The 2-minute war in Syria – Looking at suffering in the light of eternity
The twelve-year war in Syria has spanned all elements of suffering and hardship – death, displacements, destruction, genocide, poverty, and isolation. Add to this sanctions, a global pandemic, and, recently, earthquakes and floods. With nearly 600,000 people killed and 13 million displaced, only time will tell how, and if, a generation can recover from the trauma of a war that did not distinguish between gender, age or religion. The question beckoning is, can the past destruction of war be reversed, and can the future prospect of hope be restored?
When confronted with such prolonged hardship, it helps to move beyond the dimensions that so often limit us in seeing the bigger picture and embrace a perspective that places everything in a different context. The Bible is quite revealing in this regard and shares how a loving and compassionate Father sees every day, every moment, every event, and every hardship – always with eternity in mind.
Psalm 90:4 explains it as follows: “For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.”
A thousand years for a timeless God are equal to a watch in the night. A “watch” refers to a guard’s shift. There were three night-time watches, each one lasting three hours. In the middle of the night, most people would not notice the guard keeping watch because they were asleep. Similarly, a thousand years pass almost like they didn’t happen when compared to eternity.
In this eternal perspective, through the eyes of an eternal God who sees a thousand years as 3 hours, the 12-year conflict in Syria equals 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
Even though this context provides little comfort to those who look at time that passed, who suffered severely under the burden of war, it does provide hope for those who look forward and see time from a God perspective. It helps us to understand that there is One who exists from the infinite past to the infinite future, and Whose purpose are not time-bound in what is measurable, but runs through the ages into eternity. As mortals, we quantify hardship by multiplying intensity with time, and conclude that suffering has gone on far too long. We then question God with the same words that David used in Psalm 6:3 My soul is in deep anguish. How long, LORD, how long? Doesn’t God care? Are my years of suffering of so little importance that it is only measured in days and hours?
But God, with our eternal well-being in mind, has a different view on time altogether. And this is what the psalmist implies by this analysis. It highlights that all the events of a thousand years, whether past or to come, are more present to the Eternal Mind, than what was done to us in the last hour.
You see, between an hour and a thousand years there is a quantifiable proportion – we can count it, explain it, and then rationalise it. We measure the length of wars, the duration of pandemics, the shorter periods of load shedding and then proportion it according to the years we live on earth.
But between time and timelessness, there is no proportion. We cannot measure or calculate a timeless condition. For a lack of a better word, we call this ‘eternity’ when we try to explain a future without end. As humans, we are trapped in a time capsule that prevents us from thinking transdimensional – outside the dimensions of space and time.
GOD AND TIME
In scripture, we discover the glorious truth that God transcends the dimension of time by being both omni-temporary and timeless. He is not bound by the dimensions of space or by time. For God a moment in time is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a night watch.[1]. How glorious to know that time submits to God and that He exists outside the boundaries of the time capsule we live in that contains our hardships and suffering altogether.
William Lane Craig, in his presentation on GOD, TIME, AND ETERNITY[2] describes Gods’ relation to time as follows:
FIRST, HE IS OMNITEMPORALLY
One way to explore God, time and eternity would be to look at God as Omnitemporally—that is to say, God exists within time, at every point in time. He is present NOW and will be present at every NOW in the future as well. And if time is extended infinitely into the past and into the future, then God who exists omnitemporally would exist without beginning and end. He would never come into existence or go out of existence; he would exist permanently, and He would do so at every moment of time.
Scripture refers to God in terms of his everlasting, omnitemporal duration. For example, Psalm 90.1-2 says, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.“
The picture here in the psalmist’s mind is of an omnitemporal God who endures within time but for all time, from eternity past into eternity future.
SECOND, HE IS TIMELESS
On the other hand, there is the understanding that God could exist eternally, outside of time. This would make God altogether timeless; that is to say, He completely transcends time, which had no temporal location and therefore no temporal extension but just existed outside of time, having neither beginning nor end. God would therefore simply exist in a single, timeless “present,” if you will. Although the Scripture does not speak of God explicitly in terms of such timeless eternity, there are, nevertheless, some biblical passages that do intimate a transcendence of God beyond time. For example, Genesis 1.1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And then it goes on to describe his creation of the first day and the second day, and the third, and so forth. Thus, this beginning envisioned by the author of Genesis may not simply be a beginning of the material universe, the cosmos, but a beginning of time itself. Now since God didn’t begin to exist, this would imply that God, in some difficult-to-articulate way, existed beyond the beginning of time—beyond the commencement of time in the universe described in verse 1.
Similarly, in the New Testament there are a number of very interesting passages that speak of God’s existence before time. For example, in the doxology at the conclusion of the book of Jude, verse 25, we read, “To the only God, our saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever.” In this passage, in an almost inevitable manner of speaking, the author speaks of God as existing before all time; in some sense, God exists beyond time. If time is finite and had a commencement, then God, being eternal, must in some way exist beyond time.
We need to press the pause button here for a moment. If God is both OMNITEMPORALLY and TIMELESS, then God needs to exist as a Triune God and not a single entity. Therefore:
- God the Father is TIMELESS. He exists eternally outside of time. Revelation 1:8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”
- God the Spirit is OMNITEMPORALLY. He is with us NOW and is, and was, and will be, eternally present in the NOW. Matthew 28:20b “…And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
- God the Son entered time and became IMMANUEL – God with us. How amazing that our timeless God submitted Himself to the boundaries of time and entered our world to save us for eternity. Matthew 1:22-23 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).
So, God is timeless, omnitemporally, omnipresent and yet Immanuel, God with us. No other faith, philosophy or religion can testify to this amazing truth.
The reality is that God exists outside our understanding of time, that He is timeless, everlasting, and eternal, and that He is always present. An analogy of how this might be possible was offered by Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that “He who goes along the road does not see those who come after him or went before him; whereas he who sees the whole road from a height sees at once all those traveling it and even though being timeless, is present at all times.”
A timeless God is, then, thought to observe the entire course of history at once, just as a person might observe the events along the entire course of a road at once.
The significance of this is profound, especially in times of hardship and suffering (by Dr. Hugh Ross)
God’s trans-dimensionality, being timeless and omnitemporally, helps answer important questions like “How can God hear billions of prayers at the same time?” Dr. Ross shares, “Because of our confinement to a single, unidirectional, unstoppable timeline, we humans are forced to communicate with other individuals (or groups) sequentially. But God is not limited to one time dimension, his capacity to communicate with any number of individuals simultaneously can be demonstrated. King David exclaims, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You discern my going out and my lying down, you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely… (Psalm 145:18).
Another mystery that can be solved with God’s trans-dimensionality is Jesus’ crucifixion. Some wonder how all the world’s sin could be atoned for in the six to nine hours that Jesus spent on the cross. Dr. Ross proposes, “If some 20 billion people incur sin’s penalty, 20 billion infinite timelines would represent the cumulative total of sin’s penalty. With a second time dimension, God could move along, that is, experience these 20 billion timelines. He would possess a plane of time that could encompass all of them. Thus, when Jesus suffered on the cross for six hours on our timeline, he could have experienced the suffering of 20 billion infinite timelines in two other dimensions of time.”
Maybe your two minutes of pain is unbearable at the moment. Take courage. God has eternity in mind and just like Paul we can proclaim that (Romans 8:18) I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
[1] Psalm 90:4 A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.
[2] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/god-time-and-eternity1