Sunday News 27 July 2025

Time belongs to God.

Someone once said to me, ‘Timing is everything, and it belongs to God.’ I don’t remember where the saying came from – I think it is not from the Bible. I have a kind of petty annoyance with such sayings, and I think subconsciously I seek to disprove them. However, this is one that has stayed with me over the years. Although I don’t equate it with scripture, there is something in it. It is not easy to dismiss from experience.

Time is the fabric on which our whole experience, our whole life is laid out. Or you could say, the cloth on which it is embroidered. Time is the domain appointed for our mortal life and is an aspect of everything we experience. Yet I for one struggle with it, and have difficulty properly aligning my life with time (so far as it is in my power to do) or accepting its implications. Whereas God, who inhabits eternity, works naturally through time in our lives and in our world. Well after all, he is the Creator of time also – but it seems to me an irony.

Recently I caught myself at odds with the timing of God. My wife had been taken to the emergency department of the regional hospital with some irregularities of blood pressure, heartbeat and accompanying symptoms. She had been sent there by the local medical centre, partly so that blood tests could be done and the results obtained straight away. ‘Straight away’ has, of course, a different meaning in our public health system. My wife was well attended to by nurses and others but had not actually seen a doctor when we decided to leave after seven hours or so, it being past eleven o’clock at night, because staying up all night in a hospital corridor (on a trundler bed) did not seem likely to be good for her health. She was feeling better and would see her own doctor the following day. And we were advised it would be several hours still until a doctor could see her at the hospital. Nonetheless, we are privileged with the level of care we receive through the public system and I expect that had her condition deteriorated, my wife would have been attended to promptly.

Also I can report, blood tests were taken and results obtained while we waited at the hospital. However, at times nurses have found it difficult to take a blood sample from my wife, and so it was on this occasion. One nurse tried and failed. And I know that they do not try indefinitely, but give up after a couple of goes so that the patient is not traumatised by becoming ‘a pincushion’.

When a second nurse was commandeered to obtain the sample, I silently prayed to the Lord that a sample would be successfully taken. Unfortunately (so it seemed from my own perspective) this attempt also was abandoned after a series of jabs in apparently likely spots. Even a catheter which had been left secured in a vein by the medical centre earlier in the day had ceased to work.

Again I silently prayed to the Lord, this time to express my disappointment that such a simple and immediate need could not be met. And I have felt repeatedly of late that God has prompted me to ‘ask and you shall receive’, as seen in scripture such as follows.

‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.’ (Matthew 7:7-8)

But in response to this ungrateful prayer of mine I received an immediate reply, which came to me as actual words, not audible:

‘I heard you.’

It seemed to me it was God who spoke. It certainly was not in my mind that any such thing could be true – seeing my prayer had apparently not been answered – and as I shared in a recent article, with God, hearing means doing. If God hears, he acts.

A couple of hours later another nurse came by with a mobile ultrasound scanner, which he proceeded to apply to my wife’s arm, revealing the vein, and a sample was able to be taken at that time. I then realized the error of my thinking.

I had thought that because my prayer was not answered immediately at the time which seemed appropriate to me, my prayer had not been answered. ‘Rookie mistake’ I might say. (And I am no rookie if years count for anything.) One thing that is seldom appropriate to ask of God is anything combined with the word ‘now’. Timing belongs to God.

But if we were to have everything we need or want right now – where does that thinking lead us? Our very life is constructed by the process of time. Without time, we would literally have no ‘lifetime’.

The journey of our life has a purpose, which I believe is to lead us into an everlasting relationship with Jesus our Lord, and with all his redeemed people. And there is no journey where every part of the destination is there at the outset.

It seems strange to be writing these words, as if the very most basic element of our existence – time – is somehow strange to us. Well, it is to me anyway, as evidenced by my experience at the hospital. Everything in our life takes time, yet somehow I imagine that with God, things should be immediate. Whereas the Bible teaches that the heroes of our faith waited their whole lives for the promises of God, which were instead reserved for them in the life to come.

‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.’ (Hebrews 11:13)

Which is not to say that prayer is not answered in this life, indeed, my experience is that God does answer in real ways now. But the scripture from Hebrews does give a different perspective, and attributes the highest value to waiting.

Time is God’s gift to us. It can seem helpful or unhelpful. It can be painful or can bring relief. It can seem oppressive, when time seems not enough, or liberating, when time is sufficient, or when a difficult time passes, as all time does. But I believe we should reconcile ourselves to time, because it is appointed to us, and in the light of eternity, our time is brief – it is sufficient.

Recognizing the pattern of time can also help us with much bigger issues than my visit to the hospital with my wife. God presents himself and his work to us through time. To know God, it is helpful to understand this.

As I shared in a recent article, I had an interesting discussion with a friend who is not a believer in the sense that I am. We discussed Psalm 1, and the ungodly being ‘driven away’ as chaff in the wind. This discussion was enhanced by my friend’s experience as an agricultural scientist having in-depth knowledge of the physics and processes of ‘winnowing’. But his comment was, God seems to be delaying his ‘winnowing’ rather inexplicably. In other words, the ‘ungodly’ seem in places to be running riot, and doing much harm, and why have they not been ‘driven away’ if that is indeed the process? What God is going to do – why does he not do now?

Verse 5 of Psalm 1 sheds some light on the above issue.

‘Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgement, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.’ (Psalm 1:5)

And we know that while the judgement of God proceeds in the world and the Bible contains examples and accounts of it, God has also appointed a day for ‘the judgement’:

‘Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.’ Acts 17:31.

But Psalm 1 identifies two places where the ungodly are liable to be ‘driven away’: ‘the judgement’ and ‘the congregation of the righteous’.

‘For the time is coming that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?’ (1 Peter 4:17)

So the Bible teaches that God’s judgement can be expected to follow an advanced schedule among his own people (‘the congregation of the righteous’) compared to that seen in the world, which may largely await ‘the judgement’.

Jesus showed the above principles perfectly in his earthly life surrounded by the wickedness of the world in Roman-occupied Israel, against which he spoke but largely took no direct action. By contrast, his ‘purging’ of the temple he undertook directly.

‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’ Matthew 21:12-13.

Yet Jesus also said the wheat and the tares may grow together until the harvest, so that the wheat would not be harmed. (Matthew 13:24-30)

Peter explains further:

‘But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing than any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:8-9)

Failing to understand the process of God’s work and the way his purpose unfolds through time, both in the world and in our own lives, can obstruct our understanding of God and our peace in full assurance of his ways. Because good things, the things of God, do take time.

Jesus himself says:

‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.’ (Revelation 1:8)

While there is much that could be written about the above words of Jesus, one particular thing I understand from it is that Jesus is particularly revealed at the beginning and in the final chapters of our world. The creation as described in Genesis, the state of the world at that time before the fall, and the final judgement and restoration of the world described in the book of Revelation, when Jesus says, ‘Behold, I make all things new’ – these are times when the nature of God is directly evident in our world. We should not imagine that everything between ‘the beginning’ and ‘the end’ which we see in the world today, reflects God directly to the same extent.

‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’ (Revelation 21:4)

Thanks be to our God for the time he has given us. For the priceless gift of all our days, whatever they hold. Let our eyes be firmly fixed on our Lord Jesus and his love and purpose for us, and not grow weary in the process of time which leads us to him.

Amen.