Time Travel

There's been a discussion in our small group about Pilate's role in Jesus' crucifixion. Each week, the group discusses a couple of questions related to last Sunday's sermon. One of the discussion questions looked at how the Jewish religious leaders convinced a crowd to call for Jesus' execution. How does that interact with submission to church leaders? What do we do when (not if) we disagree with them?

We look back today and think those people should have very clearly known the leaders were wrong. After all, they wanted to kill a guy. But would you support life imprisonment for a repeated child molester? What's the difference? 

We say Jesus was innocent. And according to Roman law, or even our laws today, you would be right. Pilate says as much. Remember that Judaism is legalistic. It's all about the rules. The religious leaders took their power from the rules, or the perceived penalty of violating those rules.

That's why they found Jesus' message so offensive. Jesus taught that the rules weren't enough. You had to follow the rules behind the rules. Unwritten rules that went even farther. This is why Paul says the law could never justify, never restore right standing with God.

Time After Time

Jesus justified - brought us back into relationship with God - through His sacrifice. So what about all those people in the Old Testament who never knew about Jesus? This is the kind of stuff I think about on my walks.

Let me take this from another perspective - can you travel backwards in time? A favorite theme of science fiction, time travel raises questions of changing the past or the immutability of the future. The Terminator movies made an entire franchise off this one question.

I posit that no, you cannot travel back in time any more than you can change the future. Why? Because it already happened. Let's start with an assumption - God exists. If God exists, then we accept that He created the universe, including time. I God created time, then He exists outside of time. In other words, God observes the totality of time.

Moments do not pass. He sees it all as a single, static entity. In the book of Acts, Jesus tells His followers that it is not for us to know the epochs that the Father laid out. In the father's eyes, the story is done and laid out. Our spirit, soul, whatever we call it, simply can't handle that amount of reality.

Did you study infinity in high school? You know, the little side ways "8" symbol. And your teacher, like mine, explained that numbers are infinite because you can always add 1, going on forever. Well, it's even bigger than that. In between the numbers 1 and 2 are an infinite set of numbers. Some of which cannot be represented because they go on forever (Pi). 

Picture that. We have an infinite line representing integers. And at any point on that line you have an infinite number of lines extending off to infinity representing all the decimal numbers between each integer. Does that make your brain hurt like mine?

That's the level that God sees. We can't. We're an image, a reflection, of someone so much more than ourselves.

A Matter of Perspective

Back to the question - what about the people who never knew about Jesus? Imagine you jut won the lottery - $600 million ($600,000,000). The money has been transferred into your bank account. You walk out of the bank and see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. A 5 year old also sees it. Would you scoop up the $20 before the kid, or let them have it?

Probably let them. Maybe even hand it to them and smile. $20 doesn't change your life, does it?

Now imagine that you're homeless, see $20 the same time as this 5 year old. Not so easy now, is it. $20 means food. What changed?

Finally, imagine that the lottery was unbelievably huge - $600 billion ($600,000,000,000). How important is $20? Not important at all, is it. I mean, with investment, you could spend $2 billion a year and still have the same amount of money next year. $20 doesn't mean a whole lot.

In the universe, we're homeless and $600 billion doesn't even come close to God's perspective. Time, cause and effect, mean a lot to us. And it makes no difference for God. When He looks at us and the people who died before Jesus, He doesn't see the difference. His perspective is so large that a few thousand years don't change anything. 

I'm not saying that God is indifferent to our perspective. I'm saying that we're not trusting His perspective. We impose our problems on Him, trying to box Him into someone we can manipulate. And there is absolutely no way I can win that fight. He is so far beyond me, that I can't even comprehend it. And yet it's still so very hard to let go.

Redemption

What should I do when I disagree with church leaders? As someone in the group pointed out, no matter what happens, God wins. He takes the evil we do (intentional or not), and makes His good plans happen. My responsibility is doing what He asks of me, now, in this moment. Sometimes that means vocal argument. Sometimes it means quietly submitting. Every time, it means listening to Him. It always seems to come back to that - relationship.