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Time and Beyond Time | C. S. Lewis · Reformed Thinking

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Welcome to reformed thinking, it's good to have you with us
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again. It is good to be here.
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You know, usually when we sit down to record these, we have a
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a stack of commentaries, maybe some systematic theology
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textbooks, or we're looking at a specific confession.
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The heavy hitters. The heavy hitters, yeah.
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But today we're doing something slightly different.
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We are pulling a paperback off the shelf that I suspect a lot
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of our listeners have owned for years, maybe even decades.
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Oh, it's a staple. If you walk into any used
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bookstore in the English speaking world, you're going to
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find a copy. Probably several.
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We are talking about CS Lewis and Mere Christianity.
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But, and this is a big but, we're not doing the Introduction
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to Christianity stuff today, right?
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We aren't talking about the moral law or the trilemma.
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We are zooming in on Book 4, specifically a chapter called
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Time and Beyond Time. Which is notorious for being the
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chapter where Lewis stops being the friendly Oxford Dawn,
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explained things over a pint and suddenly becomes a high level
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metaphysician. It is the chapter where he
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essentially says look if this hurts your head just skip it.
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He does. He calls it a silly idea at the
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start, purely out of humility, right?
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But he includes it because he knows that for a certain type of
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mind, the concept of time is a massive, massive barrier to
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faith. And frankly, for those of us in
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the Reformed camp, understanding God's relationship to time is
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not just some side issue. It's it's central to how we
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understand sovereignty, election, and the attributes of
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God. That is what I want to get into.
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We're going to take this chapter apart, line by line, argument by
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argument. Our mission here is to see if we
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can solve a problem that I think nags at everyone, even if they
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don't admit it. OK, so what's the problem as you
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see it the? Problem is that I'm small, the
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universe is huge, and God is supposedly running the whole
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show, and I have a hard time believing that the, you know,
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the CEO of the universe has time to listen to me complain about
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my mortgage or my sick cat. It feels, I don't know, arrogant
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to think he's listening. That is the skeptics objection.
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Lewis starts with and it's a fair objection, logically
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speaking, if you start with the wrong premises.
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Lewis quotes a man who told him I can believe in God all right,
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but what I cannot swallow is the idea of him attending to several
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100 million human beings who are all addressing him at the same
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moment. Notice the constraint there.
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Yeah, it's a logistical constraint.
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The skeptic is doing math. Yeah, he's saying, OK, 700
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million Christians pray at 9.00 PM, That is 700 million inputs.
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There is 60 seconds in a minute. The math just doesn't work.
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It sounds like a denial of service attack on a server.
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Too many requests, the system crashes.
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Or to use the image that would have been current for Lewis,
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it's the switchboard operator. Right, the old telephone
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exchange. Picture a room in the 1940s.
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You have a lady sitting there with a headset and a board full
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of jacks, a light blank. She plugs in number please.
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She connects the call. Now imagine a million lights
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blinking at once. Panic.
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Utter panic. Absolute panic.
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She can't do it. She has to cue them, please
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hold, please hold. She has to take them
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sequentially, one after another. And the skeptic looks at God and
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thinks, oh, God is just a really, really big Swiftboard
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operator. The Super operator.
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Right. Maybe he has 1000 arms, maybe he
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thinks a million times faster than we do, but there's still a
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limit. If he's taking a call from a guy
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in London, he is technically occupied.
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He might be occupied for a nanosecond, but he is occupied
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and someone else has to wait. And that's where the anxiety
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comes from. The septic things.
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I don't want to bother him. He's busy running the galaxies.
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You feel like you're just another blinking light on an
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overloaded board. But the error here isn't about
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God's power. It isn't about how fast he can
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think, it's about God's very nature.
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OK. The skeptic is assuming that God
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is subject to the same timeline that we are.
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He assumes God is standing on the timeline next to the
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switchboard, watching the seconds tick by on the wall.
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Clock. That is the assumption we need
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to smash today. We have to, because a God is in
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time. He is not the God of the Bible,
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and he certainly isn't the God of the Westminster Confession.
