Please turn to Genesis 21 to show a principle. How long did Abraham have to wait for a son to come out of his own body?
We are not that way regarding time. We would like to be on time, we would like to do things on time, at exactly the right time, but we are so highly variable and we have so little control over things that our time keeps getting pushed around, and then we do it whenever we have the time to do it. God is not like that. He has control over things that we do not.
God sets the time so despite what events being worked out in our life might seem like to us from our position as being mortal and on earth, God is running a tight ship. Our perspective is very limited. So we can expand this concept of running a tight ship out to envelop the entire period of the past to all of His sovereign operations beginning with Adam and Eve.
The calling of Abraham. He called Abraham at just the right time. How about Jacob having twelve sons? Did that surprise God? Oh! He had twelve sons! What am I going to do now? He had twelve sons because God planned it. How about the formation of Israel? Same thing there, He did it right on time. Everything was done at the right time and in the right way.
God wants us to be very much impressed by this. On those of us who are living by faith, that He very much wants us to know what He has done, what He is doing, at least to the degree that we can understand. But for our good, He does not want us to be second-guessing Him, because that is not very helpful to those of us living by faith, because when we begin second-guessing God, we tend to do foolish things.
We cannot add to the past, nor can we take anything away from it. By the same token we cannot add anything to the future nor take anything away from it. The point is this: What God wants to do, when He wants to do it, will invariably be done. He does not operate on our time schedule. We cannot really add to His purpose, backward or forward. What we have to do is get in harmony with what He is doing and that is what our faith has been given to us for.
This is not easy because we cannot see Him and we have to operate according to what the Bible reveals to us, and God wants to add to our understanding. No human being can hope to alter the course of things by our sheer efforts, and if we attempt to do so, that is evidence of pride. This is a major reason why God sets the times, even in our trials. God desires to remove from us any aspect of any argument that we might have lead us to choose some other way of doing things than His.
This leads to the conclusion that is most helpful and the secondary reason why I spent all that time on God setting the time. With God setting the time we, through our experiences, gradually become aware of our sheer helplessness. We cannot control time or the times we live and operate in, so a clear understanding of this lack of power makes us thoroughly understand our helplessness before Him, and this intense grasp of our helplessness makes us more sharply grasp the totality of our dependence upon Him.
The humility that is produced by this awareness is of awesome, tremendous value. We are involved in a creation and God is the Creator, He is the Potter. He is making us into His desire. Recall what Jesus said to the apostles and to us in John 15:5. What I am speaking on here is a very difficult lesson in our life.
