We can only see God’s perfect timing in hindsight, never in the moment. In the moment, God’s timing always seems terrible, doesn’t it?
Recently I stopped to wonder how the Sovereign God of the Universe works everything in perfect time. Even beginning to think about this blows my mind.
Technically He is outside of time and space and thus sees all time at all different varying points. This gets confusing, and if your idea of a supreme ruler of the world doesn’t leave your mind boggled, your God is too small. But I digress.
He works everything in perfect time. Not my time. Not your time, but His perfect timing spins Earth on its axis and causes our solar system to revolve around the sun.
Even we his people, Christians, operate on God’s divine time table. He knows all and sees all, and it’s not coincidence provisions usually come at that eleventh hour.
From God’s perspective, sending Jesus after 400 years of His prophetic silence was the “right time.” After 4 centuries of waiting for God to speak, many lost hope in a Messiah. This was no super spiritual climate. God caused His son to be born for and among backsliders. People like you and me.
Romans 5:6 says it like this, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly,” (NIV).
God’s timing often seems roughshod and unruly to us. It looks nonsensical, and sometimes I hear myself asking When is He going to act? When is He going to show?
I hear the ache of lonlieness in my friends who question God’s timing after waiting years for a godly spouse. When? How much longer do I have to wait?
You don’t have to be a seminarian to know God is in the habit of making His people wait. With God waiting translates into a kind of badge of honor.
Think of Hannah or Abraham and Sarah pining away for a baby. Think how long David had to wait for the promised crown. Surely they grew disappointed with God, doubting God’s character and their frail abilities to hear Him.
I can imagine David, hungry, desperate and on the run from Saul. By now he knew the inside of every cave from Gilead to Hebron. He lived in God’s shadow. When would God’s promise dawn?
Was that prophet Samuel only a charlatan? Was it dementia that caused him to anoint me, Jesse’s youngest and least-qualified son?
Those questions unhinge the doors of our hearts and creep in during times of waiting. It’s normal, garden-variety doubt, as common as dandelions in Dallas lawns.
God proved Himself to each of these people—and He’s proved Himself to me over and over again. So if you are in a season of questioning God’s timing, just know this same God will one day prove Himself to you too.
We see only myopically now, but one day our Lord, Savior and Creator will sit down with us for what I imagine as a face to face interview, and ALL the pain and suffering will make sense.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known,” (1 Cor. 13:12 ESV).
Scripture declares one day time shall be no more. The God who painfully subjected himself to time and space will one day deliver us out of the conundrum of time and space.
On that last day the sun rises and falls, a new, endless day will dawn. Like time, night will cease too. In the New Heavens and the New Earth, hope awaits us a surely as Christ himself ready to wipe away all our tears.