Page 139 - Prayer Book

Ι Heard You…
139
exist as a solitary, impersonal God and then become Fa-
ther, but always existed as Father! He has always existed
with the Son and the Spirit. However, this “simultaneous”
existence of cause and effects (“causates”), i.e., the “simul-
taneous” existence of the Father as cause and the Son and
the Spirit as “causates,” is something we as humans cannot
grasp! It is entirely beyond our comprehension, because we
exist within time! Time is a necessary condition of our ex-
istence! But God exists before time, beyond and above
time! God is timeless—or more accurately, supra-time! He
is Love without beginning or end, Love before the begin-
ning of every beginning and after the end of every end.
This means that although the Father is the cause of the
existence of the Son and the Spirit, He has never existed
without the Sonand the Spirit, as Arius and the Pneuma-
tomachi (Spirit-fighters) claimed! We might say, in human
terms and metaphorically, that the Father, the Son, and the
Spirit existed “simultaneously”!
Finally, we must note something else regarding God’s
existence. Not only does God exist beyond time, but He
also exists beyond space! He is “uncontained,” He is not
“somewhere,” and there is no space surrounding Him! He
exists freely from the conditions, constraints, and limita-
tions of both space and time. Consequently, since God is
absolutely uncontained and timeless, His Nature in the
three Hypostases is one and unique, indivisible and undi-
vided! The three Hypostases do not divide the one unique,
supra-essential nature of the Trinity! The one Triune Na-
ture is simple and indivisible. The concepts of “somewhere”
and “sometime” were brought into existence when God
created the world— they did not exist before! There was