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OK, so let's back up and look at human time.
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Because to understand why God isn't in it, we have to
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understand what it is. Lewis does a really good job of
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making us feel the weight of our own limitations here.
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He does. He describes our life as
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something that comes to us moment by moment.
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It feels like a conveyor belt. That's the image that came to my
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mind. That is a good image.
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You're standing on a spot in the belt.
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You can look backward and see where you were 5 seconds ago.
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That's the past. And it's gone.
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You can't touch it. It's gone forever.
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You can look forward and see where you'll be in five seconds.
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That's the future. You can't touch that either.
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You're just locked in the now. And the now is incredibly small.
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In fact, psychologists and philosophers argue about whether
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there's even such a thing as a true now.
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As soon as you acknowledge it, it's already passed.
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It's already become a memory. Exactly.
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But let's say for the sake of argument, the now is a few
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seconds wide. Lewis says there's very little
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room in it, right? Think about your own capacity.
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Can you listen to two podcasts at once?
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No, yeah, it just becomes noise. You can't process either one.
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Can you read a book and hold a meaningful conversation with
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your spouse at the same time? I have tried, it does not go
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well, let's just say that. Right, you are rationed.
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That's the word Lewis uses, and I love it.
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Our existence is rationed out to us.
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We get one teaspoon a time, and when we drink that, we get the
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next teaspoon. We never get the whole bowl at
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once. And because we're rationed,
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we're always in a hurry, we're always running out of teaspoons,
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there's always this feeling of scarcity.
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Exactly. We are finite, we are creatures,
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and because this is the only reality we have ever known, we
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projected onto the Creator. We just can't help it.
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We assume God is also standing by the conveyor belt waiting for
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the next moment to arrive. We think He has a past, a
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present and a future, just like we do.
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We think God is waiting for tomorrow just like we are.
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And that, theologically, is a heresy.
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I don't use that word lightly. If God is waiting for something,
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he is dependent on time. He's passive.
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He's changing. Malachi 3.6 I am the Lord, I
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change, not the immutability of God.
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Precisely, if God has to wait for 2027 to arrive, then in 2027
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He will possess knowledge and experience that He does not
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possess now in 2026. So he's growing.
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He's learning. He's evolving.
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A God who evolves is not God. He's just a very old, very
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powerful creature who's also on the conveyor belt, just maybe a
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bit further down the line. So the theologians and Lewis
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points out that the theologians were way ahead of the scientists
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on this said no, God is not on the timeline.
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Augustine talked about this. Calvin talked about this.
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God created time. Time is a creature.
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It's a thing he made, like a rock or a tree or an Angel.
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Right, you don't say a Carpenter lives inside the table he made.
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He is outside of it. He is distinct from it.
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So God is not in time. His life does not consist of
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moments following one another. OK, so if he isn't in time,
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where is he? What's the alternative?
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He is in the eternal now. That sounds like a tagline for a
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sci-fi movie, The Internal. Now help me grasp that.
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It means that for God, all moments are present.
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He doesn't look back at the creation as something that
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happened a long, long time ago. This.
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Is not a faded memory for him. Not at all, And he doesn't look
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forward to the second coming as something that will happen in
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the future. He sees them both and everything
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in between right now. So 10 foot 3:00 PM tonight when
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I'm praying is just as present to him as the moment Noah
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stepped off the ark. Yes, and the moment the pyramids
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were built. Yes, and the moment the last
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star in the universe burns out, it's all just now.
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That is, that's really hard to visualize.
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It breaks our brains because we don't have the hardware to
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process it. We're wired for sequence A, then
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B, then C But let's go back to the Skeptic switchboard, OK?
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The overloaded operator A. Skeptic says God can't hear a
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million prayers at 10:30 PM, but if God is outside of time, he
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doesn't have to listen to them in the one minute slice of 10:30
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PM. He's not constrained by that
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minute. Not at all.
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He has all of eternity to listen to the prayers offered in that
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one minute. Lewis uses the pilot analogy
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here. Let's walk through that because
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it adds some, you know, high stakes to the idea.
