What Writing Taught Me About God - Part 1

Comprehending infinity by analogy

Simple Logic

History is basically one big story.

Stories have authors.

God is the author of history.

God is an author.

God is the Ultimate Author.

A pretty simple, right? Well one day I decided to be nerdy and see what happened when I extrapolated it. The results blew my mind.

God Is An Author

As finite human beings, we struggle to comprehend the infinity of God. If you think you understand it, that proves how much you don’t.

Essentially, my thought process was this: because God is the Author of History, we can understand the magnitude of God vs Man by comparing it to the magnitude of Man vs his own stories.

In a sense, what I’m saying is that men are like gods over their own stories. Except men are sinful, finite, and very stupid. So it’s not a perfect analogy.

But it’s a really dang good one.

So without further adieu, let’s analogize infinity.

Omnipotence

One of the reasons why starting a book from a blank slate is so daunting is because you can literally do anything. This comes to show the creative genius of God, who made the entire world ex nihilo, without anybody to bounce ideas off of. But I digress.

I want to focus on the word ‘anything’. Writers can literally write anything. Tolkien could have had meteors fall out of the sky and destroy the Black Gates. He could have had eagles carry Frodo to Mount Doom. In fact, if he felt so inclined, he could have given Sauron a change of heart.

How those things would have affected the story is besides the point. The point is that Tolkien could have done it with the flick of a pen.

So too, God can do whatever He wants (besides sinning and all that). Whether helping you find your keys or parting the Red Sea - it makes no difference. They’re all just flicks of a pen. The greatest miracles in history were mere thoughts.

Omniscience

When you write a story, you have to build an entire world with societal structures and physical laws. You have to thoroughly understand your characters and know your plot front to back to develop it clearly. Nothing that is known about the story did not come from your mind.

So too, because God created the world, He knows how it works. He knows the laws, the locations, the traditions, and the characters. He wrote all the dialogue, everybody’s thoughts - everything. There is nothing in this world that God doesn’t know, because if God didn’t know it, it wouldn’t exist.

Omnipresence

When you read a book, it’s like you’re being transported into a different world. You’re not actually there…but you’re there. How much more for the writer himself?

Because writers know their entire story, and knowing the story is akin to being in it, that means the writer is present everywhere in the story. He may choose to focus on one particular place at one particular time, but he has his mind wrapped around the whole thing, and is thus everywhere at once.

Likewise, because God is the author of reality, God is everywhere there is reality. He does not physically inhabit all space, yet He is There.

Outside of Matter

Human beings are made of matter, and matter is the only material thing we know, so we can only think of substance in terms of matter. Yet God Is, yet is not matter. We cannot comprehend this.

Picture yourself as a character in a book. If you explored the framework of your existence, you would discover that it is made of paper and ink. Thus, your only concept of your author’s substance would be in those terms. You would think that being made of paper and ink is the only way to be material.

But in reality we are made of something that far transcends paper and ink. We do not require paper and ink to exist - we exist without it, made of our own substance. If a character was feeling particularly philosophical, he may refer to our substance as ‘flesh’, but how would he be able to comprehend it except as some sort of paper?

So too, God is not made of matter. He is made of something that far transcends matter, except that He doesn’t even require being ‘made of’ anything at all. He is self-existing - completely outside our physical framework. We may call it ‘spiritual matter’, but this is is like our characters calling our flesh ‘3D paper’. It’s a joke.

Outside of Time

Probably the most mind-boggling attribute of God besides His threefold nature is His timelessness.

Pretend again that you’re a character in a book. How would you measure the passage of time? By page numbers.

But writers are not bound by page numbers. They can flip backward and forward while remaining unchanged. In the ultimate sense, the writer is not even ‘on’ a particular page, because he knows the entire story. In an even more ultimate sense, the page numbers are completely irrelevant. The writer existed before the front cover was opened and after the back cover was closed. He is totally removed from page number mechanics.

Likewise, God is not within what we call time. He existed before time because He is self-existing - completely outside of our human framework. From the divine perspective, the past, present, and future are all created things that He holds in His hand. The assignment of any of His deeds to a specific location in time is a mere human interpretation.

Conclusion

Is your brain still working? If you were able to follow my logic, wasn’t it so fascinating?

But if your brain hurts, don’t worry about it. You’re not really supposed to be able to comprehend God’s infinity anyway. This post is for the people who enjoy the intellectual challenge.

Oh, and by the way, there’s a Part 2 coming. If you thought this was mind-boggling, you ain’t seen nothing.