Eternity, Time, and God
Because God lives in an everlasting now, He has no past and no future. When time-words occur in the Scriptures they refer to our time, not to His.
When the four living creatures before the throne cry day and night, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come,” they are identifying God with the flow of creature-life with its familiar three tenses; and this is right and good, for God has sovereignly willed so to identify Himself. But since God is uncreated, He is not himself affected by that succession of consecutive changes we call time.
God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God. He has already lived all our tomorrows as He has lived all our yesterdays. An illustration offered by C. S. Lewis may help us here. He suggests that we think of a sheet of paper infinitely extended. That would be eternity. Then on that paper draw a short line to represent time. As the line begins and ends on that infinite expanse, so time began in God and will end in Him.
That God appears at time’s beginning is not too difficult to comprehend, but that He appears at the beginning and end of time simultaneously is not so easy to grasp; yet it is true. Time is known to us by a succession of events. It is the way we account for consecutive changes in the universe. Changes take place not all at once but in succession, one after the other, and it is the relation of “after” to “before” that gives us our idea of time. We wait for the sun to move from east to west or for the hour hand to move around the face of the clock, but God is not compelled so to wait. For Him everything that will happen has already happened.
This is why God can say, “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning.” He sees the end and the beginning in one view. “For infinite duration, which is eternity’s self, includeth all succession,” says Nicholas of Cusa, “and all which seemeth to us to be in succession existeth not posterior to Thy concept, which is eternity… Thus, because Thou art God almighty, Thou dwellest within the wall of Paradise, and this wall is that coincidence where later is one with earlier, where the end is one with the beginning, where Alpha and Omega are the same… For NOW and THEN coincide in the circle of the wall of Paradise. But, O my God, the Absolute and Eternal, it is beyond the present and the past that Thou dost exist and utter speech.”
– A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
In Knowledge of the Holy, Tozer offers real hope for Christians whose worship has become uninspired and lifeless, whose prayers feel like a monologue, and who feel devoid of spiritual power.