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It's a vivid picture. A pilot is flying a plane.
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Something goes wrong. The engine explodes.
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The wing fears off. He knows he's going down.
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He has mere seconds, maybe less. Maybe less.
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He sees the ground rushing up. The instrument panel is
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screaming. In that chaos, he yells out a
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prayer. God help me or forgive me.
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It takes him half a second to say it.
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Then impact. Now, in our timeline, that half
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second is gone instantly. It's a blip.
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It's a fraction of a heartbeat. It's over before you can even
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register. It and a skeptic thinks God is
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busy handling a war in Europe. He can't possibly stop to focus
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on that half second blip. He's got bigger fish to fry.
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But Lewis argues that God isn't hurried.
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He's not rushed. God is not rushing past that
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half second to get to the next second.
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Because God is outside the stream, he can pause again.
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Our language fails us here. Words like pause or time.
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Words. He can dwell on that half second
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for as long as he wants. He can debut infinite attention
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to that specific moment of the pilots life.
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Infinite attention. Think about that phrase.
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He isn't splitting his attention.
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It's not like he's giving 1% to the pilot and 1% of the
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president and 1% of the Pope. He's not multitasking.
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He can't multitask because that implies doing multiple things in
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the same moment of time. Because he has infinite now to
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work with, he gives 100% of his attention to the pilot.
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And he gives 100% of his attention to the president.
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Eternally, not simultaneously. You see the difference?
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I do. This changes the whole personal
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relationship dynamic. I think a lot of people feel
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like they're just a number. To God, I am just one of the
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billions of sheep. He knows I'm here, but he
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doesn't really know me. That is a very deistic view.
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It is the watchmaker God who winds it up and walks away.
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But the biblical God, the Reformed God, is intimately
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involved with every atom, every Sparrow, every hair in your
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head, and this view of time explains how that is possible
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without it being a logical contradiction.
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It means when you're in your room praying and you feel like
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you're talking to the ceiling, God is actually listening to you
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with more focus and you're listening to yourself.
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He is listening to you as if you were the only creature he ever
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made, Lewis says. And this is so powerful.
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Christ died for you individually.
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That is a huge statement. It connects directly to the
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Atonement. We sometimes think of the cross
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as a bulk transaction. Jesus paid the debt for the mass
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of humanity like a corporate bailout.
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A blanket policy that covers everyone who signs up.
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Right, but if God is outside of time, then when Jesus hung on
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the cross, he wasn't just thinking about the world in some
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generic sense. He was experiencing the specific
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sins of specific people in an eternal present.
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So he saw me. He saw you.
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He saw your specific sin from last Tuesday.
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He paid for it specifically. That is terrifying and
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comforting at the same time. It should be.
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It removes the anonymity of sin. You can't say, oh, I'm just part
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of a fallen world. No, you are an individual before
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an eternal God. But it also removes the
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anonymity of grace. That's the other side of the
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coin. You are loved individually,
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known individually, saved individually.
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OK, I want to pivot to the analogy that Louis uses to
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explain how this works, because talking about eternal nows and
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infinite attention is great, but my brain still wants a picture.
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And Louis gives us the novelist. This is, in my opinion, the
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strongest analogy he offers. It's not perfect, no analogy
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forgot is, but it gets us 90% of the way there.
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To set the scene. Imagine you were writing a book,
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a novel. Let's say it's a mystery.
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You have a character, let's call her Mary.
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OK, I'm the author, Mary's my character.
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You write a sentence. Mary laid down her work.
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Next moment came a knock at the door.
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Simple enough Action reaction. Now put yourself inside the
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book. Become Mary.
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What is her experience of time? It's instantaneous.
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I put down the knitting bang, there's a knock at the door.
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There is no gap. It's cause and effect one right
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after the other. Right in the imaginary time of
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the story, those two events are back-to-back, maybe a second
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apart. OK, I'm with you.
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Now step back out. You are the author again.
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You write the first part of the sentence, Mary laid down her
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work, and then you get writer's block.
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Happens all the. Time or your phone rings, or you
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realize you need a cup of coffee.
