‘ I am Alpha and Omega the beginning and the end the first and the last’. Revelations

I cannot see how God can be any other than outside of time as we know it. His is the past ,present and future and although free will gives us, I believe, genuine choice all possible outcomes are contained in his being. We are like the readers of a book of which God is the author we may opt to skip a paragraph or turn to a new chapter it doesn’t matter the book is still his. This inevitably means that God and ourselves have a very different view of events.

I was once talking to my mother about her childhood growing up in the Second World War . She agreed that in hindsight it was ‘ a good war’ in that Hitler and the nazis were a terrible evil which the allies had no option but to fight .On the basis that such wickedness could never be allowed to triumph. But she also pointed out that as a child being bombed every night , with never enough to eat ,that it was very difficult in 1940 to see any good at all in the terrible events taking place all around or have any hope for the future.Everything just looked dark and hopeless.

Invariably the reader and the author see things differently . For the author it all makes sense everything will turn out all right in the end because he wrote it that way. Take the crucifixion we know it ends with the resurrection and as a result the story  of Christ is seen by us as a message of hope and joy. Imagine how the disciples felt watching Christ die ? Their lives being destroyed in front of their eyes. We all have times when we struggle for meaning. Especially in the bad times we can’t make sense of the pain. But as Christians we believe in two things that our God is both almighty and all loving. Which allows us the hope that all will be put right and that one day we will understand the whole story of our lives and place in the world and that the tears of today will vanish in the light of truth.

Maché Italy