| “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” (Genesis 1:14). |
| Have you ever thought of the concept of time, and what it means? We live in a world where time is important, and we become so accustomed to living and working with time that perhaps we assume that it always existed. After all, doesn’t everything in this world have to happen at a certain time? But God lives and moves in eternity, and it was He who created time, as a small “blip” in eternity. No matter how far we go back, eternity went back further, and God was always there, for He existed from a past eternity. No matter how far we look forward, eternity goes further, for it will never end. As we have already noticed a few days ago, we too were made for eternity, and not merely for time. I well remember that when our first child was born, a godly older sister in Christ remarked, “Another little life that will live as long as God lives.” This is surely a solemn thought. |
| As we see from our verse, God did indeed create time, and created a world in which our existence is measured in periods of time, whether days, weeks, months, or years. A year on our earth is approximately 365 days, because that is how long it takes the earth to orbit around the sun once. But years on other planets are quite different. Since it is closer to the sun than our earth, Mercury’s year is only 88 days, but a year on Neptune is really long — 60,190 days. That is almost 165 of our years here on earth. But why did God create a few thousand years of time in the middle of eternity? Why did He bother? |
| I believe that there are two reasons for this. First of all, God wanted to honor and glorify His beloved Son, the Lord Jesus. (To glorify someone is to give them a high honor of which they are worthy.) In order to do this, He created this world by His Son, but then sent Him into this world as a man, to go to Calvary’s cross, and die for our sins. As a result of all this, God has been glorified, and in turn has glorified His Son. God has purposed that the Lord Jesus will rule over all things in a coming day. |
| However, there is another reason why God created time. God is love, and He needed objects to love. So God created you and me, and the Bible tells us, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). God wanted you and me to be with Him in heaven, to share all the glory of His Son, and to be His bride. |
| It is a wonderful thing to realize that God went to all the trouble of creating time, and this world too, in order to glorify His Son the Lord Jesus, and to have you and me in heaven with Him. What wonderful love! |
