It's already been done.

CS Lewis brings up an interesting point in the Screwtape letters. He speaks of humans’ preoccupation with the present vs. future vs. past, and reminds us that both God and the devil are outside the frame of time. He mentions that temptation is easy through setting future-related anxieties into the humans’ minds. This is interesting to think about in the mind frame of a movie, where we have not yet seen 5 minutes ahead, but that does not mean that it doesn’t already exist. Furthermore, if you videotape an event (like a kid on the swings, who then falls off and cries), playing the tape back (or videotaping it) does not stop the event from occurring or take away the unpredictability of falling off. The kid whose knee starts bleeding likely does not know that 10 minutes later he will forget about it, stop crying, and smile again. But we as the viewers (also as creatures more complex who know how these things work) can know what happens 10 mins ahead of a given point.


I think it’s like that with God. Somewhere else I heard this concept of “the Battle is already won.” And come to think of it, it really is. All the things we are longing for and praying for have already happened, if you look at it from eternity’s point of view. Our death and salvation, the end of the world, the New Earth, the fulfillment of prophesies.. they have already happened. Everything we are anxious about and fear has already been resolved. God has already taken care of it. All of our battles against our own sin and that of others, against temptation of the devil and weakness of the flesh – they are done. We are just in the early part of the movie, but that doesn’t make the later part of the movie any less true. Another theme in the Screwtape letters: ongoing small battles over the human’s attention that the devil and God both try to capture. Devil aims to tempt, God tempts to free and offer a better way. Lewis describes the devil’s attempts to bring the human farther away from God and we watch the human live, struggle, grow, and then die and enter the warm glow of heaven where everything finally makes sense and is as it was meant to be. The battle had been won. Now, instead of looking at the human’s life on earth as it is in each specific moment in life, let’s look at it as a whole timeline, or a movie. At each moment he was preoccupied with that moment or the time before or after it. But having read the book (or having ‘seen the movie of his life’), we already know the ending. We already know the battle has been won. So when we look at each moment’s struggle or joy that he is focused on, unaware of the bigger picture, we could laugh or cringe because he is preoccupied with the time frame he lives within. However, God, as not only the viewer of the movie but as the master of the world the movie takes place in, already knows the battle and how it is won. It is mind boggling, I know.

So, if you look outside the frame of time, the battle over that human’s heart had already been won even when he was just born. It had been won at the moments of his worst failures and the most uninteresting of days.

Perhaps we will not see how it all plays out, but we can trust and know that the battle has already been won outside the frame of time. The people we have been praying for – God has already heard our prayers. It has already been done. The Battle is already won. His good has already overcome the sin and evil. And while this concept is kind of tough to chew and swallow and comprehend, it can also be calming. We worry what will happen tomorrow and how this and that will turn out. We fear for the future of our parents and our children, and what the earth will look like when it runs out of natural resources. We worry whether God really hears our requests and petitions and we worry that we have not prayed enough for the people and things that truly matter. But that all has to do with the worries of tomorrow, which Jesus himself asks us to not worry about (Matthew 6:34). Outside the frame of time, it has already been taken care of. The Battle has already been won.

I think this idea can be especially comforting in the times of anxiety, because anxiety revolves worry over events on the small scale and within the frame of time. His Victory in the battle is beyond time and beyond our lifetimes. And it has already happened. It’s like if we lived in a snow globe and worried about interactions and events within that snow globe, but all that mattered was whether or not God moves the snow globe over from the bookshelf to the table. And that part has already been done. The battle has already been won.

Another interesting thought: when describing heaven, Lewis states that the human recognizes the angels and God and says something along the lines of “I should have known all along”. In The Great Divorce, Lewis also mentions, though, that life and reality and truth can only be understood through living them forward in time. but the days and years lived forward on earth are not all. there's more. the way eternity works can't be fully explained or understood while we are here on earth.

This brings me to this thought I once had that maybe we already know heaven and God, and just “forgot” it. We run around this maze of life as conspirators, tagging each other, recognizing it through touch, or running into things that make us remember bits and pieces of Heaven. Maybe our whole lifetimes are the journey of recalling our already existing familiarity with Him. And in the frame of eternity, (not necessarily today or tomorrow), we can say we do already know Him, and we do already know Heaven. Because in eternity we have seen it, and are already there since the Battle has already been won.