Before Abraham was, I am.
As Stephen Brock points out, we can use this to understand the divine eternity as a present (I am) that is both before our past (Abraham was) and after our future (Christ said this in the context of a conversation that considered Abraham as long dead.) All created being stands to God as Abraham. By one act, God is before we were and after we will be.
-For Augustine, God is higher than what is upmost and more interior than what is inmost. As supremely good, he is an end which is the whole of all wholes, since every subordinate end stands to a higher end as part to whole; as supremely powerful his activity does not act on a part of something by a part of himself, like the barrel of a bat hitting the seams of the baseball, but by his whole being causing a whole being.
–QDP q. 3 a. 1: Anything acts insofar as it is in act (as opposed to potency) e.g. if you want a burger, you need an actual barbecuer who is actually barbecuing. Potential chefs won’t work, nor will actual chefs who are asleep.
Nature is particular since: (1) it is not entirely in act, but only by form, and (2) it only brings about perfections in some genus of action. The supernatural is thus neither particular nor the universal above the particular.
To bring about ens determined to this or that requires motion, and does not bring about ens simpliciter (scientism or naturalism thus commits the fallacy of secundum quid and simpliciter.)
Just Thomism 