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Religous: God is beyond our time and thoughts
Father Tony Chakkunga
for South Peace News
A thousand years are like an evening!
This statement has several overtones.
God has time for everyone and everything. God packs into an evening what it would take us a 1,000 years to do. This is not a matter of physical powers but of the power of God’s love; for time is a function of love! We have, hence, time for what we love; and time begins to stretch according to the reach of our love. Ask a mother, if you are not convinced. Or ask two young people in love!
It is a statement on God’s faithfulness that endures over generations. The promise He made, for instance to Abraham, took generations to fulfill! God remembers! We forget because we change. God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. Life would have been impossible if God were a victim of amnesia, like we are!
Human life is within time and space. God is not limited by time. This is at the root of miracles, which are anything but miracles from God’s perspective. They are simply an exercise of His authority over creation.
Some of the miracles happen because God has the authority to foreshorten time. That is to say, at His word what would normally take several months or years can happen in an instant. This is, besides, the proof that there is an eternity.
Time is both the enabler and constrainer of human existence. We cannot be wholly free as long as we live within the elbowroom of time. We are the children of eternity and only in that eschatological native place can we be perfectly free. God is free, because He is eternal and beyond time. What is within time is subject to change, which also makes growth possible! God does not grow, though He is the reason why anything grows at all.
God is patient, because He is not subject to the tyranny of time. He knows our tomorrows, even though we don’t know our own. Often it happens that events blind us to the promise of tomorrow. As the Psalmist says, weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning! But we cannot pierce the veil of the night and behold the morning that fires the east. When we are impatient an evening seems a thousand years!
An application of this idea is that God’s time is the unit of life whereas man’s time is the unit of death. As each year goes by, we move closer to our death; whereas, when we live according to God’s time, we are taking a step closer to eternal life.
If this could be understood and accepted, there will be no suicide. No one who is in touch with God’s time can take his own life. Abundant life is impossible, so long as we live under the tyranny of man’s time.
The liberation that Jesus promises in Luke 4:18 (Setting the captives free ...) has this implication too; namely, that through Jesus we shift from man’s time to God’s time. How can we, as children of God, live except in God’s time? This affords an interesting insight into understanding what it means to be born again.
So the question arises in the end; which is the right or authentic unit of time? Or, which unit of time shall we adopt? God’s or man’s?
Through Christ Jesus, we have indeed become the children of God. (John l:12)
Are we not obliged to shift from man’s time to God’s time? So we sing, “In your time … You make all things beautiful in your time…”
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