Since there is a staggering amount of time involved, serious questions come up: Where did all this time come from and how fast does it go?

Take a look at the image of the Big Flash above. When in time did this event happen? How is the passage of time measured? Modern people have the tendency to think that “Science” has figured all of this out without knowing that scientific speculations continue and even deepen, as this fascinating article reveals. Beyond basic understandings, however, other questions continue to crop up, including some that science is unable to answer: What was going on before there was light and matter in space whose movements could be measured against each other and gravity? What is eternity? What about “black holes” and “dark matter”? Since measurable time seems to have started “at once” somewhat like this, will time now keep going on forever or might something happen that would bring it to an end?

What’s going on with time?

This one is truly a mind bender, and sometimes I can hardly wait for the Lord’s explanation in eternity! My sense is that time is elastic and very hard to pin down in the long run (click here to read an article by Dr. Heile). The time measurements in the Big Bang diagram are extrapolated from the way we see time passing here on Earth now. We really have no clear idea “how long it took” for the observable universe to come into its current configuration.

When we discuss “days” in the Genesis account of creation, we are on similarly mysterious ground, because we measure days on earth by how long it takes the earth to make a full revolution on its axis, then we divide up that time into human units of measure as if we, living in our age, were the center and arbiters of it all. And all the time we erroneously assume that earth days have remained constant over the eons

Then there is the literal meaning of Yom (Hebrew: יום‎), the Biblical Hebrew word for “day” used in Genesis and throughout the Old Testament. Look in Terminology for more on this topic. Or click here for an interesting introduction to what Saint Augustine wrote in his 2-volume treatise “The Literal Meaning of Genesis” back in 415. More recently a very thoughtful article was posted on BioLogos that compares ways of interpreting Genesis 1 and comes to the convincing conclusion that the arrangement of time described is a helpful literary device to convey God’s sovereignty in the creation narrative.

As a closing word (for now) I find myself having difficulty taking the truly metaphorical passage in Peter that says that “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”, and using it as a literal statement like an equation to mark out dispensations. Actually, how long is “a thousand years” to the Lord? Let’s just say that a thousand years seems much longer to us than a day on Earth but that both are relatively short time periods to the Lord, mere drops in eternity’s bucket.