My Inspiration: My times are in your hands

MY TIMES ARE IN YOUR HANDS

By William King | Email: kingwilliam189@gmail.com | image courtesy: science.howstuffworsk.com

Did you know your head ages faster than your feet? Scientists have confirmed. The higher up from the earth something is, the weaker the gravitational pull and the faster time moves. An implication of this is that we frequently put our trust in a frame of reference on time different from the one we experience.

For instance, the Global Positioning System(GPS) we rely on to accurately and safely guide us as we pilot our cars, ships, planes and spaceships only works because it’s programmed, based on Einstein’s theories of relativitiy, to compensate for the distance between earth and space.

Without those formulae, our computers and smartphones would soon get disastrously out of sync with the GPS satelites, which orbit in different time. Stick with me; I am going somewhere with this. How we experience time depends on our frame of reference. In fact, sometimes it’s critically important that we trust another framing more than our own.

For Christians, this concept is nothing new. Over three millennia ago, Moses wrote,

“A thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday is when it’s past, or as a watch in the night”(Psalm 90:4).

Some two millennia ago, Peter wrote, “Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is a thousand years and a thousand years as one day” (2Peter 3:8).

In other words, time in God’s eyes moves at different speeds from time in our ours. In the life of faith, it’s critically important that we learn to rely on God’s timing. In the life of faith, it’s critically important that we learn to rely on God’s timing. Learning to trust God’s timing is not easy, to say the least. This is partly due to our sin.

It’s also because trusting a frame of reference different from ours is, by definition, counterintuitive. Since we can’t calculate God’s time, His timing often doesn’t make sense to us. That’s why after Peter described one God - day as being like a thousand years for us, he went on to say, “The Lord is not slow... as some count slowness”(2Peter 3:9).

The “some” he referred to were “scoffers” who mocked Christians’ hope in the return of Christ (2Peter 3:3-4). The truth is that all of us fit into the “some” category. I don’t mean as scoffers, but as children of God painfully perplexed by our heavenly Father’s apparent slowness.

We cry out, “How long, O Lord?” (Psalm 13:1), wondering when He will finally fulfill some promise to which we’re clinging. So, Peter exhorts us, the “beloved” of God. Someone who has created such a thing as light speed and who knows what’s happening in every part of a universe spanning some ninety-three billion light-years across, is clearly not slow.

It’s also clear, however, that such a being as God operates on a very different

timeline than we do - if timeline is even the right word. For God is not constrained by time. He is the Father of time (Genesis 1:1, Colossians 1:6). He is “the Ancienr of Days”(Daniel 7:9).

When the speed of God seems slow to us or when His timing doesn’t make sense, we must “not overlook this one fact”: God-time is different from man-time. God-time is relative to His purposes, which is His frame of reference. God, according to His wise purposes, makes everything beautiful in its time.

(Ecclesiastes 3:11)This verse captures like no other both the mysterious nature of our experience of time and the pictures God has placed within our frame of reference to help us trust the wisdom of His timing. In designing us with the eternity in our hearts, the “eternal God” made us known to Him (Deuteronomy 33:27).

In limiting the scope of our perspective and comprehension, He also made us to fundamentally trust Him and not ourselves(Proverbs 3:5-6). This is how He means for us to know Him: “I am God and there is no other; I am God and there is no one like Me” (Isaiah 46:9).

One clear way He reveals the wisdom of His purposes is how He has created, in our frame of reference, “a time for every matter under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4). The Hebrew word translated “beautiful” means appropriate, fitting, right. God’s “invisible attributes” can be “clearly perceived” in the created order we observe.

They reveal the wisdom of His purposes - a wisdom far beyond ours. God intends them to teach us that His “beautiful” timing can be trusted, even when we don’t understand it. God did not merely leave us to deduce His character and wisdom from nature (Galatians 4:4).

In Jesus, the Creator of all stepped into terrestial time into our frame of reference (John 1:2). In fully human form, He dwelt among us, “directly revealing the divine attributes with a “glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

While here, He performed many signs and wonders and proclaimed, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1). As He did so, He displayed the marvellous wisdom of the timing of God, often in ways that surprised His followers.

When His time had come (John 12:23), Jesus obeyed His Father to the point of death. As His followers, we also wait. We wait for the Father to “send the Christ appointed” (Acts 3:20). As we wait, two thousand years later (or two God-days) we helped each other remember (2Peter 3:9)