THE TIME ON GOD'S CLOCK
Dr. W. A. Criswell
2 Peter 3:8
6-23-74 10:50 a.m.
On
the radio and on television, we welcome you to the services of the First
Baptist Church. This is the pastor bringing the message entitled: The Time
On God's Clock. It is an exposition of a passage in the third chapter of 2
Peter:
There shall come in the
last days scoffers…
Saying, Where is the
promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue
as they were from the beginning of the creation…
But beloved, be not without
knowledge of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years,
and a thousand years is as a day.
The Lord is not slack
concerning His promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to
us-ward, not willing that any perish, but that all should come to repentance.
[2
Peter 3:4-9]
And our text: "Be not without knowledge of this
one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand
years as one day." In my reading and studying, preparing for this
message, I came across many interpretations and presentations of this text.
It's a very famous one, and one that is oft spoken of: "A thousand years
is a day, and a day as a thousand years." For example, there is a
marvelously famous preacher of this generation, this century. He's now dead—died
recently—but I suppose one of the greatest preachers of all time.
He delivered a sermon on this text and he
spiritualized it, which is all right. He found in it, for him, hidden,
esoteric meanings that belong to our experience. He spiritualizes it; that is,
he does not look upon it literally. He takes it out of its context and
spiritualizes it.
Well
this was his spiritualization: He said that this referred to the fact that, in
our human experience, we'll go along, and go along, and go along—the sameness
of a thing year, after year, after year, after year—and then suddenly there
will be a great crisis in our life. And in that one moment, that one
experience, all of life thereafter is changed. Then you could apply that to
nations—and he did. A nation will go along in the sameness of the years, and
the years, and the years, and the years, unchanged. Then suddenly, there will
be a great crisis, and the whole world for that people changes.
A
thousand years, and then a day as a thousand years, just go along, go along, go
along—a thousand years, no change—just as one day. Then, “a day as a thousand
years”, a great moment of catastrophic confrontation and change.
If
he lived today, he'd illustrate it, I imagine, like this: About a week ago,
there was a man who appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services. He
was from the Pentagon and he was pointing out to that committee that Russia is
building such nuclear capacity as to be able to annihilate the United States in
one moment, in one surprise attack.
Now that would illustrate
what this preacher was talking about. The country—go along, and go along, and
go along, “a thousand years as a day,” just the same; then suddenly “a day is a
thousand years”—in that one catastrophic, nuclear attack, the whole nation
would be wiped out.
Well I don't have any
objection to that spiritualization, that's fine. That's fine preaching and a
fine message. Our lives are like that; we just go along and then, suddenly,
something happens and it's never the same again for us.
Well
there's another way that I run across where men take it. And this, to me, is
rather bizarre and unusual. There are many interpreters who take the passage and
they use it to set a date for the coming of the Lord, “a thousand years as a
day”, for example one of them took this passage over here in Hosea. In the
sixth chapter of Hosea, the prophet says:
Come let us return to the
Lord…He will healeth, He has smitten us, He will bind us up.
After two days He will
revive us: in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His
sight.
[Hosea
6:1-2]
Now, the resurrection is the coming of Jesus. So it
says here, "After two days He will revive us: in the third day He will
raise us up." So if a thousand years is as a day, a thousand years, it'll
soon be two thousand years—two days—since Jesus is gone. And in the third day,
after 2,000 A.D., He will come back, “and we shall live in His sight.” Now,
that's interesting. I would not have any objection to that except I don't
think it's true. But that's all right. It's interesting.
Here
is another way that a man will take the text, "A thousand years is a
day," and he's going to set the time of the coming of the Lord:
Thus the heavens—second
chapter of Genesis—thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the
host of them.
And on the seventh day God
ended His work which He had made…
And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it:
because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made.
[Genesis 2:1-2]
So there are six days of
God's creation, and then the seventh day is the Sabbath day of rest. Now they
take that and place with it the fourth chapter of Hebrews. In the fourth
chapter of Hebrews it'll say:
For God spake in a certain place of the seventh day
on this wise, And the Lord did rest the seventh day from all His works… There
remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.
[Hebrews 4:4-9]
So what they do is this:
They take this text that “a thousand years is as a day" and, after six
days come the sabbatical rest. So after six days—six thousand years—will come
the next chiliad, the next millennium, the seventh one, and that will be the
final rest for the people of God—the coming of Christ and the establishment of
His kingdom.
