo), to throw down; a casting or laying down; founding, foundation. It serves as much to intimate a Creator as it does to stand for instantiation as creation.
Metaphorically, of seed. Literally strength for the casting in or implanting of seed.
Creation was for God sowing the seed of His Logos to bring forth mankind as the yield at harvest. (Look at katabole in Hebrews 11:11. It's translated "conceive", and its an anarthrous NOUN!!!!
But "before" this foundation, there was no "before" for God. And "after" this foundation, there is no "after" for God. This invokes a glimpse of how it is about place as well as time, even though God created all place/s as "where/s", also.
It's a reference to His "beyondness" of transcendance by contrast. And as the Hebrews perceived it, creation was the functionalization of all things.
All aspects of creation in the eternal immutable mind of God were not functionalized apart from the Divine Utterance to create. It was eternal noumena, with no phenomena apart from the Rhema of God's dunamis which carried it forth and is upholding it for all everlasting. Yet there was not "when" for this to happen.
Zodhiates says of John 1:1... "Before there was any beginning, the Word had been, and the Word has been toward the God, and God had been the Word."
These are all time-relative terms for those in a creation governed by time (though the form of created time prior to the Edenic scenario likely wasn't this chronological form we "now" know as time).
God is not limited by His creation of time, even with His immanence within creation. He is still transcendant to creation while being immanent within creation. So "before" and "after" for God are irrelevant and inapplicable. He condescends to speak to us in terms we can comprehend; but also empowers and enables us to understand Him by/through His Logos, which is uncreated and timeless.
God "finalizes" creation's scroll from and with creation, even though it is eternally "finalized". This is what the deluded heretical God-denying Open Theists have corrupted to try to make God subject TO creation and man (originally) created in His image.
