God's Time/Timing
- Michael Haldas
- Jan 2
- 5 min read
“Many of us long for the past because we believe, correctly, that the past uniquely offered something that satisfied a core human need—namely, the need for hope for something better and everlasting beyond this life, which communities steeped in religious tradition, in which faith formed the center of one’s life and permeated every aspect of it, were able to inspire. In short, this past provided the means by which man’s spiritual thirst could be quenched. The tragedy of the present condition consists not only in the fact that we are dying of this thirst, but also of our ignorance of the reason for—or even the fact of—our condition, as well as the truth that the cure lies within our own hearts, buried though it is beneath layers of selfish and worldly attachments.” (Dr. Amir Azarvan)
“A very important theological point for us – creation was initiated by God with its intended end in God. We, as well as all of creation, are being drawn to the eschaton, to the climatic end which God has prepared for us.…we are to be oriented to that future eschaton, we are not to be focused on the past. Debating the literalness of Genesis will not help us understand what it is to be human, or what humans were created for. We will not learn our fate in Adam, but rather in Christ in the eschaton. To constantly focus on Adam or original sin is to lose the focus which we should have in Christ which is our salvation. Great Lent should be as geared toward the eschaton as is Pascha. The sin of Adam and Eve has no eternal consequence – just think about the Paschal icons of Christ’s descent into Hades. Christ is resurrecting Adam and Eve, their sin is forgiven and wiped away!” (Fr. Ted Bobosh)
“It was the Church that gave us clocks (of a sort). The word, “clock,” gives it away. It’s origin is from a word meaning a “bell.” And it was the bells in a monastery that signaled the times for prayer…The first calendar was the sky itself, as the position of the Sun and the stars marked the passage of the seasons. In ancient lands of every sort, the calendar of the sky became a basis for the development of mathematics. Its orderly procession through the year was also seen as a reflection of a divine order that suffused creation itself. It is creation of the Sun and Moon and stars, day and night, that open the book of Genesis. It is also in that first chapter that we are told of the calendar days, a cycle of seven that set the heartbeat or rhythm of time.” (Father Stephen Freeman)
“I realized, then, how formless our own experience of time is in the twenty-first century, untethered not just from prayer but from sun or moon, season or tide. The internet never sleeps, electricity means that darkness need not halt work, and we are too worldly wise and weary to shape our days by any great story…When I choose to shape the hours of my life in such a way that they become the space in which I listen for God’s voice and expect his arrival, I am entering the Christian way of understanding time as redeemed from a fallen cascade into disaster by the arrival of God himself in the circles of our embodied days.” (Sarah Clarkson)
“There is no time with God. We can’t expect things to happen within a certain timeframe. Things will happen when we are ready, but we ourselves may never understand when we’ll be ready. Things will happen when it’s God’s time, not when we think the time is right. If we give up every expectation and leave it to God—there is our patience established! There is nothing to be anxious about.” (Bishop Emilianos)
“At times we may become so consumed and focused on our own problems and worries that we forget that God is there. We also may feel that God gets impatient or frustrated with our setbacks or slow progress.” (Fr. Joshua Makoul)
“God's timeline is never the same as ours, He works to bring about His purposes.” (Gordon T. Smith)
“God the Eternal is above the categories of time and space. Therefore, we cannot measure God’s ways by our human calendar. As the apostle says, “With the Lord, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). Therefore, we cannot apply the words “slack,” “delay,” “slowness,” or “tardiness” to the actions of God in human history…The Lord acts in his own time. And He does not hurry. We do not know when He will fulfill His final promise. But we do know why it has not yet occurred. According to Peter, the Almighty is patient and longsuffering (vs. 9)… He does not desire that anyone should perish. But He is waiting for all to come to repentance (vs. 9).” (Fr. Basil)
“The self-help gurus are wrong: time is not manageable. When in the midst of pleasure, there is too little; when in pain, there is too much. Since time is elusive to define or manage, we measure it by events that happen within it. A professional athlete measures time between games; a computer company measures time between product releases; a cancer patient measures time between treatments. Some of us feel as if we measure time between problems, knowing that that is no way to live but not sure what to do about it. At the very least, we know that human beings measure time around something…As human beings bound by time, there is a temptation to live in regret over a past we cannot change or in fear over a future we cannot predict. The Christian writer C.S. Lewis says this temptation is a devilish trap. In fact, in his book The Screwtape Letters, Lewis has a devil speak that very thing: "Our business," writes the devil Screwtape, "is to get [humans] away from the eternal and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past...[i]t is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear.” (Fr. John Oliver)
“Unless God’s will is viewed on the two planes of His desiderative and decretive will (what He desires and what He decrees), hopeless confusion will result. The scriptures amply illustrate both that God sometimes decrees things that He does not desire and desires things that He does not decree. It is not that His will can be thwarted, nor that He has limited his sovereignty. But the mystery of God’s dealings with humanity is best seen if this tension is preserved. Otherwise, either God will be perceived as good but impotent or as a sovereign taskmaster. Here the idea that God does not wish for any to perish speaks only of God’s desiderative will, without comment on His decretive will.” (NET Bible, 2 Peter 3:9)
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