What will we learn about the details and big picture of human history when we are in heaven?
“Dear friends, don’t let this one thing escape you: with the Lord one day is like 1,000 years, and 1,000 years like one day.” – 2 Peter 3:8
Peter writes, “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day” (2 Pet. 3:8 CSB). This one verse gives both sides of the equation. One day is like a thousand years. This means even the most mundane, ordinary day of human history contains more information, major occurrences, “random” events, significant conversations, commonplace tasks, devious crimes, sinister plots, and charming moments than a hundred skilled historians could ever catalog. But that is only the beginning. A thousand years are like a day. The span of human history is immense, covering roughly six thousand years so far. No historian can accurately synthesize the requisite details of human history into anything resembling gospel truth. But God can. He is not daunted by the scope of time, the immensity of eons and epochs and eras and dynasties. His processing ability is limitless. This is the subject matter of our heavenly history course: every single day of every person from every tribe and nation on earth, woven into a comprehensive and comprehendible narrative by the perfect Teacher.
“God is not daunted by the scope of time, the immensity of eons and epochs and eras and dynasties. His processing ability is limitless.”
Let me illustrate the idea of dimensions and details. Imagine you wanted to learn about the redwood forest in northern California. A friend of yours who works there happens to be a forestry expert specializing in the composition of redwood bark. But instead of zooming in on the bark of one tree, he wisely begins your education by hiring a friend who gives helicopter tours of Redwood National Park and the spectacular rocky cliffs that make up the Pacific shoreline. For two full days, you fly up and down the coastline, seeing over 110,000 acres of redwood trees and fifty miles of staggeringly beautiful California coastline from an altitude of one thousand feet. After that, your forestry friend gives you a daylong overview of the biology of individual redwoods, from root to crown. At last, after this three-day introduction, you are ready to study with him the bark of a single redwood tree using his magnifying glass. And the study will be far more interesting because now you have the context, the “big picture.” You have seen both the forest and the trees.
That is what our heavenly tour of six millennia of history will be like, only infinitely beyond that.
Excerpt from “The Glory Now Revealed” by Andrew M. Davis. To purchase click Here.