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You stand up. You walk to the kitchen.
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You grind the beans. You brew the coffee.
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You look out the window at the rain.
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You think about how you want the knock to sound.
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Is it a loud knock? A hesitant knock.
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I might be away from the desk for 20 minutes or a week if the
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writer's block is bad. Let's say it's three hours.
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You sit back down, take a sip of coffee and write the
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second-half. Next moment came a knock at the
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door. OK, here's the question.
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Didn't Mary wait for three hours?
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No, of course not. Did Mary sit there, frozen in
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their chair, wondering why the universe had stopped?
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No, she doesn't know about the coffee.
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She doesn't know about the rain outside my window.
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Those three hours simply do not exist in her world.
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They're not part of her timeline.
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Exactly. There is a real time that you,
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the author live in and there is an imaginary time that Mary
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lives in and they completely independent.
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You can spend an infinite amount of your time between 2 seconds
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of her time. And the application is obvious.
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God is the author. We are the characters.
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We are living in the book. We are rushing from sentence to
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sentence. I had to get to work.
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I have to pick up the kids. I have to pay this bill.
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We are trapped in the narrative flow.
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But God. God is the one holding the pen.
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He is not trapped in the sentence with us.
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He isn't rushing to find out what happens on the next page.
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He wrote the next page. This is where it gets into
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sovereignty, doesn't it? This is where it gets really
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reformed. It absolutely does.
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This is why Reformed view of God is so robust.
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We don't believe God is a character in the story reacting
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to what the other characters do. Oh no, animate the fruit.
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What do I do now? Let me quickly write a Plan B.
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That's the open theism view, right?
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The idea that God is learning as he goes reacting to our choices.
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Yes, and it is a disaster theologically if God is
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reacting. He is not sovereign, but if God
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is the author, the entire story from in the beginning to Amen is
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a finished work in His mind. So when I'm waiting for an
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answer to prayer and I feel like God is taking too long.
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You are judging the timing of the author from the perspective
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of the character. You are saying the pacing of
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this chapter is too slow. But the author knows exactly why
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the pacing is that way. He knows that the suspense is
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necessary for the climax in Chapter 10.
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That puts a lot of trust in the author.
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That is what faith is. It is trusting that the author
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is good and that the story has a point, even when you were in the
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dark, confusing part of the plot.
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But Lewis adds A nuance here. He says the analogy breaks down
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in one specific way. And I think this is important.
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So we don't think God is just, you know, a guy at a desk
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somewhere. Right.
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It's a crucial distinction in the the analogy.
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The author steps out of the novel's time, but he is still in
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real time. Right.
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He's still aging. The coffee is getting cold.
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The clock on his wall is still ticking.
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But God doesn't have a real time parallel to ours.
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So he's not just in a slower time.
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No, he's in no time, Lewis says. God's life is himself.
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That is a heavy phrase. Unpack that.
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What does that mean? God's life is himself.
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Well, think about our lives. We possess our life in
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fragments. I have the me of today.
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The me of yesterday is a memory. The me of tomorrow is a hope.
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I never possess my whole self at once.
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I am always bleeding away into the past.
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Like water slipping through your fingers.
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Exactly. But God.
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God is a solid block of reality. He possesses his entire being,
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His power, his knowledge, his joy in one single eternal act.
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He doesn't have memories because nothing is past for him.
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He doesn't have anticipation because nothing is future for
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him. He just.
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He just I. Yes, this connects directly to
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the name he gives Moses at the burning Bush.
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I am. I am that I.
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Am not, I was not. I will be eternal present.
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Lewis gives us a second visual to help with this, the line and
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the page. Yes, this one is helpful for the
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the geometry. Of it, imagine a piece of white
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paper, a big blank sheet. OK, you take a pen and you draw
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a stroke line across it from left to right.
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That line is time. That line is history.
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That line is my life. That line is the timeline of the
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universe. Now we are living on the line.
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We are little dots moving from left to right.
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We could see the part of the line we just walked over.
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That's history. That's our memory.
