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TIME AND BEYOND TIME

It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never &039;skip&039; All sensible people skip freely when they co to be no use to the which may be helpful to some readers, but which may seem to others merely an unnecessary complication If you are one of the second sort of readers, then I advise you not to bother about this Chapter at all but to turn on to the next

In the last Chapter I had to touch on the subject of prayer, and while that is still fresh in your mind and my own, I should like to deal with a difficulty that some people find about the whole idea of prayer A ht, but what I cannot s is the idea of His who are all addressing Him at the same moment&039; And I have found that quite a lot of people feel this

Now, the first thing to notice is that the whole sting of it coine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too s into one moment of time

Well that is of course what happens to us Our life comes to us moment by : and there is room for very little in each That is what Tiranted that this Tiement of past, present and future - is not sis really exist We tend to assu on froree with that It was the Theologians who first started the idea that sos are not in Time at all: later the Philosophers took it over: and now so the same

Almost certainly God is not in Ti one another If a ht, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty Ten-thirty-and every otherof the world-is always the Present for Him If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in fla, not the sa a novel I write &039;Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!&039; For Mary who has to live in the i down the work and hearing the knock But I, who ainary ti the first half of that sentence and the second, I ht sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary&039;s time (the time inside the story) at all

This is not a perfect illustration, of course But it limpse of what I believe to be the truth God is not hurried along in the Time-strea in the iinary time of his own novel He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us He does not have to deal with us in the mass You are asHe had ever created When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world

The way in which ets out of one Time-series (the real one) But God, I believe, does not live in a Time-series at all His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like ours with Him it is, so to speak, still 1920 and already 1960 For His life is Hi which we have to travel, then you e on which the line is drawn We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all

The idea is worth trying to grasp because it removes some apparent difficulties in Christianity Before I became a Christian one of my objections was as follows The Christians said that the eternal God who is everywhere and keeps the whole universe going, once beca Well, then, said I, how did the whole universe keep going while He was a baby, or while He was asleep? How could He at the sa his disciples &039;Who touchedlay in the time words: &039;While He was a baby&039;-&039;How could He at the sa that Christ&039;s life as God was in time, and that His life as the man Jesus in Palestine was a shorter period taken out of that time - just as my service in the army was a shorter period taken out of my total life And that is how most of us perhaps tend to think about it We picture God living through a period when His hu to a period when it was present: then going on to a period when He could look back on it as so in the past But probably these ideas correspond to nothing in the actual facts You cannot fit Christ&039;s earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and tiest, a timeless truth about God that human nature, and the hunorance, are somehow included in His whole divine life This human life in God is from our point of view a particular period in the history of our world (froine it is also a period in the history of God&039;s own existence But God has no history He is too completely and utterly real to have one For, of course, to have a historypart of your reality (because it has already slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it is still in the future): in fact having nothing but the tiny little present, which has gone before you can speak about it God forbid we should think God was like that Even we may hope not to be always rationed in that way

Another difficulty we get if we believe God to be in time is this Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knohat you and I are going to do to- to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty co the Ti that He can see ahead and we cannot Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand hoe could be free not to do them But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line In that case, e call &039;to-morrow&039; is visible to Him in just the same way as e call &039;to-day&039; All the days are &039;Now&039; for His yesterday; He sih you have lost yesterday, He has not He does not &039;foresee&039; you doing things to-h to-morrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him You never supposed that your actions at thisWell He knows your tomorrow&039;s actions in just the same way -because He is already in to-morrow and can simply watch you In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already `Now&039; for Hiood deal If it does not help you, leave it alone It is a `Christian idea&039; in the sense that great and wise Christians have held it and there is nothing in it contrary to Christianity But it is not in the Bible or any of the creeds You can be a perfectly good Christian without accepting it, or indeed without thinking of the matter at all