GodTime 75 Biblical Meditations on Time and History

By Edwin Walhout

Short devotionals, concentrating on passages that deal with time and major events in Biblical history, sampling the entire span of the Bible. The Theism of the Bible not only sees God as the Creator of time but also as the Sovereign Guide of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edwin Walhout
• Release date: Dec 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301827930

Edwin Walhout

I am a retired minister of the Christian Reformed Church, living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being retired from professional life, I am now free to explore theology without the constraints of ecclesiastical loyalties. You will be challenged by the ebooks I am supplying on Smashwords.

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GODTIME

75 Biblical Meditations on Time and History

by Edwin Walhout

Published by Edwin Walhout

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Edwin Walhout

Cover design by Amy Cole

See Smashwords.com for additional titles by this author.

Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Chapter 61 Chapter 62 Chapter 63 Chapter 64 Chapter 65 Chapter 66 Chapter 67 Chapter 68 Chapter 69 Chapter 70 Chapter 71 Chapter 72 Chapter 73 Chapter 74 Chapter 75 About the Author

1 IN THE BEGINNING

"In the beginning

when God created the heavens and the earth,

the earth was a formless void

and darkness covered the face of the deep."

Genesis 1:1-2 *

Of course Moses wasn’t there when time began, so how did he know what things were like way back then?

He is writing the things that God enabled him to understand. Moses did not have the benefit of hundreds of years of modern science, but he did have the best education that the royal court of Egypt could provide at that time.

So that is something we need to take into consideration when we read Genesis One. We do not need to evaluate everything Moses writes by twenty-first century standards. We need to recognize that Moses is writing the best he can in the early times of human thinking. And if we can do that, we may well recognize that what Moses is getting at in Genesis One are some of the most profound and insightful truths that anyone has ever written.

So here, for example, in the very first sentence. Modern science can talk about the Big Bang as the beginning of the universe, but they cannot, and do not, say anything about what caused that to happen. Moses does not know anything about the Big Bang, but he does recognize that the world had to be caused by some Power larger than the world itself.

So right here, right at the beginning of the Bible and at the beginning of time we need to learn from Moses how to be theists. We need to learn how to understand life and history and time as things God has created and that he is in charge of. We need to learn how to be God-centered. That’s theism. So everything that happens in the world, and everything that ever happened in the past, is under the control and supervision of the God who created it all.

Theism means we need to understand that what happens in our own lives is not the most important thing to deal with. Of course we need to deal with our own thoughts and attitudes and behavior and problems, but all of that in turn needs to be seen from the point of view of God, theistically. God is working out his own plans and purposes in our lives individually, and his own goals and purposes are much larger and broader than ours.

Every age and every century and the life of every person is part of the developing plan of God. It is impossible for any one of us to see clearly exactly what that plan is, any more than Moses could at the time he wrote Genesis One. But even though our insights are limited we can get some idea of what God is doing from the Bible and especially from Jesus.

God created time and he created people and he controls history. We need to do our best to live in such a way that what little we do know about God’s purposes also controls our lives. That’s what it means to live by faith, what it means to live as Christian theists.

That is the most important thing we can learn from Genesis One. We exist as creatures in the overarching plan and purpose of God.

* All Bible quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

2 THE FIRST DAY

"And there was evening and there was morning,

the first day."

Genesis 1:5

This is the way Moses begins his description of the process of creation, and by the time he finishes that story he has seven days. Six of the days saw the process of making the earth ready for humans to live in, and the seventh day was a day of rest when the process was completed and God could stop creating.

So now, what about that? What about these days? There was evening and there was morning, each time for six days.

Modern science shows that the universe is as much as fifteen billion years old, and that it took all of that time for humans to appear on planet Earth. Obviously this is vastly different from what we read in Genesis One. So how do we reconcile them?

Theologians have invented several ingenious ways of fitting these two accounts together. You can take your choice. Six days, but separated by billions of years. Or, a day in the Bible is the equivalent of a billion or more years in science. Or, days are evolutionary periods. Maybe there are other explanations as well. Take your choice.

