God's Timetable

GOD’S TIMETABLE

By Pastor Jim May

While most of the Psalms were songs and poems of worship written by David, the sweet singer of Israel, this Psalm is attributed to Moses, and was a prayer that Moses prayed unto God as he led the Children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. Let’s read the first four verses tonight, for I believe that God has something to say to all of us in these words.

Psalms 90:1-4, " Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

We can also see in the New Testament, in Book of 2 Peter, where Peter is inspired by the Holy Spirit to say these same words, perhaps quoting, or remembering what Moses had prayed many years earlier.

2 Peter 3:8, "But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

I want you to keep those two scriptures in mind as we continue now to the Book of Genesis. In the first chapter of Genesis, the Word of God begins with the story of God’s creation of the universe and all that is in it. I want us to look at the six days of creation and project them, compare them, and type them as the passage of time over man’s 6000 plus, years of history upon this earth, and hopefully you will see with me, just where we are in God’s prophetic timetable.

God just didn’t helter-skelter throw together the course of history with no thought of its length and all of the things that would take place through the millennia of time to come. Every part of history; everything that has transpired and everything that will transpire is all according to God’s master plan to fulfill His Word.

If you remember in the Book of Daniel that we studied a year or so ago, that Daniel’s vision of future events in the political history of the world were right on target. God knew in advance of what would happen and He set the powers in place, raised up rulers and kings at the proper time and place, even naming several of the kings that would rule and the empires that they would rule over sometimes hundreds and even thousands of years before they came upon the scene. Through it all God’s plan was working. Through it all, time was marching ever onward to that day when all shall be fulfilled. God’s Word cannot fail. God is faithful and He will see that everything works to His will and purpose.

So when God began that first day of Creation, here is what we see.

Genesis 1:1-5, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

Now if we were to type this first day of Creation in relationship to the history of mankind, we must say that this represents the beginning of God’s revelation to all of creation, and to man himself, that God is God and that He is.

For the first day of man’s history, the first 1000 years and more, mankind was learning of the existence of God and that man’s existence on the earth, and even the earth itself, was no mere accident in some unknown eon of time. It was the time when God revealed himself not only to Adam, but also to Seth, Enoch, and Methuselah and down to Noah. Noah was born approximately 1000 years after Adam, and though Enoch was a man who walked with God and went on to Heaven without dying, Moses is the first man of the Bible that “found grace in the eyes of the Lord”.

Mankind began by walking with the Lord in the Garden and by the end of the first 1000 years; he had severed his relationship with God and lost his immortality through sin. For a thousand years and more, mankind fell further and further into the depravity of sin. There were only a few, a very few people who lived in that time period that would give God a second thought.