C.S.Lewis

C.S.Lewis is a magnificent writer (as I'm sure many of you know) and he is most famous for the Narnia series (which I read as a child). They are filled with deep metaphors throughout the series. With his characters and plot lines running deep into christian beliefs. It's truly inspired stuff! He's also written a number of other very good books aimed at a more adult audience like "Mere Christianity" which I borrowed from a friend and finished a couple of weeks ago.

In the book he explains in a very simple way many issues which non-Christians and Christians bring up. Yet his points keep the issues complexity and he doesn't make the reader feel small, it's fantastic! Also is analogies and illustrations are god given. I would recommend to anyone who hasn't read it to get yourself a copy. Even if it's just for an adventure in language!

If you follow this link you can read the book online (I think) and I've copied one of many illustrations which I really enjoyed, he's dealing with the idea of God outside of time:

"Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty-and every other moment from the beginning of the world-is always the Present for Him. If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

That is difficult, I know. Let me try to give something, not the same, but a bit like it. Suppose I am writing a novel. I write 'Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!' For Mary who has to live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary's maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear in Mary's time (the time inside the story) at all.

This is not a perfect illustration, of course. But it may give just a glimpse of what I believe to be the truth. God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel. He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world.
The way in which my illustration breaks down is this. In it the author gets out of one Time-series (the real one). But God, I believe, does not live in a Time-series at all. His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like ours with Him it is, so to speak, still 1920 and already 1960 For His life is Himself.

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all."