Our Eternal GodSample

Part of the reality of being time-bound creatures is that we experience everything in a progression. We move from one moment to another, encountering new things and new experiences all the time, and changing all the while as we pass through time. But it is not like that for the unchanging, eternal God. He, at once, holds time in its totality and sees history as a whole. God stands above time as the eternal One and as its Creator, but it is also true that He interacts with us in time. He is present and involved in the world, engaging with us as time-bound creatures. More than that, in the person of His Son, He has entered into human history. God speaks in history; reveals Himself in history; makes promises, gives warnings, responds to the sin and repentance of His people. He is patient in the unfolding of His will.

All that is true, but at the very same time, He remains the eternal One. The distinction between time and eternity is not something we can pin down very well, but various people have tried at least to illustrate it in some way. So, for instance, consider the difference between a river, through which water travels, and a lake, where it is held. We experience our own existence in time as a river. Time flows, and we only see or touch part of it at any given moment. For us, time is never static. As Isaac Watts’s great hymn puts it, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, / bears all its sons away; / they fly forgotten, as a dream / dies at the op’ning day.”3 In this sense, for us, time is a river.``

For God, however, the whole of history is more like a lake or an ocean. He can see and comprehend the whole in a way that we never could in our finite existence. It is all there, gathered at once before His eternal gaze. When the Scriptures declare that He is the “Alpha and the Omega . . . the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13; see also Isa. 46:9–10), it is not simply that God was there at the beginning and will be there at the end. No; His eternity encompasses it all. He is the beginning and He is the end, even now. Unlike us, God does not look back wistfully on the past. Neither is He consumed by the present or troubled by waiting for the future. He sees all of time as a vivid whole before His eyes: creation, the fall, the flood, the call of Abram, the monarchy, the exile, the incarnation, the early church, the medieval period, the Reformation, the World Wars, the technological progress of the twenty- first century, and much more besides. None of history is lost or led away in the distant past. As the psalmist says, “A thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (Ps. 90:4).