Is God In The Past, Present, And Future?

I was out to eat with a friend of mine, and as we were finishing up, she commented that her past was preventing her from being her best self.

As the waitress had just brought the check, I picked up her pen and scrawled three words on a napkin: Past, Present, Future.

My friend got a panicked look on her face, and asked “were not going to be making any lists, are we?”

I said, “No, no, no, it’s much simpler than that.”

Then I asked if she believed in God and if she was a Christian.

She said yes to both, and I said “Ok, this will be really simple.”

I asked her “Do you believe that God is omnipresent? That is do you believe that God is everywhere?”

She said yes, so I pointed to the napkin, and asked her whether she believed that God was in the past, the present, and the future. She nodded yes to all three, and I smiled, picked up the pen, and wrote “God” under the word Present.

I then dropped this bombshell.

There is no God in the past or the future.

Then I dropped a second bombshell.

I asked, “Do you know who inhabits the past and the future?” She nodded “no” and I wrote Satan under both the words Past and Future.

(As a quick aside, we got up and left soon after, but I think I left that napkin sitting on the table next to the check. I know the waitress was going to be pleased with the tip I left, but I wonder how pleased she was with the napkin. On second thought, maybe the tip wasn’t big enough!)

But back to my thesis.

I’ve thrown out some outlandish sounding claims here, and I owe you an explanation as to what they mean. So, lets unpack some of this.

Let’s start with the past and the future.

They don’t exist.

I’m not making a quantum physics type of argument. I’m not that smart. This is a very practical statement.

The past and the future don’t exist.

The past existed at one time and the future may eventually exist, but both of those periods don’t exist right now in the present.

I can’t go down the street to revisit 1995. I can’t even revisit my decision to have a donut for breakfast that is currently sitting like an anchor at the bottom of my stomach. And no matter how much as a kid, I wanted Christmas morning to happen, I couldn’t summon it into existence on Christmas Eve.

The past and the future don’t exist. They are simply constructs in our mind. They are constructs that we use to make sense of what has happened to us and what might happen to us.

So if the past and the future don’t exist then I believe that it is safe, and thoroughly Christian, to state that God doesn’t exist in either of those periods. Again, I’m not making a complex argument. God did exist in the past, and God will exist in the eventual future, but God doesn’t exist in those periods now because those periods don’t exist now.

Are you tracking with me so far?

Good, because my last point, my second bombshell, is a little more difficult to unpack.

I’m guessing that you may be thinking “Tim, if the past and the future don’t exist then how can Satan inhabit those periods?” That’s a good question.

First, though, let’s talk about Satan.

As Keyser Soze said, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

I am not one of those fundamentalists that attributes everything to Satan. In fact, I was less a believer in Satan than I was an atheist of Jesus Christ. But similar to my about face with my faith in Christ, I had to have an experience with Satan to believe that he exists.

That story is for another day, but I’m asking now just for you to hear me out. Not to suspend whatever belief you have of Satan, but to look into your own life to see if you recognize that malevolent presence that is adversarial to your relationship with God.

A presence like the serpent in Genesis 3 that asks Eve, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Or that voice in your head that theologian Baxter Kruger calls the “I am nots”; I am not good enough, I am not talented enough, I’m not pretty enough, etc., etc.

That is what I call Satan.

And THAT Satan is using our guilt, shame, and regret about the past, and our fear and uncertainty about the future, to interrupt our present. He is weaponizing periods of life that don’t exist to suck the life out of the one we are living in.

So where do I suggest that you go from here?

This post is more fire alarm than fire extinguisher., but gaining awareness of a problem is always the first step in the process of addressing it. Often, it can be the turning point of the battle.

In my battle, the realization that the “I am not” thoughts I was having weren’t merely some psychological negative self-talk was life giving.

I had spent decades buried under an avalanche of what I perceived to be self-criticism. And as I believed this to be self generated, I believed it to be accurate. I mean, I might be a screw up, but I was an intelligent screw up who could provide accurate commentary on my own life.

To now realize that these thoughts weren’t self generated, but the product of me parroting the suggestions of a malevolent presence, a presence I call Satan, a presence that seeks to cripple and destroy me. Well, that was like having a boulder lifted off of my chest.

And it gave me the breathing room to turn to Jesus. In fact, Jesus was always the breathing room I had. I just couldn’t see it.

I realize that readjusting your worldview to be “present focused” is no small task, and that asking you to readjust it to take into account the presence of Satan might currently be too heavy a lift.

You may have your own boulder to account for.

But if you feel buried like I did, know that you have the breathing room. Jesus is always there, you just have to turn to Him.