Friday, August 5, 2016

"To infinity and beyond!"

The Word for today:
Psalm 92, 93
mark this: Psalm 93:2
Your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting.
What is time?
Time is too big a concept for us to get hold of. The only way for me to begin to understand something that big is to shrink it.
The only way to shrink time is to contrast it to something bigger. The only thing bigger is God.
God is bigger than time. He is not constrained by time. He created time and he exists outside of time. Because he contains time, he knows the future and is able to reveal it in prophecy.
God utilizes time. It's like a chemical catalyst which brings on a desired effect. This is not hard to understand when we think of time's effects on our own actions. When a deadline looms, we get things in gear. If this blog did not have to be on your monitor tomorrow, I would not be writing it today.
Jesus told us to shrink time into manageable pieces: "Take no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take thought for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." (1)
So lately I've made an uneasy peace with time. I now count it as just one of the things--just one out of all things--that God utilizes to work out his good intentions for us (2). Seeing it that way, I've come to conclude that time is on my side.
Time has even stretched my mind. I could never understand how God could exist eternally into the past, until I started to think that past and future to God are the same as left and right are to us: if he can live eternally into the future, then why not eternally into the past? I mean, if he can go right he can go left! If he can go up he can go down. From his perspective, there is no essential difference.
Time has helped me understand space. God contains--encompasses--time, so why not space as well? Which means that Jesus is bigger than space! The Bible says so:
Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 23:24)
Christ...who fills all in all. (Ephesians 1:20-23)
In him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:17)
And since the universe is expanding, he's getting ever bigger!
Ever bigger. That's a phrase where time and space and Jesus coincide. Because Jesus is--in size, in grace, in love, in power--as Buzz Lightyear says, "To infinity and beyond!"
Time and space can be hard to understand. The only way to understand them is to shrink them. The only way to shrink them is to put them next to Jesus. Relative to Jesus, they're not big at all.
You don't have to be Einstein to understand relativity. A true comprehension of time, space, and relativity will revolve, as all things do, around Jesus. Without him, there's no there there and no then then.
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(1) Matthew 6:34; (2) Romans 8:28

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