God, Time, and Eternity

The feeling of wasted time makes waiting difficult. We even feel frustrated with God because He does not appear to be in the same hurry as we are. The Bible says that with God “a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:8). What is God’s relationship to time and eternity?
Theologians are divided on this question. Some believe that God exists outside of time and does not experience it as we do, instead existing in an eternal now. Past, present, and future are the same to Him. Others think that God does experience time but is not limited by it as we are. He exists in time at all times and has always done so. According to this view, God’s relation to time is like that of His relation to physical space. Just as He is omnipresent, He is also omnitemporal.
Theologians and philosophers may speculate, but our finite capacity for understanding will never fully grasp the nature of God’s relationship to time and eternity. We can know only what it is like to live in a universe where time is a factor. Although we might think about the present, past, and future, we do not actually visit the past when we remember, and our memories are often faulty. We can only speculate about the future. Events always unfold in a sequence for us. We are time-bound.
Scripture says God is eternal (Gen. 21:33; Deut. 33:27; Psalm 90). He has no beginning or end. He also acts in time. He makes promises and executes His redemptive plan in what we would call on our behalf at the “right time” (Rom. 5:6). This was especially true of the birth of Jesus Christ, which occurred “when the set time had fully come” (Gal. 4:4).

Spiritual growth

People with strong faith can make you feel ‘less than’, when you compare yourself to them. One Bible teacher writes: ‘I admired those faith heroes whose flowery testimonies hung around the ceiling, like steam gathering in a shower. They seemed so changed, so sure, so stable. I thought God’s love was doled out according to a merit system. If I did well today, He loved me. If I failed, He didn’t. What a roller coaster! I didn’t realise everything that’s born needs time to grow and develop into maturity. I was expecting an immediate, powerful, all-inclusive metamorphosis that would transform me into perfection.’ Do you feel that way, as if there is something wrong with you because you never seem to measure up? If so, read this: ‘When we were children, we…reasoned as children…But when we grew up, we quit our childish ways.’ You start as a spiritual infant, then you become a spiritual child, then you become a spiritual adolescent, and eventually you become a spiritual adult. But you never ‘arrive’. And quick-fix, do-it-yourself righteousness will just make you try to impress others with a false sense of holiness. It will stop you from being honest before God and make you think you should be farther along than you are for your spiritual age. Do you remember when you were a child and you dressed up in your mum’s high heels or your dad’s work boots? No matter how much you wanted to fit into them, you couldn’t.

Will Ben Carson's Bible Advice to Donald Trump Work? Here’s What Americans Think

Starting Sunday, the entire Bible will be read aloud in 90 hours on Capitol Hill. Hundreds will make their way to the 27th annual reading at the US Capitol, where 100 English and foreign language versions of the Bible will be available.

Former presidential candidate Ben Carson recently told reporter Rita Cosby that his advice to Republican frontrunner Donald Trump on handling his temper was to “read the Bible and pray and learn how to put yourself in other peoples’ shoes.” (Trump recently said his favorite Bible verse is “an eye for an eye.”)

But not even regular Bible reading could make Trump and other presidential contenders more civil, believe 44 percent of Americans.

That’s an increase from 40 percent last year, according to the 2016 State of the Bible report from the American Bible Society (ABS), conducted by Barna Group.

Only 51 percent of Americans said politics would be more civil if politicians read the Bible regularly, down from 56 percent last year.

The number of Americans who believed that reading the Bible regularly would make politicians more effective fell from 58 percent in 2015 to 53 percent in 2016. Those who thought Bible reading would not make a difference rose from 40 percent in 2015 to 43 percent in 2016.

Is It Time for American Christians to Disobey the Government?

In June 2015, in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, legislators gathered to debate removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol. Meanwhile, Bree Newsome, a young African American woman, was taking the matter into her own hands, scaling the flagpole and snatching the flag herself. Though she was promptly arrested, her action attracted media attention, and many hailed it as a victory for racial justice.