Now, that's what this man
interprets it to mean. Well that's all right; the only thing is, it seems kind
of strange to me that a man could persuade himself that in 4,000 B.C., God made
the heavens and the earth. I don't believe anything that even approaches
that. I think this earth is—the Lord only knows—and He only knows how old it
is.
“In the beginning, God
created…” and to say that's 4,000 B.C. is unusual. But anyway that's what this
interpreter does: 4,000 B.C. and then 2,000 A.D., and at the end of the 2,000
A.D.—the 6,000 years, the sixth day. Then on the seventh day, beginning in
2,000 A.D., the Lord is going to come and the kingdom will be established in
the earth.
Well,
those things are interesting, and so much now. I just use those as
illustrations. So much of the preaching and writing concerning the Word of God
is like that; it's one or the other. It's taking it out of the text, out of
the context, out of the meaning of the inspired apostle, and doing something
else with it—just whatever might appeal at the moment to the imagination of the
preacher.
Practically
all exposition, and practically all preaching, is like that—the preacher
eisegetes. He reads into the text what he wants it to say. And he says from
the text what just appeals to his mind at the moment.
It
is a far better way, an infinitely better way to expound the Word of God,
exegetically. That is: What does God say? What is the apostle talking about?
What caused him to say it? What is the meaning of what he says, and what does
it mean to us? What is God saying? Not what the preacher thinks, or the
expositor thinks, or the interpreter thinks—but what does God say?
Now,
let's take the text like that. What is it that Peter was talking about when
the Holy Spirit inspired him to write these words:
It's not to be hidden away
from us—(lanthanō, to be hidden)—let it not be hidden from us, this
one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand
years as a day.
[2
Peter 3:8]
There are two things that
he's writing about. One, he's writing about these scoffers who say:
"Where is the promise of His coming? Why this world has gone on as it has
from the beginning of the creation, and it's no different now than when our
fathers fell asleep."
So, he's saying to the
scoffers: "A day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day
with God." God may delay His coming, but God's clock is not like ours.
That's the first thing he's talking about.
The
second thing that he's talking about here in the text is he's trying to
encourage us to cling to the faith and not give it up. The Lord is coming,
though He tarries! And our clock may go fast, but God's clock may not be like
ours, and His time may not be congruent with ours. And we're not to be
helpless and hopeless in our waiting for the great consummation of the age; the
Lord is coming!
Let me give you an
illustration of that in the Bible: When Paul and Silas preached at
Thessalonica, the capital of the ancient province of Macedonia, they preached
to them the coming of the Lord. Then as you know, persecution drove Paul and
Silas out, and they went down to Athens, and then to Corinth. Well, while they
were gone, some of the beloved saints in Thessalonica died. So they sent to
Paul at Athens, and later they sent to him at Corinth; and they said to him:
We are looking for the Lord. We are expecting the
return of Jesus. But He hasn't come. And, while He delays His coming, some of
our beloved have died; some of God's saints have fallen into the hands of
death. What of them? Will they share in the kingdom, or is it over for
them? Have they missed it because the Lord hasn't come, and they have died?
In answer to that question,
Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians from Athens, and
2
Thessalonians from Corinth—and you remember what he said:
The dead in Christ shall
rise first, and we, who are alive and remain, (shall be raptured) shall be
caught up with our Lord with them in the air.
[1
Thessalonians 4:16-17]
Remember
that?
Now,
that is this identical thing: We're to be comforted and strengthened in our
waiting for the delayed return of our Lord. "For," says the apostle,
"God's clock is different from our clock." We're on God's clock. A
thousand years is as a day, and a day is as a thousand years.
For you see, there's no
time with God. Time is the creation in which we are in prison, but not God!
There's no time with God! To us, if a thing is near, it would be five minutes
from now or an hour from now—that would be near. And to us, if a thing is a
thousand years from now, it's far off; we'll be dead and in our graves, it's a
long way off, but not to God! To God, there is no near or no far; it's all
just here, it is present.
He said: "My name is
'I am'." Not, "I was," as though there was change, or
development in God; and he isn't what He used to be "I was." And He
doesn't say, "My name is I shall be": that is, there are other things
that are in the life of God, that are yet to be reached for. No! He says, “My
name is ‘I am.’”—‘I am’ in the past; ‘I am’ in the present; ‘I am’ in the
future—He's always just the same.