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But we can't see the part of the line ahead of us.
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That's the unknown future. We have to leave point A to get
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to point B. God is not on the line.
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God is the page. He is the paper itself.
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He contains the line. Or, to use Lewis's exact
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phrasing, he is above and outside or all around it.
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So if I am the page or if I am looking down at the page, I can
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see the start of the line, the middle of the line, and the end
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of the line in a single glance. Exactly.
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You don't have to move your eye from left to right to know that
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the line ends. You see the whole thing as a
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single complete object. This completely solves the
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foreknowledge problem, doesn't it?
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We always ask how does God know the future as if he's some kind
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of cosmic fortune teller, And this model says he doesn't
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foresee it, he sees it. To foresee implies you are
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looking ahead on the timeline. God isn't looking ahead, he is
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looking at the whole timeline. He's looking at 20-30 just as
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clearly as he's looking at 2024. They are both just marks on the
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paper that he is holding. And for the reformed listener,
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this is the bedrock of election. Ephesians one says he chose us
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before the foundation of the world.
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How? How could he?
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Because the foundation of the world and the moment of your
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salvation are both present to Him in the eternal decree, He
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sees the whole plan as a finished structure, a complete
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line on the page. It effectively kills anxiety
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about the future of the world. The world isn't spinning out of
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control. The line isn't going to suddenly
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run off the paper. The line goes exactly where he
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drew it. OK, so we've established that
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God is the author, the page, the eternal.
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Now this makes sense for God the Father.
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It fits the high, transcendent, sovereign God.
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But we're Christians. We believe that this God became
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a man. The incarnation, The central
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mystery. This is the hurdle Lewis admits
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stumbled him for a long time. It's the central paradox of our
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faith. How can the eternal timeless
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page become a dot on the line? It is the question that splits
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religions. Islam, for example, says it's
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impossible. God is too great to become a
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man. We say it is essential.
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But logically, it is a mess, isn't it?
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I mean, think about Jesus and the Gospels.
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He's a baby. He learns to walk, he gets
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tired, he sleeps, he asks questions.
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Who touched me? Right.
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And at the very same time, we claim he is the God who holds
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the universe together, by whom all things consist.
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So the skeptic asks, how can he be running the universe and
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sleeping in a boat at the same time?
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Or how could he know everything is God but not know the day or
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the hour of his return as a man? It seems like a blatant
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contradiction. It looks like a contradiction,
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it feels like. One, it looks like a
19:20
contradiction because of that little phrase again at the same
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time. We're back to the timeline trap.
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We are. We picture God's existence as a
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long infinite timeline, and then we picture Jesus's life.
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Say 4 BC to 30 AD is a little segment of that timeline.
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Right, like God was God for eternity, then for 33 years he
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paused, being fully God to go do the Jesus thing on earth.
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Like taking a leave of absence from his job as God.
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Yeah, and then he went back to being God afterwards.
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That's the Kenosis air, the idea that he emptied himself of
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divinity. But orthodox theology,
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Caledonian Orthodoxy, says he added humanity.
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He didn't subtract dividity. So how does the time concept fix
20:05
this problem? Lewis argues that the life of
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Christ on earth, the birth, the teaching, the cross, the
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resurrection is a period in our history.
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It is a segment on the line. OK, that makes sense.
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It's a historical. Event, but God's life is not on
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the line, so we cannot say that the incarnation interrupted
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God's life. It didn't interrupt it.
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No, Imagine the page again. The page is touching the line at
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every single point, sustaining it.
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That's God's Providence. OK, but at one specific segment
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of the line in 1st century Palestine, the page didn't just
20:34
touch the line. The page wrote himself into the
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line. He entered the story.
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Into the story as a character without ever ceasing to be the
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author. That is the key.
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Shakespeare can write himself into a play as a character.
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He can walk on stage, he can talk to Hamlet.
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But while the Shakespeare character is on stage, the
20:52
Shakespeare author is still the one writing the play.
