ONE DAY… AS A THOUSAND YEARS

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to comprehend the timelessness of eternity. The features of time are interwoven with our lives to such an extent that, even as we try to grapple with the concept of eternity, we find ourselves using such terms as ‘eternity past’. In one breath we conjoin the timeless with an expression of time! In Genesis chapter 1 we read of the begin­ning of time as God chose to break down His creatorial work into six literal days. The world of science says that a day is deter­mined by the revolution of the globe upon its axis and a year by the orbit of the earth around the sun. Genesis teaches otherwise and shows us that there were days, consisting of an evening and a morning, before the sun was created. The ordered movement of these celestial bodies enables us to measure time, but it does not determine time. God does that.

Long before Peter wrote his epistles, Moses said, ‘From ever­lasting to everlasting, thou art God … For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night’, Ps. 90. 2, 4. The God who orders time is Himself time­less, so a thousand years stretching ahead (as man would see them) can be like ‘yesterday when it is past’ to God’s view. Peter has been speaking of men who are ‘willingly ignorant’ of divine intervention in the passage of time, 2 Pet. 3. 4-6. The premise upon which so much of modern science is based, the principle of uniformitarianism, is a false one. The assumption is made that observable processes of time today have always been the same, but they haven’t. In the cataclysmic judgement of the flood, God destroyed ‘the world that then was’ and, in doing so, left evidence for men to observe. Ungodly men, deliberately leaving God out of the equation, demand millions of years for sedimentary rocks to form. In judgement, God wrought that work in a matter of days!

The believer knows that a timeless God will never delay the outworking of His purpose. The Lord does not delay His coming, neither does God ‘lengthen out the day of grace’ as we sometimes say. Men need to know that God ‘hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world’, Acts 17. 31.