And
all time is present with God. He looks at the beginning; He looks at the end;
and He looks at it all the way through: it's all present with the Lord. All
history is like that with God. To us things happen one at a time, a day at a
time, but not before God. He looks upon all of it in the present—everything
that happens, and all the story of humankind—the Lord looks at it all the time,
from beginning to the end.
One
time, I went down the Illinois River in the Cookson Hills of Eastern Oklahoma, one
of the most beautiful streams in the world—flows clear, over rock. I went down
with one of my deacons in the church at Muskogee in a canoe. And as we went
down the Illinois River in that canoe, we went around this bend, and this bend,
and this bend. And as we went down the river, why, we saw things happen one at
a time as we came to them, as the river went down through the hills.
But one could stand on top
of one of those highest little mountains in the Cookson Hills, and he could see
that stream—here, clear to there—and he could see us, going down the stream in
our little canoe. Now God is like that. To us, things happen one at a time,
day at a time. And we don't know what is around the bend of the day. But
God's not like that. God sees the whole thing from the beginning to the end.
All of it is present to Him. He sees everything as though it is now: The fall
is here; the redemption is here; the fall of Israel is here; the rise of Israel
is there. The whole thing, all of history, is present with God. There is no
such thing as time. He sees it all—always!
There's something about
that that brings great sobriety to our hearts. For you see what we do wrong,
God sees forever. There it is in the penitential psalm, fifty-first Psalm, the
psalmist, David said: "For my sin is ever before Thee." Oh, what a
tragic thing. "For my sin is ever before Thee:" There it is, all of
our lives, here to there, and God sees it. It's always present with Him.
Do
you remember the forty-ninth chapter of the book of Genesis? Israel (Jacob)
has his twelve sons around him. And one of those is to receive the blessing.
He is to be appointed the progenitor of the great and coming Messiah. Who
should it be? The firstborn, it should be Reuben!
Actually, because of these
things, it was Judah. He was born in the tribe of Judah. Judah received the
blessing, but it should have been Reuben. Well why not Reuben? Jacob turned
to Reuben, his firstborn son, and spoke to him first and said: "Thou art
my firstborn, the excellency of my strength, Reuben. But, Reuben, thou shalt
not prevail. Unstable as water art thou." And he pointed out an
incestuous sin that Reuben had committed forty years before.
Why,
I would think that Reuben had thought that that had been forgotten; the nights
and the nights had covered it; time had buried it out of sight. But, when the
forty-ninth chapter of Genesis comes and Israel is dying, and he calls those twelve
patriarchs to prophesy to them what should happen; and what should happen to
their tribes; and which one should receive the blessing, which one should be
the progenitor of the Messiah—he turned to Reuben and said: "Reuben,
Reuben, remember, forty years before, that incestuous sin, before God.” That's
why a man needs to cry for the blood of Christ to wash him clean—to hide, to
cover—from God's sight, our sin.
All of us are imprisoned in
time, but not God. We are held incarcerated by time, and we cannot escape it.
Not God! Not him! Here is a man who is writhing in pain, racked with pain;
he's sick and he suffers. And he cries: "Oh, God, for the
evening." And then when the evening comes: "Oh, God, for the
morning." And then, when the morning comes, he cries for the evening
again. The hours pass, and he's in pain. He can't hasten it—the coming of
the clock. He's caught in it; and time is slow, slow, slow in his agony.
Here
is a man who is happy; he's infinitely happy. And, as the swinging of the
pendulum for the man in pain cuts him like a sword, so the ticking of the clock
for the man that is happy is like the sounding of a wedding bell. And he
wishes time would stop: “Oh, stop, stop! I'm so happy. I want this to go on
forever!”
Doesn't
make any difference—whether it's the man in pain and the pendulum cuts him like
a sword and he wants time to hasten, or whether it is ticking like a clock and
it sounds like a wedding bell and he wants time to stop—it doesn't matter, iIt
goes on just the same. He cannot hasten it in one instance and he cannot slow
it or stop it in the other instance.
We
are imprisoned in time; we are caught in it. Not God! He is absolutely above
and unaffected by time. For example, in the Book of Joshua, Joshua said: “O,
God, that sun standing over Gibeon, stop it, stand still. And that moon that
is shining over the valley of Aijalon, stop its motion around the sun, stop
it!" And for the first time in history the Bible says God heard the
prayer of a man concerning time. And God stopped the sun over Gibeon and it
stood still. And God stopped the moon over Aijalon and it didn't move. It's
the same to God, He's not imprisoned by time; He's outside of time.
