With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
Summary: Peter gives us an interesting perspective on what it is like to be God. With the Lord, time is both very detailed and expansive.
What do you think of when Peter tells us that “a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day”? Who thinks like that?
One group of people who might be able to relate to this saying are geologists. As odd as it might sound, rocks do not experience time as we do. There are rocks in Israel that have not changed at all since the time of Christ. They have not changed since Moses walked in the desert of Sin. They are the same as they were when the Great Flood covered the earth. Perhaps this is why the Bible uses the metaphor of a rock to describe Jesus?
And why does Scripture repeat the phrase forward and backward? Psalm 90, verse 4 Moses writes:
“A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.”
Peter states it this way:
“With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”
If a “day is like a thousand years,” that sounds like time is going slow. A “watch in the night” goes slow as well. If you are a watchman waiting in the darkness for the dawn, it seems like every minute crawls by like a snail.
When time is going slow, we magnify every detail. Every sound becomes important. Every thought has time to be explored in full. Even though I am not a watchman for Israel, I know what it is like to lie awake at night wishing I could sleep.
And what about the other side of the coin: “A thousand years are like a day”? This is something that we can only imagine. Yet, it is not beyond our power to understand.
When we are little children, a year is a big deal. Our first year of life is a complete mystery to us. Everything is new. Our second year of life repeats the process and we begin to get a glimmer of a pattern. By the time we are seven years old, we know every year brings us a birthday of our own and a birthday for Jesus. When we are fifty years old, we are well aware of the pattern of years, the seasons, the holidays, and our expectation that they will continue.
At the end of our lives, if we have lived long enough, each year we live is a smaller and smaller part of the whole. To a one-year-old, one year is their entire life. To someone one hundred years old, one year is like a penny is to a dollar. You might think that as we get older and retire, time seems to slow, but it does not. My mother, who is in her nineties, tells me that the days continue to go by faster and faster.
Imagine living for a thousand years! By year nine hundred and ninety-nine, each year would seem like an eye-blink! Instead of thinking in terms of seasons, we would think in terms of eons.
As humans, we are normally limited to a lifespan of less than a century. We can experience what Peter is talking about in miniature, much like a model train shows us what a real train system is like. We know what it is to have a sleepless night, and we have all had the experience of having a good time that is over too quickly. We can imagine what it is like to be outside of time, but we cannot know what it is like in this life.
God knows. He knows every detail of every person’s experience. Like a “watch in the night”, he is intimately aware of every moment of existence. Yet God is eternal. He existed before the physical world came into being and will exist after our world is long gone. All of this is “like a day” to him.
When scoffers scoff about God being slow in coming, they speak from a human perspective. Think about the arrogance of measuring eternity by one human lifetime!
Application: Human arrogance is unlimited. Humility is the refreshing antidote.
Food for Thought: How do we even begin to get our heads around God’s perspective of time?
I am not sure that we can. We can come up with Bible verses and a theology, but experientially we will be limited. After we have been in Heaven for one million years, we might begin to get a glimpse of how short this life was.
Rich –
A million years in heaven should do it… if they have years in heaven! 🙂
We may not have time, so there probably won’t be years. Just really hard to wrap my head around something without time. I guess that is the point.
They probably do not. Hard to wrap my mind around timelessness I guess that is the point.
Rich,
I am with you on the point being that these concepts are beyond our understanding.
However … if we can understand that there are things we do not understand, I think there is a benefit. It helps us realize our limits.
If we do not question these things, then we might fall into the trap of assuming that we understand them. If we make assumptions about God, we close the door of our mind to realizing how awesome our God is.
I think you did a great job of summing up how to relate to time from God’s perspective.
He is outside of time and can see each instance and know what is happening with each person, animal, bug, plant, and atom.
But to an eternal being, our days are only moments.
Your example of the older understanding the pattern of how time works is why we think time moves faster, a comparison to what we knew and as what we know and experience grows each moment in comparison is smaller, harder to grasp, not as all consuming.
But that’s not why time goes fast for God. He can make time stop in order to take it all in or to stay in a moment. It goes “fast” for Him, simply because He is so beyond it, I mean He created it! What does creating time mean? I can’t understand what not having time would look like.
What would life be like without time? Ask your pets. Ask your plants. Ask a rock. I think for the most part they live without a concept of time.
Imagine having no memory of what happened in the past, no worries about the future. Imagine being so caught up in the moment we call “now” that nothing else matters.
You have probably been there at some point. Most of us get caught up in what we are doing occasionally. Living like that every moment is intense. I think heaven will be like that: joyful, intense, engaging …
No future to worry about, no past to be concerned over. Just the eternal Now. 🙂
12-22-2021, 2 Peter 3:8c, How do we even begin to get our heads around God’s perspective of time?
Stop trying.
God is the One and only self existent Holy Trinity. The eternal creator of all that ever has, does or will exist. He is not concerned about or confined by time.Time is something He has given to finite beings to limit our days of suffering under the burden of sin.
Genesis 3:22, Mankind was barred from eating from tree of life and live forever knowing good and evil.
God has revealed all we need to know for our salvation, as well the salvation of future generations so we could become a righteous people, glorifying Him. He has always retained His infinite knowledge of ALL THINGS for Himself.
Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
A moment of wisdom is the moment we finally realize we will never fully understand, comprehend our God and accept His Lordship in
faithful reverential trust, with gratitude and esteem for Him as our Sacred God.
Proverbs 9:10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
The day men stop trying to reduce, confine, restrict God to being small enough to fit within the capacity of the human mind, is the day we take a big step in achieving true freedom from the power of our flesh.
Ron,
Bravo! Well said! Our pride knows no limits, and because there are no limits we never really realize how far out we have wandered.
Thank you for the Deuteronomy 29 passage. There are things we cannot know. A friend of mine says that these things belong in the “mystery bucket.” I’ve always liked that imagery; a bucket full of things we cannot know.
Jeff,
I thought it was a great question and enjoyed the research. I tossed my God box away some years ago and it really lightened my load to let God have the freedom to be beyond my understanding.
I am so very grateful to Him for His patience with me.
Maybe we should stop trying to understand, but somehow that makes me think that I won’t be as in awe of God if I see just how little of a ‘scratch’ my mind can put into understanding how God does things.
I can say to everything “I don’t get it, but God does” or I can try and learn just how complex and manifold the idea of something is and how many things that He brought into balance in order to sustain it, maintain His creation. And then say “I understand a lot but there’s still a lot more and He is beyond me to have made it all”
I don’t try in order to limit, I try in order to see how limitless He is.
How do we even begin to get our heads around God’s perspective of time?
I’m with R2T2 stop trying. Best way I can come up with is, How does a goldfish even begin to get its head around our perspective of time? A goldfish is not on the same level intellectually as “most” people. We are far less intelligent compared towards God.
Tim,
NICE comparison! (I could point out there is something “fishy” about it, but I don’t want to “sink” to that level. 🙂 )
I like the goldfish illustration T. I have been told they have a memory of like seven seconds. Of course, how do they possibly know that. Good illustration.