Before God created the heavens and the earth, how did He know when to actually start the creation? When did He decide?
God couldn’t have said, “It’s about time We did this.” – Because that means time eternity past was measured.
God couldn’t have said, “Too much time has gone by since the angelic rebellion.” – Because that would assume that there was some accounting on a timepiece that indicated an accounting of events that had to take place before other things could take place. That would involve time.
When we assume the genius of mankind, we forget that we didn’t invent clocks (or sundials in ancient times). We just discovered ways to track events sequenced in an orderly fashion.
Although God created the heavens and the earth in (6) literal days (yom), it didn’t account of WHEN that sequence of days would begin. Even though the word, Genesis actually means “beginning” or “birth”, it doesn’t indicate when between eternity past and eternity future it was to occur. So why did we so desperately have to devise a method of monitoring our passage through existence? The Bible indicates a precision of so many things, we KNOW that God knew about time, because he created it with creation. Many things in Scripture mention a time interval.
The orbits of planets are cyclical, and can be measured in diameters, speeds of planetary travel, and angles of orientation regarding to the rotational axis of the sun. The entire heavens are rotating at different speeds and with complete harmony. The constellations of Orion and the Pleiades, and all the others can be seen during the same times of each year, but not by everyone all the time. God created an immaculately designed creation perfectly operational for only a certain amount of time.
And us humans were designed to have birth but no death……until the entry of sin into the world. So a timeline was created with the creation of each human life.
Can time actually be altered on this planet? Yes!!! The creator of time can alter it any time He wants to!
- Joshua needed a longer day to finish a battle, and the Lord granted him that. (Joshua 10:12-14)
- Hezekiah needed confirmation of God through the prophet Isaiah about allowing the solar system to respond by observing that time went backwards 10 degrees on a sundial. (II Kings 20:8-11 and Isaiah 38:7-6)
Given that God gave us the gift of time, we should use it wisely. The present time is the ONLY thing we have. He can’t change the past and can’t have the future. Even though we can hear the ticks of a grandfather clock to the imperceptible hum of a Rolex, the measurement of time allows us to allocate our days with things to be done. We may not be able to help everyone; but we can take time to reach out and bless someone with an act of kindness, a sturdy shoulder drenched with someone else’s tears, a carefully assembled food delivery to a starving family, a tender smile or a contagious laugh, a long letter of encouragement, praying diligently for your company to be more purposeful, or a visit to a lonely person whose family is far away.
“I don’t have the time!” is a wrong statement. “I don’t have the time to do everything the Lord wants me to do.” Can be a mostly true statement. “God created me out of the finest materials for a specific purpose in this world.” Is an absolutely true statement. So instead of worrying about time, thank God for the time you have left! He will give you all the time He feels you need to do what He has you to do.
“Lord, show us now that irreplaceable prayers and obedience have a factor in the timelines of others in our circles of influence. The rewards for blessing others through our faith in You allows You to alter the timelines in those other lives to impact an ever-widening circle of impact. Thankfully, there will be no need for clocks in heaven. And THANK YOU for that! In Jesus’ name, Amen.”