Or take again, in the story
of Hezekiah. Sick unto death, and God said, “He's going to die.” And then,
because of his tears and his prayers, God sent Isaiah back to him and said:
"I've heard your prayers and I've seen your tears; I'm going to give you
15 years to live."
And Hezekiah said:
"What will be the sign that God will heal me and give me 15 more
years?"
And Isaiah gave the hardest
decision that a man could choose, hard for us. He said to him: “Well tell me,
tell me? God [will] give you a sign: The shadow on the sun dial of Ahaz, the
shadow, as a sign from God that God's going to heal you and give you 15 years.
Would you like that shadow to go forward 10 degrees or back 10 degrees? Would
you like the sun to go down 10 degrees, or go back where it came from 10
degrees?" Doesn't matter to God either way, for time is no imprisonment
of God. He's not caught in it, He's Lord of it, He's ruler over it!
“What do you want,
Hezekiah?” And Hezekiah thought for a minute and then he replied: "You
know, for the shadow to go forward 10 degrees would be the way it's going.
Let's have God take the sun and send it back 10 degrees, bring the shadow back
10 degrees."
So
the prophet Isaiah took that to the Lord God, and the Lord God caused the
shadow on the sun dial of Ahaz to go back 10 degrees. That's God! We're
caught in time, but not God; He is free, above it. He is mighty, above it—He
is the Lord God, and He lives above time.
Our
text says: "Let this not be hidden—lanthanō—let this not be
hidden from you…" Some people willfully hide their faces from the truth of
God. And some of us do it in neglect. "No!" says the apostle:
"Let it not be hidden from you, that one day is with the Lord as a
thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
Now
hastily, because our time's soon gone, what does that say to the scoffer? The
scoffer! “There shall come scoffers saying, Where is the promise of his
coming?” “Where is God? Where is the promise of His coming? I don't see any
heavens rolled back like a scroll. And I don't see any Lord Jesus Christ
coming down from above. I don't see any of that. All I see is the world—the
universe in which we live—and I don't see any God in it! And I don't see any
Christ coming in it."
Scoffers
who laugh and scorn the Christian faith, and the Christian promise, they live
in this world, and they laugh at the idea of a great mighty Lord who is its
history, and its destiny, and its consummation, and who's coming again. They
scoff at it.
You
know what I think of people like that? I think of those little infusorial
animalcules that thrive in a little drop of water—a stagnant water. When you
went to school, did you take a microscope and look in your biology class? Did
you look at all of those little amoebas and all of those little parameciums
that were just swimming around by the thousands in that little drop of water?
Did you ever do that in school? Oh, that's one of the most interesting things
you ever saw in your life. Those little, low creatures down there; those
little unicellular protozoans right down there, you know, in that drop of
water.
And, as I look at them, you
know, all the little creatures down there, I can just imagine one of them.
He's bigger than the others and he struts. And, oh, he's so proud of himself!
And he's smarter than the others, and he's very conscious of it. I can just
imagine one of them; and he's a philosopher, and he says: "Oh, all of you
infusorial protozoans, listen to me." He says: "Did you know? Did
you know that there is a creature that could take this drop of water and just
scatter it? Did you know that? Did you know there is a creature that could
take 10,000 of our worlds—these drops of water—and just scatter them
everywhere? Did you know that?"
"Why," they say,
"that's impossible! That's unimaginable! I don't see any creature like
that down here in this little world of our drop of water. I don't see anyone like
that—that can do that. That's fantastic! That's idiotic! That's insane!
That's unintelligible! That's unacademic!"
And then they just say all
kinds of things, you know. I can imagine one of them saying: "Did you
know, if we were to take an army of ten million amoebas on this side, and go to
war with ten million parameciums on that side—why we could just shake the whole
earth?"
The philosopher would say:
"Did you know there's somebody that could just crush all those armies just
like that…just like that?"
I can just imagine that.
You know, all of this vastness and time, they're just ciphers in God's sight.