20:55
Exactly. The character on stage might be
20:57
limited. He might only know what is
20:59
happening in that scene, he might express fatigue or
21:02
surprise, but the author knows the whole plot from beginning to
21:06
end. So when Jesus is sleeping in the
21:09
boat. The human nature of Christ is
21:12
exhausted and sleeping. It is subject to the timeline of
21:15
the story. It's experiencing that moment
21:18
sequentially. But the divine person, the
21:21
second person of the Trinity, is simultaneously in the eternal
21:24
sense, upholding the atoms of the water in the wood of the
21:27
boat. He.
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Never stopped being God. He never stopped being God for a
21:31
single second, Lewis makes a bold statement.
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Here is one that really makes you stop and think.
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He says. God has no history.
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That stopped me when I read it. God has no history.
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We talk about salvation history all the time in theology.
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We do, but that's the history of God's interaction with us, with
21:44
his creation, which exists in time.
21:46
God in himself, no history. Why is that a good thing?
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To me, history gives things weight.
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I have a history. My country has a history.
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It feels like a positive thing. Lewis flips that on its head.
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He says to have a history means to lose something.
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To lose something? How so?
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Where's your childhood? It's gone, it's in the past,
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it's just memories. It is lost.
22:05
It slipped away into the past. Where is your old age?
22:08
Hasn't happened yet, hopefully. So you lack it.
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To have a history means you are constantly losing reality and
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waiting for new reality. You are never whole.
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I am leaking reality. That's a strange thought.
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We all are. We're buckets with holes in
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them. But God, God has no holes.
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He retains everything. He is too completely and utterly
22:28
real to have a history. So saying God has no history
22:31
isn't an insult. It's not saying he's static or
22:35
boring. It's the highest praise.
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It means he is the solid rock. He is the anchor, and because he
22:42
is the anchor, the incarnation is the anchor holding fast to
22:45
the shifting sands of history. The eternal truth became a
22:48
historical fact. That is the miracle.
22:51
Man that is heavy, but it solves the sleeping in the boat
22:55
problem. He isn't switching back and
22:56
forth between God Mode and man mode.
22:59
The divine life encompasses the human life eternally.
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Yes, the humiliation of the cross, the weakness of the baby.
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These are not things God passed through and left behind.
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They are eternally part of the identity of Christ.
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Now He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
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OK, we have one more giant dragon Dislay in this chapter,
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and this is the one that usually starts the bar fights in
23:21
seminary. Free will.
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Free will versus predestination, or more specifically in this
23:26
context, free will versus divine foreknowledge.
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It's the classic dilemma, isn't it?
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If God knows what I'm going to do tomorrow, do I have a choice?
23:34
Walk us through the logic of the objection.
23:36
Lay it out for us. The skeptic says God is
23:39
omniscient. He knows everything.
23:40
Therefore, God knows that tomorrow morning at 8, AMI will
23:43
eat scrambled eggs. OK, a simple premise.
23:46
Now the skeptic continues, Since God cannot be wrong, it is an
23:50
unchangeable fact that I will eat scrambled eggs when 8:00 AM
23:55
arrives. I must eat scrambled eggs.
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If I tried to eat pancakes, I would make God a liar, which is
24:00
impossible. Therefore, I have no freedom.
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I am programmed to eat the eggs. It makes me sound like a robot.
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A scrambled egg eating robot. My choice is just an illusion.
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Here's a logical trap. The premise is if it is
24:13
foreseen, it is fixed. So how does the time concept get
24:17
us out of the trap? It attacks the word foreseen.
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We're back to the telescope idea.
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Right. The objection assumes that God
24:24
is standing in today looking at tomorrow through a crystal ball
24:28
or a super powerful telescope. It assumes he is predicting your
24:31
behavior based on perfect data. Like a supercomputer predicting
24:34
the weather, given all the variables, it calculates the
24:36
outcome. Exactly.
24:38
But if God is outside of time, he isn't predicting, He is
24:42
observing. Explain the difference.
24:43
That's a key distinction. Let's say you look out your
24:46
window right now you see your neighbor walking his dog, OK?
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I see him, he's wearing a red jacket.
