Music Box

My wife used to have a music box.  Every time the lid was opened, it played a little tune: “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head!”  When someone opened the box, a small brass cylinder was exposed to view.  It had a lot of little spikes sticking up all over it.  Also, prongs produced the different notes when the revolving spikes hit them.

Now, in a sense, when someone opened that music box, they saw the whole tune.  It was all pegged out.  However, to experience the tune, they had to wait for the cylinder to complete its full cycle in its appointed time.  As the cylinder turned, each spike hit the appropriate prong and was released, producing each successive note – ping! ping!  ping-a-ping-a-ping!

It is rather like that with God.  He sees the whole story.  The whole of future time is all pegged out in glory.  But we creatures of time must wait for the slow process, whereby the timeless, eternal purpose of God is worked out by us, in us, and through us in terms of human experience.  But it is all pegged out in heaven by an omniscient God who – “calleth those things which be not as though they were”  (Rom. 4:17).

John Phillips, Exploring 1 & 2 Thessalonians (Grand Rapid: Kregel, 2005), 121.