He changes times and seasons…

Talk about being on the spot!  You know how some people say you shouldn’t do a good job the first time, because they’ll expect it every time?  Well this good job had never been done before, not even for a wise man.  King Nebuchadnezzar couldn’t sleep anymore because of the dream he had earlier that night (Daniel 2:1).  I imagine he had his wise men awakened out of a sound sleep.  In they came, shuffling their feet and wiping their eyes.  But he didn’t care about that.  He wanted answers: What was his dream, and what does it mean?  Apparently the dream was so confusing, so troubling, that he wanted his savants to tell him the dream first so he would know that their interpretation was correct.  It was a request as unreasonable as jumping to the moon is: “There is not a man on earth who can do what the king asks!  No king, however great and mighty, has ever asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or astrologer.  What the king asks is too difficult.  No one can reveal it to the king except the gods, and they do not live among men” (vs. 10-11).  Now there’s a very honest admission:  “the gods…do not live among men.”  At least they got that right.  Confessions were never as true as this.  And that says volumes about their magic, enchantments, astrology and their worldview.

It was in this extremely tense situation that Daniel first asked for time, then prayed with his three friends, and shortly received a vision detailing both the king’s dream and the interpretation.  Since the gods don’t live with men, at least One communicates with some folks.  And in his thanksgiving praise, Daniel says the first thing that God does is “change times and seasons” (v. 21).

Of course, his immediate thoughts came from the dream’s interpretation.  The rest of the verse says, “He sets up kings and deposes them.”  The dream was about a huge statue composed of different metals that represented future empires and their leaders.  One after another came and went, but the sovereign God superintends every empire, every ruler, and every person in every kingdom.  No small task!  Thus we see the reason behind Daniel’s delightful praise, not to mention that he kept himself and the other wise men from turning into shish-ka-bob (2:5)!

So, yes, indeed, God does change times and seasons.  But this has to do more than just with empires or royalty or politics.  It has to do with the fact that God is intimately involved in all the affairs of men.  Deists can definitely stop reading now!

When we jump to the New Testament, several verses quickly surface.  Galatians 4:4 says, “But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son…”  This word time is chronos in the Greek, from which we get our word chronology.  It generally means a space or duration of time, either short periods or epochs.  As the ages transpired God sent Jesus at the time when it was fully prepared, not sooner or later.  Then Romans 5:6 says, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly”.  Here the Greek for time is kairos, meaning a season, a particular period or moment.  It means that God was precise, not capricious in his intervention in time and space.  And how things have changed since he intervened!  Think of the repeated endemic failures of Israel of old, and the systematic march of the Church since the time of Christ to reach the nations.  In this regard, consider Acts 17:26-27, “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times (kairos) set for them and the exact places where they should live.  God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him…”  Here we see that God has prepared a time for each ethnic group to find him, and at his time, as he leads his people to reach them, there will be a change like never seen before.  Every nation has its time, and it all falls under the supervision of the timeless God.

This holds true individually, too.  Think of where you were in your ‘BC’ days — before Christ.  Where would you be today?  What would you be today?  If I answered those questions, they would have pretty short answers, like “In a mess.  Probably dead.”  But God changed my time.  I am alive in Christ, renewed, restored, serving him with my whole heart, and grateful…ever so grateful.  How about you?  Has God changed your time?