I once planted a garden with some floaty ideas of what I might like to do there when it was fully formed. I didn’t have a timeline or finish date… I never quiiiiiiite finished and I’ve never done any of the ideas i first imagined in that lovely little space that is now falling down and is beyond my capacity to repair.
However, when I plan an event, I have an idea, a date, a goal, a target group, and I plan from top down… the date – backwards to the present. I begin with the end in mind.
I’m way better at planning events than I am at gardening 🙂 For instance I didn’t consider how heavy the vine I planted would grow to be and pull down the structure I had for it to grow on… or that the already enormous tree would grow so much that the candelabra I nailed into it would eventually be so high as to be unusable.
We live in a way that the day by day results are often indistinguishable – but take a mother away from her baby for a week – just 7 indistinguishable days – and she can see change in her baby with just that bit of gap.
We live in this band of time where we often can only see change by looking back… or the way separate events work together bring about unanticipated results after the events coalesce… Where day by day we live in a ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ attitude toward time…
A lost child in New York’s’ Central Park would feel its enormity and effective endlessness, but a searcher on the rooftop of a nearby building using high resolution binoculars knows the child is in that space and sees the space entirely differently to the child’s experience of it.
Time is a created thing that occupies a space
within eternity.
We live within it and the Creator of it sits over it, yet is in it with us. He
made it with the end in mind… and for the purpose and result at that end –
where time gives way to eternity.
Working backwards in Jesus partial timeline….
Jesus was raised from the dead at the right time – fulfilling prophecies and pictures that had been in place thousands of years.
Jesus died at the right time… often having eluded His haters in the 3 years previous – knowing their intent to kill Him. Not through fear – but because it wasn’t the right time to die. And when the time came – He knew it and submitted to it – having let His 12 know He knew the time was near.
The demons asked Jesus if He had come to torture them before their “appointed time” – they knew then, and know still, they have an appointment with God for judgement – and a little of what lies on the eternity side of that.
Satan himself had been on the look-out for this prophesied Messiah for thousands of years. He doesn’t possess all knowledge. He knew the prophecies but not how they’d play out. The Holy Spirit revealed Jesus at His baptism – and Satan came to the party in force – targeting Jesus now he knew who the One was – but he’d already tried wiping out the Jewish boy babies twice in history – due to his knowledge – though unspecific – of timing and prophecy.
God had protected the infant Jesus from Satan’s broad brush attacks – the timing of His due death mattered – not just the fact of it.
And the timing of the birth of Jesus was also planned, measured, protected, damage-controlled, appointed and actioned. God – The Original Event Planner at work.
Jesus was real.
Forever and now.
In time. From eternity past till eternity future.
What we decide about Him matters.
If He was a fraud – who He claimed to be wouldn’t matter.
If He was a fruitcake – who He claimed to be wouldn’t matter.
If He is just a fable – who it is claimed to be wouldn’t matter.
But if Who He claimed to me stacks up – it matters enormously.
Like He asked the fisherman Peter…
“Who do YOU say I AM?”