Psalm 90:4

Psalm 90:4

It's all about time - His time

It is easy to forget that God does not measure time as we do. However, our human system of counting minutes, hours, days, months and years is very much based on God’s predetermined measurements! He has put us in orbit around the sun spinning on a planet that goes through 180 degrees every 24 hours and that circles the sun every 365 days. (366 in a Leap Year!) There are many significant measures of time in the Scriptures including the 7-day week, the use of 40 days to measure certain periods, the 50th year of Jubilee and so on, that’s without going into circadian rhythms! All of these periods are God ordained but He stands above them all and so when the Bible talks about eternity, we humans are completely out of our depth. We love to measure everything, but how do you measure something that has no beginning or end? How can we even begin to grasp what that means?  With God, an age can be whittled down to a day and a day can represent an age and in all of this, God remains patient and true whilst we finite human beings bristle with impatience. So much so, that we try to place times and dates on things and to pre-empt what we believe God might be doing next in accordance with our understanding of His scheduling! What a foolish waste of time. That is why prophecy can only be understood in terms of what is happening now, we cannot possibly predict or understand what is about to come because we have no way of measuring God’s timing. Jesus said to the disciples, “It is not for you to know the times and dates that the Father has set by His own authority.” Acts 1:7. It’s not just that we are not being given all the information because it is so secret, it is because we are completely incapable of comprehending the mind of God. He is not withholding from us; He knows that the order and programming of events are way outside of our understanding. How many books would He have needed to write for us to even begin to get a glimpse of His plan and His purposes? That is why we cannot know. Be very wary of those who produce prophetic timelines or who claim to understand, in detail, how things are going to unfold in the future. Yes, we have been given clues, but I have seen in my own lifetime that the interpretation of God’s plan that Bible teachers held 50-60 years ago, has been long disproved because they could only interpret the Scriptures based on what they knew at that moment. 

Returning to our verse, a “watch” was a period of 3-4 hours, so a thousand years in God’s sight is not just like a day to the Lord, it can be like just a handful of hours! I find all of this disconcerting but also humbling, the events that are clearly going to happen in the future, some of which we eagerly anticipate, could still be a thousand years away or, they could start to unfold tomorrow! Only God knows! Hallelujah!

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