A helpful insight from C. S. Lewis

“Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” -- Psalm 90:2

If you believe in God, you probably believe in the idea that He is eternal. That is, one of His attributes, or qualities, is that He has always existed. He has no beginning and no ending. He exists, in a sense, outside of time as we know it. He is infinite.

But, how often have you really stopped to think about the profundity of this assertion? In our culture, we are familiar with statements such as “The universe is 4.6 billion years old, and began with the Big Bang,” or “A nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War would have brought the world to an end.” Regardless of the factuality of these statements, the idea that God is eternal goes way beyond this. That is, if God is truly infinite and eternal, then 4.6 billion years isn’t even a drop in the bucket with regard to how long God has existed.

Sometimes my head starts to hurt--quite literally--when I try to get my arms around this idea. Our difficulty, of course, lies in the fact that we human beings cannot comprehend infinity, nor can we comprehend the notion that God exists outside of our “time-space continuum,” so to speak.

In his book Mere Christianity, the great C. S. Lewis provided an example that, while not perfect, helps us to understand how God can be thought of as eternal or existing outside of time.

Lewis asks us to imagine a novelist and a character in his novel, “Mary.” Imagine a scene in the novel where Mary is sitting on the sofa reading. Then there is a knock on the door. Mary gets up and answers the door. Now, as the novelist is writing, he could put down his pencil at the point where there is a knock on the door, go do something else for three hours, then come back and write that Mary answers the door.

The point Lewis is trying to make is that in Mary’s “world,” absolutely no time has elapsed between the knock on the door and her getting up to answer it. But in our world, three hours have elapsed. The world of the novelist exists “outside of time” with respect to Mary’s world. Mary can “live her entire life,” if you will, and not be affected one bit by the timing of our world (consider, for instance, that the novelist could write the book in three days, or thirty years). In a sense, the novelist is “eternal” in comparison to Mary.

Now, as I said (and as Lewis would have undoubtedly admitted), this example should not be taken too far. First of all, obviously, we know that the novelist is not eternal in the way God is. The novelist is a human being like us. Second, Lewis is not suggesting that God interrupts the natural flow of events in our lives with three-hour breaks. And third, in this example, Mary has no way of really knowing the novelist. He is not revealed to her in any way. But in our case, God has revealed Himself to us in the form of the Bible. The Bible is where we can find out who God is, what He is like (His nature and attributes), and how we can know Him.

Despite these caveats, Lewis’ example has been very helpful to me in sorting out the idea that God is eternal and exists “outside of time” to us. My head still hurts when I think about it too much, but maybe just a little less now.

In closing, I’d say that one area where this example has helped me in a practical sense is the way I think about my future. Like many Christians, I am concerned about following “God’s will” for my life. I want to make God-honoring decisions with respect to my family, church, career, etc. These decisions can be gut-wrenching at times. But Lewis’ example of the novelist and Mary, teamed with the biblical teaching of God as the “I AM” has led me to contemplate what theologians call the “eternal now.” That is, God not only knows my future, He is already there. He is eternally present.

Do you follow what I am saying? God IS two hundred years ago. God IS the day I was born. God IS today. And God IS next week, next month, and next year. He is there. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way saying that I am merely an automaton with no measure of free will. I believe God has given us that. What I’m saying is that when I face difficult decisions and uncertainties in life—some of which will affect me and my family in very profound ways—I feel an overwhelming sense of comfort, stability, and most of all thankfulness to know that God IS.