While the topic of this post is probably worthy of a book (which I probably would have to devote huge amounts of time to) I wanted to touch on the idea of God’s eternal nature.  Often I hear, and just moments ago I heard it again, that our lives are like the lifespan of a gnat compared to the timeline of God.  Does God exist only inside of the time-space continuum?  Does God have to sit and wait?  Instead I believe God looks over all of time and space at once (and as Norm Geisler says in his Encyclopedia of Christian Apologets, He knows every alternative futures as well).

God is eternal in history and future (to force a time vocabulary onto a non-time based God) as recorded in Psalm 90:1-3.  If He has no beginning and has no end why would you take the powerful nature of God
and try to describe it in finite terms?  Considering the discussion of time my 9th grade history teacher drew a long line across two very wide dry-erase boards and then took a piece of paper and scratched a minuscule slice out of the black ink on the baord and said, “That is the length of your life.”  He then proceeded to tell us that the line didn’t start and stop on the board, but instead he explained that it went from end to end infinitely.  Why would a secular teacher (who did not like Christianity) explain infinity better than a pastor in a sermon [I was listening to Joshua Harris in this MP3 message]?
Describing the beginning and end of God in a sermon illustration was not his point, his point was to describe the finite nature of our lives.  However, it rings in my ears when I hear people describe our lives in comparison to God.  The importance, as J. Harris explained later, is that we recognize the eternal nature of God and our residence in Him!  In God you have eternal life, and that life is not bound by the time space continuum.  You attempt to use the word eternal because it is a finite way to describe that which is infinite.  Infinity itself is still a concept we try to grasp as humans because we want to think of infinity as being still within the constraints of knowledge.  Is the pursuit of the infinite outside of God silly?  Certainly, but if God was before the world and will certainly be after the world we should be resting in His eternal hands – trusting that we are not like gnats, nor are we like any other creating thing because our identity is within Him, the uncreated one.