He lives in the eternal present, the eternal “now”. In relation to our time, God has always been and always will be, “now and ever and unto ages of ages”. Or to put it another way, He has all times within Himself. He is “beyond” time, “outside” time, so to speak. Art (Is)Īctually this word isn’t in the Greek text! but it is implied – and since we pray it, let’s talk about it. Hang on, for this will be like the movie “Back to the Future”, only worse – or actually better. We’re going to hit on that theme again and again today. God is like that, beyond our dimensions and our understanding.
An analogy: Mathematicians can calculate in more than our three dimensions, but our experience cannot grasp what they are like. What does that mean? We haven’t the faintest idea. Remember that none of our words for God are adequate to His Reality. (This, by the way, also applies to the Holy Spirit, who is never an impersonal “It”.)īut let’s dig a little deeper, even though we won’t know what to do with it once we get there. God is our Father, which means He’s personal, never deals with us in an impersonal way. You’d think we could take the word “who” for granted. He took the form of a dove once at the time of Christ’s Baptism, but in essence He also has no form and cannot be imaged.
Nor, by the way, should the Holy Spirit be depicted as a bird. This comes perilously close to the heresy of Arius who taught that “there was a time when the Son was not”, that the Son is younger than the Father and therefore not eternal. It shows the Father as an old man, and the Son as a young man. I include it here for illustrative purposes only. Were you expecting the Father to look older? Here is another (very misleading) icon of the Trinity which shows why not. Genesis 18 and 19 In the icon, which of the Three is the Father? The One on the left, towards Whom the other Two incline their heads, since the Lord taught that the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father.Ībove: by permission of Saint Isaac’s Skete at So the classical icon of God the Holy Trinity is the one by Andrei Rublev (Sixteenth Century) where all three are shown symbolically, using the three “men”, “the Lord”, “the angels” who visited Abraham and Sarah. God the Father has no physical attributes and so cannot be depicted, nor can the Holy Spirit. Last week, as we talked about The Father, I ignored something obvious: I’ve been Orthodox for 32 years, and I forgot iconography!?
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