Another time marker in the clock room of God is that while our physical body clocks will one day soon run down and stop, God has an eternal flywheel in His clock room that will never run down – even after time, as we understand it, ends! And here we come to the most exciting concept in all eternity – our deeper walk with the Lord need never end!
The moment we invited Jesus Christ into our lives we became the recipients of the most sought after commodity in the universe – eternal life! Again, we accept this by faith, and though we can’t fully comprehend this infinite concept with our finite minds, we can get lost in the joyous contemplation of it. Our new creation bodies, like that of our heavenly Father, are made to last forever. This lesson that we learn about God’s timetable focuses on the realm of eternity. While we are born with a sin nature, by virtue of our distant forefather Adam’s transgression, we now through faith in Christ become born again. And as children of God we have inherited something infinitely precious – the gift of eternal life.
A fascinating aspect of the way God keeps time can be seen in (II Peter 3:8): “But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.” As we discussed earlier, God doesn’t need time to function in, since He exists in the past, present, and future simultaneously. While years seem long to us and days short, these time periods really have no big meaning to God since He, in a sense, treats and views them alike. God doesn’t expect us to fully comprehend this, but He does want us to trust Him and believe that His timing, on all matters in our lives, is always perfect.
It is essential that we trust God when it comes to understanding how He views time, if we are to grow in our walk with the Lord. For if we can’t trust God when He tells us He existed before time began, and will be here after time ends, then how can we go further in our walk, when one of the most important words in the entire Bible involves time – and that word is wait. Before we end our discussion on time with respect to the word wait, I would like to show you the rich meaning of (II Peter 3:8).
Picture the father of a two-year-old girl and let’s examine how her little mind understands the concept of time. Say her birthday is seven months from now. If she is told she has to wait seven months for her birthday, she probably can’t fully comprehend how long her wait will be. At two, she might realize that her daddy doesn’t go to work on Saturdays but she couldn’t tell her father on Tuesday, that Saturday was four days away. And if she were told that she had to wait five more minutes for her ice cream cone, she would only stare at the cone not knowing how long her wait would be.
The point I am trying to make is that while we don’t expect little children to understand these simple time concepts, we do expect them to trust us when we tell them they are real and in their proper time will come to pass. In the case of the little two-year-old girl she may not have understood the time concepts discussed above but hopefully she trusted her father even though she didn’t fully understand the concepts. Thus, while she may not know what a five minute wait was, she did trust her father that he would deliver the ice cream cone. Of course, as she grows older both the trust and the understanding will become one.
This is exactly the same way our heavenly Father views us, His children. When we first get saved God knows that we probably won’t understand fully the time concepts that we have discussed in this devotional series. But He does want us to trust in their realty, just as we want our own small children to trust us when we talk about time. And just as our children, as they grow older, begin to understand that the mysteries of time are not so mysterious, we too can, as we mature in the Lord, understand the deeper time concepts of God.
As we develop a deeper understanding of (II Peter 3:8), we begin to see that waiting on the Lord need not prove to be an anxious and sometimes endless period of time, as it appears to be for so many Christians.
“waiting on the Lord need not prove to be an anxious and sometimes endless period of time”
The one thing we can not buy back is time. We are bound by clocks and calendars that relentlessly count down our days and sometimes mercilessly. Such was the case of the rich man who thought he had plenty of time to indulge himself in pleasure.
Luke 12 I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’
Even if we use our time wisely, our lives are a blip on the screen. James 4 “yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”
This burden of fleeting time we carry with us everywhere and its only the Lord that can give meaning to that time until we break the bands that bind us to clocks and we are ushered into the eternity we long for. Ecclesiastes 3
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.”
The takeaway from this is summarized in the admonition of Hebrews 3
“But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.””