I get confused when putting new and old testaments together. If God is eternal (so outside of all time and space) how can he be moved to jealousy by affections, or even act in our reality, without becoming temporal and a subject to our world's rules? Polytheism answers this dilemma by making the One (eternal bystander) and the Gods (immortals from heaven) different. Monotheism says the Gods never existed, they were never distinct from God, or they were angels and demons, but I think runs into the problem of making the eternal, unchanging being an absurdity. How could he perform miracles if his divinity is wrapped up in his eternal being? Gods like Apollo and Thor are really just stronger men on a whole other level, but Jesus would be all at once conscious of everything and finite. I don't even understand.
Not understanding is perfectly fine, there are plenty of things in the Christian religion that exist in the realm of the paradoxical and even incomprehensible. The Christian claim is never that our religion always makes sense, only that the things we believe to be true are indeed true.
That said, I don't think this is as especially complicated as perhaps you are imagining it to be.
Let's imagine that the sum total of all material existence, so the universe or the entirety of space-time, were a bubble. And you could place your finger on point point of the bubble to interact it it in those coordinates (and since we're talking space-time, it's not just the x, y, and z of three-dimensional space, but also the fourth dimension of time here). So one finger is interacting with one point in four-dimensional space-time, and then if you take another finger and place it elsewhere on the bubble that finger is now interacting with another point in four-dimensional space-time. That is you are simultaneously (from your vantage point) interacting with not just two different points of three-dimensional space, but also at different times.
So, from a purely analogical perspective, it's not terribly difficult to conceive of a being outside of the totality of space-time interacting with spacetime.
This is approximating the sort of thought experiment from the novel Flatland. If you're not familiar, it involves a protagonist who lives in Flatland, a two-dimensional world that consists only of length and width, the denizens of flatland are circles, triangles, etc. The protagonist, Square, has a dream where he visits the one-dimensional world of Lineland whose denizens are all single points. The points are unable to conceive of Flatlanders, and so the points only ever see Square as a set of points on a line, and his attempts to explain the two-dimensional world to the Linelanders is fruitless--they cannot conceive of a world beyond one dimension--they can't even perceive the Square as the Square actually is. Later, the Square is visited by Sphere from a three-dimensional world, but Square can't see Sphere as anything other than a circle. And Sphere's attempts to show himself and explain three dimensions to Square is going about as well as Square's attempt to explain two-dimensions to the points of Lineland. Sphere attempts to prove three dimensions by moving up and down, but Square can only see Sphere as a growing and then contracting circle.
Our perceptions of reality, of course, are bound to our experience of space-time. We can move freely through three-dimensions of space, but can only move in a single direction through the fourth dimension of time. In the same way that Square can't truly comprehend the three-dimensional world of Sphere, or the Linelanders comprehend the two-dimensional world of Square; and yet Sphere can interact with Flatland just fine, and Square can interact with Lineland just fine; so we can't truly conceive of dimensions beyond our experience and perception. But this does not negate the possibility of the existence of these higher-order dimensions and of a higher-order dimension being being able to interact with our world as easily as Sphere could interact with Square's world.
Of course, with God, we are talking about something far bigger than just a being existing on a hypothetical higher order of dimensions within the totality of all space-time. We are talking about God. So, certainly if it is easy for you, a mere three-dimensional being to interact with the two dimensional, such as when you draw a square on a sheet of paper for example, or touch a flat surface somewhere. There's really no difficulty in considering that God could interact with the universe in ways that aren't like ours.
But perhaps most importantly, for Christians, God did actually become part of created space-time, in the Incarnation, as Jesus Christ. And that's really where the paradox exists, for the Eternal and Infinite remained Eternal and Infinite and yet was temporal and finite. What is noncontainable was contained, without ever being constrained; what was bound by flesh was yet still boundless through all things and all eternity. That which could not suffer suffered; that which could not die died.
But as far as the Eternal interacting with the universe? That's really not that difficult to consider.
-CryptoLutheran
-CryptoLutheran
