God and Plastic Time

Here it is, almost June, and it's been January since I contributed to my own blog. Excuses, excuses-- been gone to Haiti, on vacation for a few days, seeing patients, looking for a house to buy, trying to sell a house, and etc. Just not enough time to go around.

I'm glad that God doesn't run out of time. He invented time, and has the position of not being limited by it. Peter tells us in his second letter, "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." To God, time is plastic. What we expect a thousand years to complete is an instantaneous process for Him. He is in the past, He is here now, He is in the future. He is above time. This is the essence of the Lord's statement of identity, "I am."

Because we are very time-limited creatures, we try to hold God to a clock. We look at the events of our own lives, and say to ourselves, "nothing's happening, God must be too busy." Not so. Not only is God involved in the big picture of the flow of time (His plan for creation, fall, redemption), but He is in the minutes, seconds, and microseconds of our every day.

Albert Einstein gives us a hand at understanding that time is plastic, even in the observable creation we live in. He theorized that for an object or person traveling faster and faster, time gets slower and slower. As the speed of light is approached, time for the traveler gets close to stopping. Science fiction writers let their characters travel to distant worlds, only to come home to find themselves as antiques.

I'm looking forward to the end of time. The scriptures tell is that it is coming, a day when we will stand in a timeless state, in an eternal now, around the throne of glory occupied by our Lord. I'll have plenty of time to write blogs then.