Father Time

“Do not interfere with the work on this temple of God.  Let the governor of the Jews and the Jewish elders rebuild this house of God on its site.”  Ezra 6:7

It had been roughly 15 years since temple construction stopped.  The former king, Cyrus, had ordered its rebuild, but political maneuvering by the opposition had brought the effort to a standstill until this subsequent decree by King Darius.  A 15-year wait ... that’s an eternity for us today.

I don’t know how our world shifted gears into its break-neck pace.  (“Break-neck” and accelerating toward “maniacal,” I suspect.)  Maybe it all started with the automobile.  Older folks among us might cite McDonalds as a major influence behind our “right now!” insistence.  Of course, the internet has propelled our instant access expectations to levels unimaginable a generation ago.  (Encyclopedia Britannica ran out of breath and published its final printed edition in 2010.)

Our need for speed is brand new, perhaps only a century of race car red, vividly contrasting the gray track of relative sameness through much of human history.  Certainly there is and has always been a category for immediacy.  Brought in to clean up Hurricane Katrina’s mess, for instance, commanding general Russell Honoré instilled a needed urgency among all factions with refreshingly simple clarity, “You’re looking at a calendar, and I’m looking at my watch.”  His focus and decisiveness were refreshing, exactly what New Orleans needed at that moment.  But everything need not rise to crisis level.

What would we do today if our plans came to a 15-year standstill, as it did for the Jews returning from exile?  Would we despair?  Blame God?  Lose faith?  Ironically, instant access to everything has made us oblivious to the fact that God’s sovereignty extends over time, itself.  It’s still his world.  He’s still in control.  And he still does things in his time. 

God is not rushed.  And it’s not safe to pass him on either the right or the left.  We need to trust him, settle in and adjust to his pace.

So if you’ll please excuse me for now … I need to go and synchronize my time to his watch.

[Read today’s text, Ezra 6:1-12, in the NIV, or in The Message.]