Have you ever wondered why we're obsessed with the idea of time travel? Back to the future,

Quantum Leap, Doctor Who, maybe it's because the tiny speck of time that you and I inhabit

feels a bit claustrophobic to us. Think about it. The only millisecond of time that we

actually have access to is this very millisecond that we're living in right now.

The past is closed off behind us. There's no way to get back there.

The future is always beyond our reach because as soon as we do reach the future,

it immediately gets locked up in the same impenetrable vault as the past.

The time that you and I can actually live in is about as wide as the business edge of a surgeon's

scalpel. It's why people become writers. Authors give themselves the exhilarating sense that

they're able to move freely backwards and forwards through time and are able to

slow it down or speed it up at will. But of course, that's just an illusion. Real time moves on

while authors are pretending to be outside it and it continues to be lost forever at the reliable

rate of 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour.

You could set your watch by it.

We're obliged to live in it as a goldfish is obliged to live in water, and there's no way out of it,

at least not in our current bodies. By contrast, the entire

sweep of history, not to mention everything either side of it, is immediately and always

accessible to God. No claustrophobia here, because as the creator of time, God must of necessity be outside time.

This is what theologians call the eternity of God. You see it all over Scripture. God is repeatedly

referred to as the eternal or everlasting God who alone has immortality,

1 Timothy chapter 6. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth

and the world from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. Psalm 90, verse 2. When in Exodus chapter 3, Moses asks God

...