New Year’s Sermons

Steven J. Cole

New Millennium Message: The Inefficiency of God—A Perspective on God’s View of Time (Various Scriptures)

January 16, 2000

The change from 1999 to 2000 has us all thinking about the past century and millennium as well as the next. On the personal level, it has made me think about where I’m at in life and where I’m headed, should the Lord give me more years to serve Him. I trust that as a steward of God’s grace, each of you is thinking about your use of the time God has allotted to you.

I want to offer you a perspective on time that may jar you. It jarred me when I first started thinking along these lines years ago. My Bible reading made me begin thinking about how different God’s view of time is from the American view of time. Peter tells us that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Pet. 3:8). Moses exclaims that a thousand years in God’s sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night (Ps. 90:4). To us, a millennium is a very long time; to God, it’s just another day in paradise!

The radical thought that hit me is that God is terribly inefficient by American standards. I say it reverently, of course. But as I read the Bible, it strikes me how God could have administered His eternal plan much more efficiently than He did. Why take at least four millennia from the fall of man until He sent the Savior? Why bottle up the process with one disobedient nation and then, for the past two millennia with the often disobedient church? The angels could have had the job done in a few weeks or months! Yet here we are, living on a planet where perhaps two billion people have never heard about Jesus Christ!

Our American culture is obsessed with efficiency. If my computer runs at 300 megahertz and a newer one runs at 600, I’ve got to have it! I don’t want to wait! We have instant everything in our society to help us perform tasks more quickly. The contrast between America and the rest of the world hit me when I was in Eastern Europe last fall. I saw men tilling the soil with hand plows behind a horse, and people reaping crops by hand. In America, farming is a computer-driven science. Everything is done by mechanical means. We’re efficient about business, since time means money. Management courses teach us how to squeeze the most from every day and hour. We’re even efficient about our recreation. We listen to books on tape while we jog on a treadmill that tells us our heart rate and how many calories we’re burning. We want efficiency, even from our down time! But,

1. God made people with less efficiency than Americans would have.

Take child development. We push our kids toward achievement. As soon as they’re old enough, we sign them up for classes to nurture their latent talents in sports and music. But have you ever asked, “Why did God design the maturing process to take so long?” Animals mature and reproduce before human beings are out of kindergarten. God could have ...