God: The Storyteller Supreme
We can create amazing characters and stories, but what about God? What can God do?
God is a non-temporal author. Time is a beautiful invention created for his canon. Because of this, language and the human mind cannot fully comprehend the infinity and timelessness of God. The best way to speak of God in the English language is through the infinitive form of verbs. Although this is grammatically incorrect and hard to read, the message is clear once one considers the timelessness of God. All that was, is, and will be eternally be the authorship of God. God be who he be. This is not to say that time is illusionary, rather it is to say that God is unaffected by it.
J.R.R. Tolkien is not affected by the passing of time in Middle Earth, but certainly time exists there. This goes hand in hand with God’s holy transcendence. He is beyond anything he creates. When one creates a story or a tale, it starts in his mind. A story is not independent of its author. Middle Earth is dependent on the mind of Tolkien, and Narnia needs Lewis. Such is the same of God’s story. We are of the mind of God. God is wholly and utterly holy and transcendent precisely because his thought is that which creates and sustains. Even the unbeliever is dependent on God’s penmanship and was graciously written into the story.
Now this is where the idea of God’s as supreme author can become confusing. A couple of things must be noted. First off, this idea of us all being in the mind of God is not to be confused with pantheism. Secondly, the analogy of God’s authorship of the world to man’s authorship of a book becomes foggy because of the change in dimensions. I am no mathematician or physicist, but God is a being outside of our perception of reality as was stated earlier.
Say we are three dimensional beings. We have not the power to create three dimensional beings. We only have the power to create two dimensional beings (which are not ‘beings’ according to most people’s definitions). We can create robust characters, heroes and villains. However, these ‘beings’ are utterly bound to pages and to our thought. Nonetheless, great characters often take on a life of their own.
If we can create amazing characters and stories, how much more can God create and write?
Mitchell D. Cochran is from Midland, Texas and is a graduate of Lubbock Christian University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. He is currently attending Calvary University for his Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling. Mitchell currently resides in Lubbock, Texas with his wife Katherine.