Just add to it and take away from it, as you want to. Put a million ciphers as
you want, take off a million ciphers if you want—it doesn't make any
difference. They're just drops of water in the vast ocean of God's
infinitude. They're just a leaf falling in the vast infinite forest of God's
being. It's just a grain of sand in the whole innumerable, immeasurable,
uncountable, innumerable sea shore of God's existence; the whole thing, all of
this, time and creation and everything.
When
I was a youngster, when I was a teenager, there was a very famous novelist by
the name of Sinclair Lewis. And there was a very gifted and famous syndicated
columnist named Arthur Brisbane. He had a column called Today. And in
so many of the newspapers of America, it was in the left-hand side. And there
was a president of the Santa Fe Railroad named Charles Story.
Well,
upon a day, Sinclair Lewis stood up in a pulpit in Kansas City—and he was
making fun of the idea of God—and he said: "If there be a God, I challenge
Him, I dare Him, to come and strike me dead here in this pulpit."
And, when Sinclair Lewis
said that, the whole world of infidelity clapped. “Ho-ho-ho-ho—oh, smart!
Man, did you ever hear anything like that," said the whole world. They
headlined it in the newspapers, and they wrote of it in editorials. “Sinclair
Lewis, the great author and novelist, he scoffs at the idea of God. And he
dares God to come and strike him dead, if there is such a God.”
Oh, I remember that so
well! I also remember what Arthur Brisbane wrote about it. Arthur Brisbane
was a very devout Catholic and here’s what he wrote in that Today’s column
that I read as a boy. He said, “You know Sinclair Lewis, standing in that
pulpit in Kansas City, dared God to strike him dead—if there be a god. He
said, “You know that reminds me of say,” he said, “a little ant—a little ant, a
little tiny ant—in the deserts of Arizona. And right through the middle of
Arizona, the great Santa Fe railroad runs. That little ant gets up on top of
one of those big, steel-iron rails and he lifts up his hand and he says, “I am
told that there is the head of this railroad by the name of Charles Storey, I
don’t believe it! And if there is a Charles Storey who runs this railroad, I
dare him to come out here in Arizona and strike me dead, step on my head!” And
Arthur Brisbane said, “Charles Storey would say, ‘It’s just not worth my
time.’” He said that about Sinclair Lewis.
Why should the great
Almighty of the whole vast universe, the Sovereign God of time, and tide, and
eternity, take time to go out to go down there and mash in Sinclair Lewis’
head?
That’s what Simon Peter is
talking about. Our Little world, and our little clocks, and our little time
pieces, how we watch them! Not God, not God! Oh, to God a thousand, thousand
years is as nothing. He may delay to us: He’s right on time to Him. His
judgments may tarry. Ecclesiastes says, “Because the judgment of God does not
fall immediately, evil men wax worse and worse.” It may tarry but it will
come.
To a snail a mile is a long
way; to a stag and a hound it is shorter; to a diesel locomotive it’s shorter;
to a jet engine it’s still shorter; and to ether waves it may be non-existent.
To us, it may seem long—not to God: it’s tomorrow, it’s now. I have to close.
Why does God delay at all? Why
didn’t God mash the world? Why doesn’t God stamp out evil? Why doesn’t God
tear up these that are terrible, they’re violent, they’re criminal? Why
doesn’t God do something about those who plan war? Why doesn’t God come? He
says He’s waiting that we might be saved; He’s hoping that somebody you will
turn.
And He’s praying–Jesus is,
our great Mediator–that you might open your heart and accept His great
salvation. And one thing it does for us, after the passing of the years, and
the years, the choral “hallelujah!” will be sweeter, and the triumph will be
greater, and we shall rest in that fair and happy land by and by, just across
on the ever-green shore. Sing the song of Moses and the lamb by and by, and
dwell with Jesus ever more.
He’s coming, He’s on His
way! It may seem long to us, there’s no time with God; He’s here. He’s present
and He brings with Him infinite goodness, and grace, and blessing, for those
who look in faith, and love, and acceptance to Him.
My friend in Christ, look
to Him now, accept Him now, trust Him now, open your heart to Him now. The
blessing is present, it comes, the blessing is forever, it never fades, or
perishes, or passes away.
In a moment we stand to
sing our hymn of invitation and while we sing it, you in the balcony round,
you; on this lower floor you; coming to the Lord and to us, a family, a couple,
or just you, make the decision now in your heart. And in a moment, when we
stand up to sing, stand up answering with your life, do it! Make it now, while
we stand and while we sing…
