One of the great mysteries of the Bible is the element of time.

From the very first descriptions of the story of creation, we are faced with contradictory time elements. While the sequence of events is compatible with today’s scientific understanding, the idea that those events occurred over the course of just a few days is difficult to justify when compared to a realistic evolutionary model.

When Adam and Eve appear on the scene, their first offspring become engaged in a lethal confrontation that results in one killed by the other and the survivor being banished to live with a remote group unaffiliated with the first family. What is unexplained is the existence of other, unaffiliated humans in the earliest days of mankind.

The book of Genisis very quickly expands into events that appear to be widely separated in time, yet appear to occur in rapid succession. Add to that mix the lifespan of those early characters and we quickly stumble into debatable territory.

When we look at some of those questionable lifespans we must wonder, was time measured by different standards in the earliest days of recorded history? Did the earth orbit the sun at a different speed? Was the earth’s rotation faster?

Or is there another, simpler explanation?

When we look at the first book of the Bible, we quickly recognize that it represents a considerable span of time, yet the events are presented in rapid succession. We might also recognize that the events described in the book of Genisis are a summary of events that occurred over a large span of time. It is a historical narrative compressed into a preamble.

We need to acknowledge that we view the messages of the Bible from our contemporary perspective. One day is the time it takes the earth to make one full rotation. A year is the time it takes for the earth to complete one revolution around the sun. We divide a year into 12 months, a week into 7 days.

Maybe we need to consider that the standards we use today are different than those used several thousand years ago. Could the definition of a year have been different? Could the interpretation of days or years have been distorted?

How did we come to divide a day into 24 hours, or an hour into 60 minutes? Why is a year divided into 12 months?

We might look at the stories of the prophets and their predictions and ask – why did God take so long to act? Why does it seem that God acts on a time scale of generations? Why are we still waiting for Jesus to return 2000 years later?

Could it be that time, on a linear scale, doesn’t exist the way we experience it? Could it be that time has no meaning for a spiritual being?

Like many other elements of the human experience, perhaps the perception of time is directly tied to the needs of the human form. The passage of time has so much meaning for the human that the concept that time doesn’t exist in the spiritual realm is incomprehensible.

Like so many other aspects of the existence that we experience, time is just one more example of elements that we cannot fully grasp while enjoying a human life. Perhaps the blindness to those elements that we sense or appreciate is part of God’s plan to give us the ability to focus on the that which defines us.