⁸But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.

The false teachers had a skewed understanding of God’s way of viewing time, and we believers must not allow them to cloud the picture. To some degree, this ignorance is understandable if a person’s source of knowledge is only his or her observation of the world. We finite creatures have limitations, one of which is that we are bound by the sequence of time, using such terms as before and after, yesterday and tomorrow. We measure time passage with seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, millennia, etc.

But what is time? Some see it simply as a measurement of change. That would mean that before creation, the concept of time was irrelevant since there was no movement of anything because nothing existed. When God created out of nothing, then time began. The Scripture refers to creation as “In the beginning” (Gen. 1:1, John 1:1). Therefore, there was no “before” creation.

Some thinkers think of time as a fourth dimension where we move from point A to point B, where the movement is across time, rather than across the “other” three dimensions. If we had the power to travel across time, then we could see all activity through time as though it were happening simultaneously. Such thinking stretches our imagination beyond our capabilities, but the point is that we cannot observe the passage of time that has not yet occurred, because we are bound by time.

But God is not bound by time as we are. He is the Creator of everything, and therefore He is the originator of time. It stands to reason that He sees time differently than we do. Today, our passage says that to God, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like one day. There is no difference to Him. To us, one is much longer than the other, but that is relative only to our experience.

That is why we see comments in Scripture like Jesus saying, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). When we say that God is eternally existent, we are not making a time-sequence statement but a universal-existence statement. He exists, “the same, yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). We add, “all at the same time,” because He exists unchanging and in the same way at every point in time. While our knowledge and experience of life are limited by the passage of time, God experiences time as an ever-present reality. As it relates to His promise of judgment, the conclusion is that while divine interventions in time may seem to us few and far between, to Him it is all on time!

Lord, I submit to Your knowledge of the future as far superior to mine!