2 Esdras 5:41-43

New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised

Why Successive Generations Have Been Created

⁴¹ I said, ‘Yet, O Lord, you have charge of those who are alive at the end, but what will those do who lived before me, or we, ourselves, or those who come after us?’

⁴² He said to me, ‘I shall liken my judgement to a circle;^[a] just as for those who are last there is no slowness, so for those who are first there is no haste.’

⁴³ Then I answered and said, ‘Could you not have created at one time those who have been and those who are and those who will be, so that you might show your judgement the sooner?’