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Time

 God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:14)

“We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them—or else, by keeping them, rise through them to the fulness of freedom under God. God means us to be free. With divine daring, he gave us the power of choice.” (Cecil B. DeMille)

The eternal, independent, and self-existent being:

The Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself,

without foreign motive or influence.

 

          My homework for this week is to consider various attributes of God, and explain what it means to me or why it’s important. The second passage above includes the first three of what they call attributes. They seem to me to be nicely summed up in the Scripture I’ve chosen for the day. From this, we’re invited to think magnificently about God.

          So what does it mean that God is eternal, or, more specifically, what does it mean to me? The first thing that comes to mind is a sentence from Moby Dick. It’s more than 400 words of consideration of the responses to the color white. To this people in this sense, it’s a good thing. To those people, in that sense, it’s bad. I’ve posted about the concept before (Eternal Now) but this is supposed to be personal.

          The first thing that comes to mind about God’s eternality, independence, and self-existence is “otherness.” Ultimately, that’s a good response, because God isn’t like me. I’m like Him – a little bit, in small ways – but He is not like me. He needs nothing from me. He need not depend on me for anything, and He owes me nothing. I can’t control Him.

He doesn’t end, change, or run out. He does not and can not run out of time, so He can be patient. He doesn’t have to hurry. This is bothersome when we want Him to do something. We don’t have all day. We don’t have all week, all month, all year, or all life. We’re like the disciples in the boat as the storm rages all around us. “Lord, don’t you care? We’re about to drown here.”

Jesus opens His eyes, sits up, stretches, blinks, and looks around, clearly “clueless” (from the perspective of the disciples) about the problem, but He pauses to deal with something He considers more important. He talks to them about their faith before He talks to the weather about its behavior, while the disciples and I look at our watches. Time’s a-wasting.

We live in a world with clocks and schedules. There are things we have to do, but I have to wonder what it would be like to be able to focus less on time. What would it be like to not wake up in the morning with anxiety about getting everything done, or to not spend half the time I’m doing X thinking about needing to get A. G, I, N, T, and W done.  It would require faith and trust, that much I know.

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