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The dog is a golden retriever. Does your seeing him force him
24:54
to walk the dog? Did your observation 'cause it
24:57
to happen? No, he chose to walk the dog.
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I'm just watching it. Happen.
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Does your knowledge of the red jacket cause the jacket to be
25:03
red? No, of course not.
25:06
My knowledge is a result of the reality, not the cause of it.
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Precisely. Observation does not destroy
25:11
freedom. Now elevate that to God.
25:14
God is looking at your tomorrow, but to Him it isn't tomorrow, it
25:18
is now. So he is looking at the
25:20
scrambled eggs on the plate. He is watching you pick up the
25:23
fork. He is watching you chew.
25:25
He is seeing it as a present reality.
25:27
He isn't guessing. He isn't calculating
25:29
probabilities. He is looking at the event
25:32
itself as it happens in His eternal present.
25:35
So God knows I will eat eggs, because in his view I am eating
25:38
eggs. Yes, the ACT is free.
25:40
You chose the eggs. God simply sees the choice you
25:42
freely made. This implies that God's
25:45
knowledge follows the event, logically speaking, even if it
25:48
perceives it from our temporal perspective.
25:50
In a sense, yes, Lewis says. And this is a bit of a brain
25:54
twister. He does not know your action
25:57
until you have done it, but then the moment at which you have
26:00
done it is already now for him. That is a brain twister.
26:04
Let me try to say that back. So my action happens and my
26:08
doing it is what makes it known. It's just that for God, the
26:11
moment I do it is a moment He has always been seeing.
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You got it. It essentially means you are
26:17
free to do what you want, but whatever you freely choose to
26:21
do, God has already seen it. Now I have to play the Reformed
26:24
card here because Lewis was Anglican and sometimes Anglicans
26:27
can get a little squishy on the sovereignty side.
26:30
Reformed theology would go a step further, wouldn't it?
26:32
We would yes, we would say yes, God observes the action, but why
26:35
is the action there to be observed in the first place?
26:38
Because he wrote the book. Because he is the author, Yeah.
26:41
The reformed view says yes. You freely chose the eggs.
26:45
You weren't coerced. You did what you wanted to do.
26:48
But who gave you the appetite for eggs that morning?
26:50
Who created the hem that laid the egg?
26:52
Who arranged the molecules of the universe such that you were
26:55
standing in that kitchen at that moment?
26:57
God. So we can hold both truths.
27:00
God is the author who wrote the same Determining that it would
27:03
happen, He decreed it. But he wrote it in such a way
27:06
that the character acts freely according to his nature and
27:09
desires. That's the secondary causes
27:11
doctrine you find in the Westminster Confession.
27:13
Exactly. God is the first 'cause but he
27:16
works the secondary causes, your will, your appetite, the frying
27:20
pan. He doesn't override your will.
27:21
Like a puppet master, He creates the context in which your will
27:25
freely operates toward his ordained end.
27:28
But Luz's point about time helps remove that feeling of being a
27:32
puppet. It keeps us from fatalism.
27:34
It does. It saves us from fatalism.
27:36
Fatalism says whatever I do doesn't matter.
27:39
The result is fixed. The Eternal now says what you do
27:42
matters immensely because God is watching you do it right now.
27:46
He is the eternal spectator of your life as well as the author.
27:49
And that restores the dignity of human action.
27:51
We aren't just gears in a machine.
27:53
We are living characters in a drama that is being eternally
27:56
enjoyed by its creator. We have covered a massive amount
28:00
of ground here. We've gone from switchboards to
28:02
pilots to novelists to geometry to scrambled eggs.
28:06
It is a lot to take in. It's a dense chapter.
28:08
And Lewis knows it. I love how he ends this chapter.
28:10
He basically puts his hands up and says, look, this is not the
28:14
gospel. It is a very important
28:16
disclaimer, he says. This is a Christian idea,
28:19
meaning it has a long and respected tradition of the
28:22
Church, but it is not in the Creed.
28:24
You do not have to swear allegiance to the eternal Now to
28:28
be saved. You don't have to understand
28:29
metaphysics to love Jesus. Thank goodness for that.