But, regardless of how you choose to explain the days of Genesis, it is important to see that the main point is not the length of these days but the fact of development from one day to the next. There is progress, step by step, from the chaos of the very beginning till the final appearance of humans on earth.

Try to put yourself in Moses’ mentality when he was writing this superb document of Genesis One. He wants to explain as best he can how the world started and what the purpose of the human race is. So he sees that there has to be a definite process of getting from the chaos of the beginning, through the development of the universe in such a way that the earth appeared as a separate planet, and that conditions on the earth were such as to make human existence possible.

Moses does his best to put this all in a reasonable and understandable sequence. Work backwards in your mind. Humans need to have food in order to live, so we have to have plants and animals. We need to have dry land to live on, and water to drink. Plants need sunshine and rain. So there has to be a sun and clouds. And so forth, step by step all the way back to the original chaos of the beginning, a recognizable process, moving closer and closer to making the world suitable for humans to live in.

So that’s Moses’ main point and we don’t need to get all worked up about the language of days that Moses uses to describe this developing process. Accept simply that Moses is doing his best to make sense of what he sees. What he sees is one of the most important and profound insights that any ancient philosopher ever made, much more significant than the pre-Socratics of Greek history: development.

And then we can recognize that what Moses was getting at is exactly the same as what modern science is discovering: process, development, movement from chaos to organization.

3 ONE DAY LIKE A THOUSAND YEARS

"But do not ignore this one fact, beloved,

that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years,

and a thousand years are like one day."

2 Peter 3:8

According to our scientists, it took God about fifteen billion years to create the universe the way we see it today. That’s a long time. And it makes us wonder how to understand what we read in Genesis One where it took God only one week to do it. That isn’t a very long time, seven days.

There is this obscure passage in Peter’s second letter that may help us understand the situation a bit better. Peter writes that for God one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like one day. Apparently time is not as important to God as it is to us.

We get antsy when too much time passes to get something done. A farmer wants to get his hay baled; it’s all ready in the fields, but it starts to rain and he has to wait. An investor wants to get a quote to buy some important stock, but his computer goes out temporarily and he misses his chance. A teenager needs to get to school by eight-thirty, but he oversleeps and is charged with a tardy slip when he does get there. A cook is timing a dinner on the stove, but the phone rings and she forgets the food and lets it burn.

We are very conscious of the pressures of time and of getting things done efficiently. We are bothered when too much time elapses and not much gets done. Factories do time studies, trying to get a handle on how much time it takes to do some particular job on the machine. They pay close attention to the time when employees punch in and punch out. Politicians promise great things before they get elected, and seem to dawdle in getting them done afterwards.

But we need to understand that none of that time pressure bothers God. If he wants to take a hundred and sixty thousand years to create human beings, what does that matter to God? If he wants to let the descendants of Jacob become slaves in Egypt for a couple of hundred years before he gets them out, what does he care about that? If he sends his people off into captivity for seventy years, he doesn’t mind the wait until he lets them go back to Jerusalem. If seventeen hundred years pass after he calls Abraham and before he sends his Son to save people, that’s his decision and the length of time means nothing to God; the timing has to be just right.

And so it goes. God takes all the time he needs to get things done the way he wants them done. He has his reasons for taking as long as he does. But we get impatient. We want things done today, and if not today, tomorrow. We can’t wait hundreds of years.

The point that Peter is making is that we Christian people need to understand that it may take God a thousand years to accomplish what we would like to see done in one day. And when we understand that, we will not be so impatient but be content to live each day in the faith that God knows how to take what we do and work it into the design of his own purpose. We will live and work steadily, faithfully, patiently, confidently, in the full assurance that God is doing everything he wants to do in the world and in our lives, and that he is doing it exactly the way he wants to. God is never off schedule.

4 AND GOD SAID

"Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’

and there was light."

Genesis 1:3

Nine times in the