Living with the God Who Is Here and Now
Dr. John Snyder is the pastor of Christ Church New Albany, director of Media Gratiae, host of The Whole Counsel podcast, and author of multiple multimedia Bible studies including the Behold Your God series, Living with the True God: Lessons from Judges, and Behold Your God: Seeking Him Early.
In this passage, excerpted from Behold Your God: The Weight of Majesty, Dr. Snyder speaks of the God who transcends time and how that reality offers hope to believers.
Time is the measurement of existence by a succession of events. Events that are in the near future soon become events in the present and then events in our past. They pass like a stream. We measure our existence by the passage of these events. We experience life in time, or in other words, we experience things in a consecutive order. But God is not part of this creation and He is not affected by time’s influences. He is not subject to time’s constraints, and He doesn’t have to experience things one at a time in a consecutive order. God lives above time.
Eternity is not just long life; it is timelessness. We must not think that God dwells in the distant past and far off future. Eternity means that He inhabits all moments at once.
As beings created in the image of God, we hunger for something more permanent than what this life offers. This longing is satisfied only when we are brought into union with the Ancient of Days through the redemptive labors of His Son, applied to us by His Spirit.
Because God is in all times at once, there can never be any legitimate reason for the Christian to pine for the “good-ole-days.” Looking back in history and wishing we lived during the days of the New Testament, or the Reformation, or the First Great Awakening is proof that we have failed to understand the eternity of God. We would not be closer to Him in the first century than we are now. We do not need to look toward the future and wish we lived in some time yet to come when things will be better.
There is another way that God’s eternality should affect our lives. Christians often recall with thanksgiving what God has done in the past. We often think hopefully about what God will do in the future, those things He has promised. But do you think often about the fact that God is here NOW, with you in this present moment? We cannot relive the past and we cannot live in the future, but then we do not need to—He is here and now for every follower of Christ.