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Last week I started a new series called God is. I know that’s revolutionary for a Christian church to be talking about God but that’s basically what we’re going to be doing for the next 10, 15 weeks up until Christmas is just going through who is God. Who is God? Going through his name, his character, his attributes because I believe this is the sort of thing that is absolutely necessary and darn near impossible at the same time. I feel that on the one hand it’s absolutely essential that we understand the truth of who God is. that we worship God in spirit and truth. That we don’t just get blown every here and there by what everyone says about who God is or gods are or whatever, but that we understand who God is. Because everything in our life would depend on, do you believe that you can know God? Do you believe that God is loving? Do you believe that God is a judge? Do you believe that he is holy? What does that mean when we proclaim that God is love, that God is a judge, that God can heal? What does that mean, what does it not mean that God can heal? What does it mean, what does it not mean when we say God is a provider? All of these things are essential to your faith and to your life to understand who God is and who he’s not. Because I know that every time I declare “this is who God is”, I’m also declaring in many ways that these are some things he’s not. I’m defining which is a dangerous thing in these times to say this is God, this is not God. So what I’m trying to do is, and I believe is absolutely essential, to try to proclaim who God is and, at the same time, it’s pretty impossible because I’m trying to put into words someone, something some being who is absolutely beyond our comprehension. And so I know it’s not an easy task to say, All right, in words this is the best I can do to explain to you the majesty of who God is.

I shared last week a quote from St. Thomas of Aquinas who is one of the greatest theologians the world has ever known and how at the end of his life he stopped writing and when his secretary asked him why he said brother Reginald when I was at prayer a month ago, I experienced something of the reality of Jesus Christ and ever since then I haven’t been able to write and everything I’ve ever written about him now seems to be but straw is how he put it. And I love that quote that somehow once he experienced the reality of who God was, this theologian looked back at everything he had written and said, that’s it I’m done writing nothing can ever compare to the majesty of who he is and so I know that in some sense its an impossible task but it’s important. We have to do it we have to press on we have to try and understand who is God

So, last week I began with exactly what fit what I was saying something that was incredibly important but pretty impossible in some ways and that is, that God is a trinity. God is father, son, spirit. At his heart, God is a relational being. From the very beginning, God has not been some solitary individual up in the sky twiddling his thumbs saying what am I going to do today I am so lonely. But that from the beginning, God has been a community of father, son, holy spirit, a community of self-giving love. Showing unity and diversity that they’re all divine, but in the same sense that they all have different functions and relate to each other and to this world in different ways. And that community of love we were created to participate in that. Not out of loneliness but out of love, out of an overflow of love to take part in that type of community. To form those type of communities, to show by our marriages, to show by our churches, to show by our world that we are a community of self-giving love, showing unity and diversity. And today I’m going to go onto another aspect of God that is again, very essential, more essential than you probably understand up front when I say what it is but it’s also another thing that’s very difficult to put into words.

And I’m going to start by putting it this way. It’s that God is eternal. That he stands outside of time. That he is the alpha and the omega, that he is, he was, he is to come, he always has been. This is the doctrine put into words essentially. That God is eternal, that God has no beginning, he has no end, he has no succession of moments in his own being and he sees all time equally vividly. No one created God, he will never die, he will never end. He has no succession of moments. It’s not like he can look back at the past and the present and the future as far as his being goes. But instead, he stands outside of time and sees all of time. Equally vividly that he's omnipresent, as it were. He sees everything in time from the beginning to the end. He is fully present, fully able to see everything at the same time. God is eternal. Think about it this way if you have a hard time conceptualizing it. We are trapped. We’re trapped basically in linear forward time as it’s called. You’re born, you pay taxes, you die. Your life, you can’t go backwards. Everything I just said that you were laughing about is in the past. It’s only accessible by your memory. You can’t go back and visit it again. Everything that’s happened in the past is in the past. You can go back into your memory, if someone taped it you can go back and watch it again. And the future. You can’t access it; only by anticipating something or by hoping in something. Essentially you’re stuck in the succession of the present moments. We’re stuck in linear forward time but on the other hand, look at it this way. If this is our life, if this is the world history; the beginning - the end. That God is like me standing here outside of time. He can see the beginning from the end he can go like this and look at it from this aspect, from this perspective. That he stands outside of time he’s not trapped in this linear forward time. He sees the end from the beginning; he sees every moment at the same time. That’s what it means that God is eternal.