God’s Time – Our Time

What is God’s time? How does it differ from my time or your time? What other ramifications occur when the two times are not the same?

I think these are good questions to consider.  I do not know! That being said, I do have an opinion of these questions and my thoughts are not mine exactly, but of another person who had the same thoughts and wrote about them.

First off, let me be up front about this. The person whose books I have read is C.S. Lewis. I admire his writing and he makes sense about the unsensible things in life or at least those that are not easy to understand. He wrote in his book “Mere Christianity” about God’s time and in doing so, made the idea of God looking at us daily in a different light. So, I will borrow from Mr. Lewis in a way, as I remember.

Time in the mind of most humans is a definite way of being. Some of us want it to hurry and others would like it to take forever, it all depends on what is happening in our lives. For me to be enjoying the sunset on a beach in the Caribbean, time can take its time. Being in a dentist office having a tooth extracted time can go as fast as can be, I want out of there. Such is life in the slow and fast lanes.

But, how do we look at life overall, at the past, right now in the present and the future to come? Does God look at those three time periods the same way? I hardly think so.  I had someone state something about these questions and make the declaration that it would be impossible for God to be able to hear everyone on Earth at the same time when they were praying to Him. There would be an overload of input to Him, because of millions, if not billions, of people talking/praying  at the same time.

One thing he did not think of (at the time) is the fact that time is different for God. He can take all the time it takes to listen to your prayers and mine. He is not restricted by the concept of time and as such can spend as many moments as it takes to hear us speak or pray. How so, it is asked? Let me explain and give you an idea of how this may work. Again, it is my opinion, or one perhaps copied from Mr. Lewis.

Get a sheet of 8-1/2 x 11 paper and put it sideways. On it, make a large dot on the left side and one on the right. Now draw a straight line between them. Now, envision yourself as being God and looking down and think of this as your lifeline. You were born at the time the dot on the left was made and will die at the time of the dot on the right. At the moment you are somewhere on the line as being the present time. Hopefully the line is long and you are not near the right side very much.

He is looking at your life and all that has, is, and will happen. He can see your birth NOW. He can see you as you are today, again, somewhere on the line, and He can see the time when you die; all at the same time. He is not restricted by our timeframe of looking at past, present and future. We can remember our past, be it long ago, and our present as we experience it. Our future is uncertain, but God can see it, not as the future, but as now, to Him.

For God, our tomorrow is looked at the same way as we look at today. All our days are “now” for Him. He does not look (the way we look) at yesterday, He just looks at us doing them, because, to us, we have yesterday as history and He again just sees it as today in His eyes.

It does not get into predestination of the doctrine that all events of our lives have been willed by God or into the concept of God’s will, but instead He can see like it actually is and not as it will be. He is not changing anything in our lives as they occurred, or are, or what they will be, but instead as they actually are to us and to God they are now to Him. God is already in tomorrow and we cannot see what that time brings to us. We do not know what we will be doing then, but when we do it, to God it is “Now for Him.”

This concept is not in the Bible, or written in any creed as such.  It is something that Christians have been thinking about in the past (especially God’s will), but is not important as a Christian to believe this or not or even think about it at all. In Christianity, those who believe in predestination, such as the reformer, John Calvin (1509-1564) around the time of Martin Luther, postulated that God must have pre-appointed certain souls to salvation and precluded the others. That word is used in many ways today since Calvin’s time.

I highly recommend reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I got a good bit out of the reading and he helped clarify some things for me.  I believe he read excerpts over the BBC airways during the hard times of the Second World War, from books that were compiled into one book.