March 31, 2009

  • God and Time

    Reading an excerpt from her book, "A Lifetime of Wisdom":

    For some odd reason, it comforted me to realize that God did not condemn me for plying Him with questions. He wanted me to express the true contents of my heart, to dump out all the jumbled, jagged shards of my soul before Him.

    Sometimes we're afraid to talk to God this way — like Job crying out in the night on the ash heap behind his house, like the psalmist treading water in the dark, like a furious teenager welded into bed with a broken neck and bolts in her head. We repress those murky, edgy emotions about our suffering. We choose to be polite, speaking sanitized words, or not speaking at all. We bottle up our troubling questions and unspeakable feelings toward God, hiding behind an orthodox, evangelical glaze as we "give it all over to the Lord." Except that we don't. It's a lie and a ruse. And He knows that too.

    Why would God rather have our anger, our venom, our rage, our cry of desolation rather than our measured, controlled, even-tempered, theologically correct prayer? It's all about the heart. Over and over again in Scripture you can hear God saying, "Give Me your heart or nothing at all." God doesn't have time to play games. He wants reality.

    "God doesn't have time to play games."  Joni has done some amazing things in her life and I am sure she is a great inspirational speaker, but ...  and this is nitpicking, and I'm sure she probably meant it as a colloquialism, but ...

    God is not subject to time, he has all the time the is, or ever could be, because He created all things, and that includes time.  God is not subject to time.  That is why He can hear all our prayers and act on them, "in the fullness of time" (Gal 4:4 and Eph 1:10).

    I have this theory about death and time.  I have not found a proof text for it in the Bible, and this is certainly not developed in Scripture, but ... here is my idea: When we die, we immediately stand before God in Judgment.  We all stand before God's Judgment, time is no more, and we are all there on Judgment Day.  We all arrive before God at the "same time," eternity will have begun.  My Dad won't have to wait for me at the Eastern Gate to Heaven, because we will all stand before God on Judgment Day.  There are eschatological and ontological implications that I have not worked out yet, but that's my idea.

    Anyway, God HAS the time for "all our anger, our venom, our rage, our cry of desolation" exactly because He is God.