Newsome had been arrested two years earlier for protesting North Carolina’s voter ID law. As such, she was anything but reticent about her motives. Ordered by police to come down, she replied, “In the name of Jesus, this flag has to come down. You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.” As officers handcuffed her and led her away, she recited Psalm 23.

As the Confederate flag controversy died down, another controversy was heating up in rural Rowan County, Kentucky. Another woman of unbending Christian conviction—albeit very different politics—quickly gained notoriety for her own defiant stand. Kim Davis, the county clerk, ceased issuing marriage licenses after the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. Davis, a recent convert, framed her refusal as a defense of her religious freedom. Jailed briefly for contempt of court, she continued fighting several legal actions launched against her, styling herself a “soldier for Christ.”

Can People of Color Really Make Themselves at Home?

In the early 1990s, during my first years of ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, I worked with a thoroughly multiethnic campus ministry team in New York City. We had two to three members from each of several major American racial and ethnic groups—black, Latino, Asian, and white. Our team believed that God loves people of every ethnicity and culture. Frankly, if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have had much of a student ministry in New York City. And during our city-wide conferences, when students gathered in worship, we looked like that picture of the new creation in Revelation 7: every nation, tribe, people, and language gathered in praise.

As a Chinese American who grew up in Hawaii, I deeply appreciated InterVarsity’s commitment to multiethnicity and racial reconciliation. In InterVarsity, my ethnic background felt like an asset, not a path to being a somewhat abnormal would-be white person. InterVarsity, some said, was the most multiethnic campus ministry in the country, and we were the most multiethnic team in InterVarsity.

One of the ways our ministry embraced a multiethnic vision was sponsoring ethnic student conferences—opportunities for black, Latino, Asian, and white students to work through issues of ethnic identity, community, and faith in a safe environment. The first year we ran all the conferences at the same time in the fall, the students at my predominantly Asian American Columbia University fellowship promptly delved so deeply into their ethnic journey, especially what I call the “angry stage,” that they forgot to welcome new students. Obviously, this didn’t help the growth of our fellowship.

The Universal Call to ‘Mothering Like Christ’

The call to service and sacrifice can be difficult enough without bringing our bodies into it. And yet, there it is in Scripture, an invitation to “to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” (Rom. 12:1, ESV). Paul describes physical sacrifice as our “spiritual act of worship.” He unifies our spiritual with our physical selves, grounding the spirit in real life and making sacred the body.

Many of us have an ambivalent relationship with our physical forms. Glamour mags infamously deepen the wedge between beauty and beholder. The post-fall body itself betrays us with aches, scars, sicknesses, and disease. I think of my sweet friend, whose womb denies her the children she longs for, and of my ever-strong grandfather’s astonishment when his legs at last refused to bear him.

It’s easier for us to push our bodies to the wayside. It’s easier to capitulate to the lingering Gnosticism that divides what God has joined—the spiritual from the physical—and falsely elevates the former. The Age of the Enlightenment is centuries behind us, but our worship of reason continues; I know of no seminary courses covering the theology of bunions and orgasm.

God's Word in Two Words

Christians often wish that God would speak the way that he used to speak to his people—audibly, through burning bushes, dreams, and doves descending from the sky. That way, it would seem so much easier to discern what he is saying. Today, most Christians agree, the main way God speaks to his people is through the Bible. For too many, though, what he says there is a complete mystery, impossible to understand.

It doesn't have to be.

Many people read the Bible as if it were fundamentally about us: our improvement, our life, our victory, our faith, our holiness, our godliness. We treat it like a disconnected series of timeless principles that will give us our best life now, if we simply apply them. We read it, in other words, as if it were a heaven-sent self-help manual, a divinely delivered to-do list. But by reading the Bible this way, we—like the two companions on the road to Emmaus—totally miss the point. As Luke 24 shows, it's possible to read the Bible, study the Bible—even memorize large portions of the Bible—and miss the main point of the Bible. In fact, unless we go to the Bible to see Jesus and his work for us, even devout Bible reading can become fuel for our own self-improvement plans, a source for the help we need to conquer today's challenges and take control of our lives.