28:32
That's a relief for all of us, Lewis.
28:34
Says If these ideas help you, use them if they remove a
28:39
stumbling block, if they help you pray with more confidence or
28:42
understand Jesus better, or trust God's plan more than they
28:46
are good tools. But if they just make you dizzy?
28:48
If they sound like philosophical nonsense to you.
28:50
Then scrap them. Forget you ever heard this.
28:52
Put them on the shelf. Maybe you'll come back to them
28:55
in 10 years and they will click, or maybe never, and that is
28:59
fine. Theology is meant to be a window
29:01
to look at God, not a painting to look at for its own sake.
29:05
If the window is dirty for you, find another window.
29:07
But. For me this window is crystal
29:10
clear. It solves so much.
29:12
It was a game changer for me as well.
29:14
It took God out of the big man in the sky box and put him back
29:17
where he belongs, as the transcended ground of all being.
29:22
So let's bring this in for a landing.
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We always want to leave our listeners with something
29:25
practical because reformed thinking isn't just about big
29:29
heads, it's about big hearts. How does this change your
29:32
Tuesday morning? For me, it revolutionizes
29:35
prayer. I struggle with a feeling of
29:37
rushing. I rush through my Bible reading.
29:39
I rush through my prayer list. I feel like I'm wasting God's
29:42
time. Hurry up, God has a universe to
29:44
run. Get to the point.
29:45
Exactly. But this truth tells me there is
29:48
no rush in the internal. No, God has all the time in the
29:52
world for me. I'm not competing for His
29:54
attention. I have His ear completely.
29:57
It invites me to slow down, to breathe, to actually be with
30:01
Him. It validates that desire to be
30:03
known. We all want to be known fully
30:06
and deeply. This doctrine says you are known
30:09
better than you know yourself. You are the protagonist of the
30:12
story God is paying infinite attention to.
30:15
And it gives me peace about my life.
30:17
I often feel like I'm losing time.
30:19
I'm getting older, my kids are growing up too fast.
30:21
The sand is running out of the hourglass.
30:24
That's the tragedy of the timeline, isn't it?
30:25
The constant sense of loss. But this view reminds me nothing
30:30
is lost to God. My children as babies, they are
30:34
still present to him. My parents who have passed away,
30:36
they are present to Him. The best moments of my life
30:39
aren't gone. They are permanently written in
30:41
the book. They are safe in his eternity.
30:44
That is a beautiful thought. God is the keeper of our days.
30:46
He gathers up the fragments so that nothing is lost.
30:49
I want to leave the listener with one final thought,
30:51
something to chew on this week. It's a bit of a provocation
30:54
building on that. So for it, if God sees our whole
30:57
life as a single now, if he sees the line on the page all at
31:01
once, what does that mean for grace?
31:04
What do you mean by that? We tend to think of grace
31:06
sequentially. I sin, then I feel bad, then I
31:10
confess, then he forgives. It's a transaction that happens
31:14
in time, right? A process.
31:16
But if God sees the whole line, he sees the sin I committed
31:19
yesterday, the struggle I am having today, and the Saint I
31:22
will be in glory all at the same time.
31:25
He sees the finished product. Does that mean that when he
31:28
looks at you, messy, struggling, imperfect you, he is
31:33
simultaneously seeing the glorified, perfect Christ like
31:37
you, that you will be in heaven? That would mean His love for you
31:41
isn't just based on your current performance.
31:42
It's not a response to how good you were today.
31:45
It's based on your eternal reality in Christ.
31:47
It means grace covers the person, not just the moment.
31:50
He loves the whole line from beginning to end.
31:53
That is the gospel. He who began a good work in you
31:55
will carry it on to completion, because in his eyes it is
31:58
already complete. It is finished.
32:00
Amen. Thank you for walking through
32:02
this deep water with us. We hope your mind is stretched,
32:04
but more importantly, we hope your view of God is bigger than
32:07
it was an hour ago. Keep thinking, keep reading.
32:10
And we will see you next time on reformed thinking.