Some Thoughts about Time and God

The Shadow by my finger cast divides the Future from the Past:
Before it, sleeps the unborn hour, in darkness, and beyond thy power:
Behind its unreturning line, the vanished hour, no longer thine:
One hour alone is in thy hands, the now on which the shadow stands.
The Sundial at Wells College by Henry Van Dyke
Some theological concepts are very difficult for us humans to understand. For example we are taught as I understand it that God exists outside of what we know as space-time, i.e., God is not confined by what we accept as physical laws. We believe, because we are Christians, that God created the Heavens and the Earth, we believe that God has the ability to enter space-time when he wishes, and that at different times God has chosen to step into our world to perform various acts, the most important of which from our point of view was the time he was born into a human body and lived a short blameless life on the earth and was executed horribly; all in order to provide a way for we humans to be saved from our many sins and enter a new life with Him when our earthly existence is complete. If you accept this concept unquestioned, you need not read further. If it is difficult to understand you might try reading on. The following thoughts are paraphrased from a book entitled Time Travel by Paul Nahin in a chapter called Block Universe containing some words from a 1928 New York stage play Berkeley Square.
Suppose you are in a boat sailing down a winding stream. You watch the banks as they pass by you. You went by a grove of maple trees upstream, but you can’t see them now, so you saw them in the Past didn’t you. You’re watching a field of clover now; it’s before your eyes in the Present. There may be wonderful things around the bend ahead of you, but you can’t see them now, so you don’t know yet because they are in the future.
The stream is the arrow of time and the boat is your life. You can remember the past always, but as the stream flows onward the past grows dimmer and dimmer; until finally only the very important, the very unusual events are remembered. The pleasures and displeasures of the present are your daily experiences. You cannot see the future. Certainly you can guess what will probably occur; you can plan for your future and if correctly done so, you can expect your plan to probably develop; but you can never know with certainty what will occur even in the next moment.
Are you ready for this? Now, remember you are in the boat. You can remember the Past, see the Present, but not know the Future, but I’m up in the sky above you in a hot air balloon, or maybe a magic carpet! I’m looking down on it all. I can see all at once the trees you saw upstream in your past, the field of clover you are looking at now, and what is waiting for you around the bend in your future. I can simultaneously see your past, present, and future. They are all one to the man up above.
So, who is in the balloon? God is up there looking down. I don’t mean to be sacrilegious, but simply to use these words to try to explain a concept that I think lots of folks have difficulty understanding. John 1:1. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. (NIV).
If my hot air balloon runs out of air, or perhaps my magic carpet gets low on magic, and I float down and land in the boat with you, say howdy, and sit on the other seat as we float along I would just as you be able to remember the past, see the present, but differently from you I would remember what is around the bend in the future, e.g., that there are big rocks on both sides of the stream. I could tell you to steer or paddle to the narrow lane in the center to avoid them. Then again, if somehow I acquire some air for my balloon or some magic for my carpet, I could just float back up above you, maybe even so high that you would not be able to see me, but all the while I would be observing you, and at any moment could lower down and ride with you in the boat if I choose to.