God Through Time
Revelation 1:4-8 is bookended by the claim that God is, God was, and God is to come. God is the past, the present, and the future. God exists throughout time and allows time itself to progress. God is the observer who watches reality and makes it real. God gives meaning to the randomness in the universe. God is the foundation of all that is, was, and ever will be, but God isn’t just a distant logical or metaphysical concept. God is with us. God is our past, our present, and our future.
My faith journey began before I was born. My grandfather, the pastor at St. John’s in Yutan, shaped the religious culture I was raised in. Even though I didn’t see him preach every Sunday, I could see the marks of his influence in my upbringing. While I didn’t always recognize them at the time, looking back and hearing the stories other people tell me about him, I can see that his voice continued to speak in the community he led for over two decades. In subtle, hidden ways, he was foundational to my religious upbringing.
My grandfather had his own influences. There were Latvian pastors who formed him into the man he was before he ever arrived at Yutan. His experiences gave him the voice that echoed even after his retirement in the halls of St. John’s. Likewise, those who influenced him had their own inspirations going back through history to people whose names have been forgotten but whose legacies remain in the subtle ways they shook the world. These thousands, perhaps millions, of heroes in faith and life all pour into me now, whether I know it or not. The voices of my familial and theological ancestors resound as overtones when I speak, recalling those who have passed and bringing their ideas back to life.
Now, I’m certainly no superhero. Everyone shares this complex history. Sometimes these histories clearly overlap. Sometimes we don’t know what influences we share, but our ancestors continue to work through all of us, whether we know it or not. Our upbringing, our culture, our family history are all important for how we navigate our daily lives. And though the world has greatly changed from the time when my grandfather was a young man until now, God remains constant. God was there for him, just as God was there for those before, just as God is here for us today. God makes our past something we can learn from because through God, the past isn’t some disconnected reality. The past is alive and real, held together in Christ. God is our past.
We bring all of these past influences to us today. Here and now, we interact in complicated relationships mixed with love and fear. We fear the loss of healthy relationships, while we mourn relationships that have broken down. We work to mend injured friendships, while meeting new people to love and cherish. We seek wisdom to make our lives easier while seeking to share wisdom to make our lives meaningful. We face complicated global challenges and uncertain times, knowing that sometimes the full height and depth of the world’s fierce obstacles may be too much to view. We grow numb from disappointment. We grow weary from fear. We grow callous to love that may be at risk of changing.
It is hard, sometimes scary, to be fully human, fully present. Fortunately, we can take confidence in the fact that we aren’t alone in this. While there are times when we may be thriving, we all face doubt and uncertainty. We all face times when the best we can do is survive, even if we earn terrible scars for our trouble. Bound by our own limits, we share a fear of fully engaging with the present. We have each other, but even more, we have God.
God is not defeated by the world. God can face down the challenges that would drive us into hiding. God can take on the full weight of the present without yielding or even flinching, because God is the foundation of the present. The problems can only exist in the world because God sustains the world with life. The evils of the day can only be witnessed because God gives us life so that we can experience the joys and sorrows of our world. These problems may be too big for us, but God can fully engage with the world as it is.
In God, we are joined to a network that reaches from the mists of the past to the entirety of the suffering world today. In God, we are connected to our heritage and to each other in a way that other things don’t allow. Memory and storytelling, as powerful as they are, cannot compete with the unchanging eternal memory of God. We cannot fully connect with each other on our own. We are too blinded by our own fears and selfishness, but God can connect to each and every one of us. And in connecting to all of us, God can bring us all together into a community that would be impossible without God. God is our past. God is our present.
But sometimes when I am tired of looking at the past and overwhelmed by the present, I turn with hope to the future. The future is yet shrouded in mystery. Honestly, I don’t know whether the future will bring good or bad outcomes for me, but I know I can trust God nonetheless. God has brought me thus far, filling me with the wisdom of a web of influence stretching back beyond memory into the past, allowing me to connect deeply with my neighbors in the present, and promising to guide my steps on the uncertain paths of the future. I can trust God, who has taken me this far without leading me astray. In this faith I can continue. In this faith, the past, present, and future are all held together. I’m part of one long story that began with creation and will end with the new creation at the end of the age.
When God claims to be the one who is, who was, and who is to come, we can put our hope in this promise. God unites our heritage and memory to our relationships today. God unites our lives today to our future, to our descendants. God connects us to those who come after us, for whom we will be a part of the past that carries on the tapestry of history, and one day, through God, our voices will be heard living on in the words of our grandchildren’s grandchildren well after we are gone. All this comes together in God: our past, our present, and our future.
