Dear People Who Keep Company With God,
A long time ago as Christmas day came to an end I stood wishfully looking at the calendar. In that moment it was as if my daddy could read my mind, he said, “Just think, in only 365 days we can do this again!” He might as well have said, 365 years because, like most children, it seemed to me Christmas took forever to come around.
Time is a peculiar thing. Today it seems like Christmas comes and goes so fast it is a blur. We all have God given prophetic promises and dreams for certain things to happen in our lives, but like Christmas to a child, it seems like they will never happen. To make matters worse, we do not even have a calendar to look at as the Lord seldom shares when these things will actually happen. Waiting is one of the most challenging things we experience as God’s people.
Genesis is the book of beginning and it holds some keys to time that have helped me not go nuts while I wait on the Lord. The concept of time in Genesis is not like our concept of time. In the creation story in Genesis 1, it is only after an event is completed that it is called the first day, second day, third day, etc. This is not describing the earth spinning on its axis every 24 hours. It is describing when an event is completed in heaven and on earth. It is the event that defines the day, not the earth spinning.
It is not until Genesis 1:14 that God puts the lights in the sky to set them as markers of the days, months and years. The time before the creation of the ground, the sky, water, plants and trees, had already taken place in a time that was not associated with the lights (sun and moon) marking the days, months and years in our normal sense of 24 hour periods. It was the fourth day when we got the sun and moon. Only God knows how long in terms of days or years those first three days really were.
When God speaks about a day, year or season, He may be referring to an event(s), not necessarily a particular moment in time. It seems God does not view time linearly or logically like 1, 2,3…it seems to be more circular, interactive – everything is going back to the beginning.
Think about it like this, an analog clock or watch is not a timeline but a circle for the simple reason that time does not begin or stop, it continues without beginning or end. In the same way days and years are also circular. If you think about it the whole universe operates in circular fashion – days, weeks, months, years and seasons.
We see this concept in the person of Christ; He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end (Rev. 1:8) and the Lord’s prayer – your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven is reminding us that the garden of God is not only the beginning state but also the end state, which means we have access to the garden right now.
So, how does this help me in my everyday walk and struggles with God’s timing in my life? I look at time as God’s usher. An usher at a wedding will help you go to the right place at the right time. Time’s job is to escort you into the prophetic promises and dreams God gave you. In the waiting time we are to live in the hope of those promises and dreams, for without hope there would be no faith to receive them when their time comes.
If we knew how long some of those dreams and promises would take to fulfill we would give up or try to make them happen. Either way we create a mess. So each time we choose God’s will by submitting to His usher (time), we are positioning ourselves to eventually see all His promises and dreams come true.
Many Blessings, BW