God’s Word for You

2 Peter 3:8 A thousand years are like one day

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, August 14, 2022

8 But do not forget this one fact, dear friends, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.

Peter is still answering the accusation from false teachers: Where is the return of Christ? If it hasn’t happened yet, then surely it isn’t going to happen at all! They have forgotten even the words of Moses, who said, “A thousand years in your sight are like a day, or like a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4). A day, or even just a couple of hours (a watch in the night) is what a millennium seems like to God, or even less, because he does not live inside of time the way his creation does. He created time when he created everything else, because that was “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1; John 1:1), because the very first passage of time is described for us by the Holy Spirit: “There was evening and there was morning—the first day” (Genesis 1:5). But God had already existed before that, for he has no beginning at all.

For God, the passing of time is described by God himself. He does not say, “I was,” but “I am” (Exodus 3:14). We call this doctrine “the eternity of God.” The animals are conceived and born, live their lives, and die, passing out of existence. The angels were created sometime during the six days of creation, and they cannot die, so they are immortal, but they had a beginning and therefore they are not eternal. Man was made to be like the angels, with no end to our physical lives, but sin brought death (Romans 5:12), and so we wait for the resurrection to bring our bodies back to life, and those who had faith in Christ will live forever with him in heaven, imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:50,54). God, however, has no death, no ending, and no beginning. He has always been. His is an eternal “now,” with no transition from a past into now, nor any transition from now into a future, but only now. Other theologians have tried to explain this. Augustine said, “Time does not exist without some change of movement, but there is no change in eternity.” And Boethius (d. 524) said: “As ‘now’ flows, it makes time. As ‘now’ stands, it makes eternity.”

Luther caught the idea with characteristic simplicity and brilliance, asking us to think of a fallen tree. If you look at it from the side, you can’t see all of it. But if you walk to one end and look down to the other, you can see the whole thing at once:

“Adam, the first man, is just as close to God as the man who will be born last before the Last Day. For God does not see time longitudinally; He sees it transversely, as if you were looking transversely at a tall tree lying before you. Then you can see both ends at the same time. This you cannot do if you look at it longitudinally. With our reason we cannot look at time in any other way than longitudinally. Beginning with Adam, we must count one year after the other until the Last Day. But in God’s sight everything is in one heap” (LW 30).

What Peter means to say is that the end of the world is coming, and even if it seems a long way off, it will get here soon enough. When I was a boy, my grandparents were in their fifties, approaching sixty years old, and I thought they were very old and full of aches and pains. I couldn’t imagine being that old, and I don’t say that casually, as a matter of rhetoric. I honestly could not imagine myself old, with aches, with six decades of life behind me and far fewer ahead, or that my end would in fact arrive one day. But I am just about the same age today that my grandfather was when I was born, and he was born nearly 120 years ago. The day we think will never come, the day we can’t imagine arriving, will arrive sooner than we think. One day it will just arrive, and like the ring of the alarm clock, it will surprise all but a few.

This puts our minds in view of our deaths, but it is also true of the Last Day. For almost all of us, both days will come. First, my death, and then on the Last Day, my resurrection. For my body, there will be hardly a pause, not even a breath, in between the two. Whether I close my eyes slowly or quickly in death, whether in peace or in pain, surrounded by loved ones or enemies, or all alone, freezing, falling, drowning, destroyed by accident or war or disease, I will die, but then I will awaken, stepping suddenly from urn, sea, or grave, remade, reborn, and refreshed with perfect and whole flesh. A few will be remade and refreshed as Elijah was, without death, because they will still be alive when the trumpet sounds and the end comes. They will step away from the earth as Elijah and Enoch did, treading the air like a step, caught up with the rest of us into the air, like windblown leaves wrapped together by the force of a beautiful and all-encompassing cyclone, the last whirlwind, the tornado of life, as we are separated from the damned by fire (not chariots of fire as Elisha was, but pits of fire, acid and death, as Korah discovered), catching us all up into Paradise without losing a single hair from our heads.

To conclude: God’s perception of time is nothing at all like ours. Anyone foolish enough to complain that the return of Christ is taking too long (1) has all the patience of a little child in the back seat of a car, and (2) has no compassion whatsoever for lost souls who still need to hear the gospel. To them we say: Go tell people about Jesus, and stop complaining—if you truly believe in Jesus at all, you hypocrites. And to all who put their trust in Jesus, we say and believe: Jesus will come. Have no fear, little flock. Share the gospel, love God, and love your neighbor.

His word is for the human race
His law is what we shall embrace
So love God o’er your flesh or health
And love your neighbor as yourself
On Christ, the solid Rock I stand
All other ground is sinking sand.
  (Based on “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less”)

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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