Can God affect our past as well as our present and future? If we don’t “redeem the time,” will He?
We who are locked in the present believe the Lord can preempt events still in the future. We know the verse, “Before they call, I will answer” (Isa 65:24). And the Scriptures are full of prophetic details explaining future events. But can God affect events that are already history? Christ said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58), the past being equally accessible to Him. Certainly the Lord has promised, “their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more” (Heb 8:12). But here’s a verse concerning the Day of the Lord that hints at our story today. The Lord promised, “So I will restore to you the years that the…locust has eaten” (Joel 2:25). If we take this literally, it’s not just the crops, but the actual years, restored. Elisha warned his Shunammite friend, “whose son he had restored to life” (2 Ki 8:1), that a seven-year famine was coming to Israel. “So the woman arose…and she went with her household and dwelt in the land of the Philistines seven years” (v 2). But events don’t stand still, and, when the woman returned, she had lost her house and land. So “she went to make an appeal to the king” (v 3). Were the particular day she returned from Philistia and the time she arrived at the palace coincidence? As she approached, the king was hearing stories of Elisha’s exploits from Gehazi. (Had his leprosy been healed, or is this story from an earlier period? We don’t know.) At the very moment Gehazi “was telling the king how he had restored the dead to life,… there was the woman” (v 5)! The circumstances were so striking that the king responded, “Restore all that was hers, and all the proceeds of the field from the day that she left the land until now” (v 6), as if the time needed to grow the crops was also restored, like she never left!