Do you ever wish that God spoke and worked in our own time as He did in the Old Testament or in the days of the original Apostles?
We have probably all, at one time or another, found ourselves wishing for this. We may be facing a difficult decision and we crave the straightforward clarity of hearing God’s audible voice as Abraham did. Or we may be faced with fear of the future and desperately desire the privilege and advantage of a prophetic vision or even a glimpse into the end of the age, as John received. Perhaps we hunger for the thrill of seeing miracles happen before our very eyes.
We want to hear God speak. And we want to see His sovereignty and power at work in the world around us. And yet we feel as if we have missed the deadline to experience these things. If only we had been born sometime before the First Century A.D. in the Near Eastern world!
In his book, Knowing God, J.I. Packer acknowledges this ache in the hearts of modern people to be able to touch and experience the narrative of the Bible in a real way. And he draws his reader’s attention to the unchanging nature of God. For the same God that spoke to Abraham is speaking to us now. And the same Christ who performed miracles in First Century Judea is still performing them today. Not only that, but the majestic God who will wrap up all of human history in power is mightily sovereign now.
Our prayers, our hope and trust, and our fellowship with God are helped along by our understanding of God’s consistent nature throughout time and space.
Time-Bound Creatures
We are time-bound creatures. And while our souls are immortal and continue to exist after we die, we have a beginning, and an earthly end. We sit in the present. With one eye to the past and one eye to the future. Categories like “have been” and “will be” exist and we understand them. In fact, we can only understand the world and our movement in it through these categories.
Unlike us, God is not time-bound.
When God called Moses from the burning bush and instructed him to return to Egypt, He proclaimed His eternal self-existence.
God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
Exodus 3:14
By revealing Himself by the name “I AM”, God declared His eternal nature outside of time. He is the one “who was, who is, and who is to come” (Revelation 1:8). Because God is not time-bound, He has full access to all times and places in history all at once. He does not need to travel back or forward in time to know, see, or work. He exists in His own perpetual “present”. He “inhabits eternity” (Isaiah 57:15).
Furthermore, His presence in the burning bush, which burned but was not consumed, reveals His self-existence and self-sufficiency. The angel of God burned in the bush but was not reliant on the bush for fuel to keep burning.
The Eternal Christ
Not only is God the Father eternally self-existing, but Jesus Christ is also eternal.
In John 8:58 Jesus is speaking to the Jews and He declares His eternal self-existence by claiming the name of I AM.
Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”
John 8:58
To this, they are incredulous and seek to stone Him.
Earlier in John, at the very beginning of the gospel, John affirms Jesus’ immortality:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
John 1:1-2
J.I. Packer describes the eternal nature of Christ as the “strong consolation of all God’s people”. And indeed it is incredibly consoling and fortifying to our hope that Christ is eternal and that His life, death, and resurrection are affecting our salvation now as they were when those events happened in the timeline of human history.
God did not wait to save humanity until Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Nor does He have to return to the First Century to remember His compassion and mercy for us. He sees all of human history at once and therefore when we sin in the year 2022 He immediately sees the blood of Christ applied to our sin.
Praying & Fellowshipping With An Eternal God
This doctrine of God’s eternal nature does wonders for our prayer, our hope, and our fellowship and intimacy with God.
We do not need to longingly look back at ancient times and wish that God would only work in our lives the same way now as He did then. For to God, “then” and “now” are no different.
We can pray boldly as the heroes of the faith did because the same God is working in our lives today. He has not aged with time or slowed down. He has not grown tired over the millennia. He is just as presently at work in your life today as He was in the life of Abraham. And while we cannot experience His presence in Abraham’s life (just as Abraham cannot experience His presence in our own life) it is not because He has changed or been limited. Rather the limit lies with us.
We have great hope. In fact, we have far more than a “great hope”. We have a Living Hope (1 Peter 1:3). Jesus Christ is our Living Hope. He is living eternally making intercession at the Father’s side for us (Hebrews 7:25; Romans 8:34). We can trust in God’s sovereignty because we know that we are placing our trust in the same sovereignty that we see exhibited in Scripture. He is sovereignly working in our lives right now, just as He sovereignly ordained all the events recorded in Scripture.
Finally, our fellowship and intimacy with God can grow to be as deep as any recorded in Scripture. While God will probably not speak to us audibly or appear to us visibly, we are in fellowship with the same God who spoke and appeared to Abraham, Jacob, Paul, John, and so many others. And one day, we shall be face-to-face with Him as well. For God, that moment has already come. He lives in it now. For us, we have to wait. But the knowledge that our God is face-to-face with us now in His eternal existence is a beautiful thought that can free our hearts to pursue fellowship with Him beyond what we can understand or explain.