I’ve been reading about the kings of Judah and Israel in my Bible reading, and it sometimes feels like rapid fire as I read about each one. It got me thinking about other summarized historical accounts that I’ve read. It takes me several minutes to read them, but it took several years for them to happen. Some day all that’s been happening over the past several years will take just a few minutes to read in a historical summary.
There are consequences and implications about what’s happening now that we won’t know until years down the road. We can make pretty good guesses based on logic and what’s happened already in history, but only time will tell us the details.
Then time will cause us to lose the details. We don’t know about everything that’s happened before. Only the people who lived through it can really give us the details we otherwise wouldn’t have, and even they can only give us the slice of history that they could see and hear. We can record the details given, but once the sources for these details have died, we can’t record any more of them. And sometimes over time certain recorded details become unimportant and can be forgotten entirely.
Knowing how history can be summarized, I have noticed that it doesn’t really take that long for history to actually happen either. A hundred years doesn’t really seem that long. A lot can happen very quickly in that amount of time.
But I’ve also noticed that regardless of the point of history that people are in, we are still humans with human needs, desires, and motives. We are doing what we can with what we have. We have always done this and we always will, and the only reason there’s any meaning to it is because of God and what He’s done through Jesus. And speaking of historical perspective, a study of the time around the life of Jesus will show you that God sent Jesus at just the perfect time.
Human history is an interesting study, whether you’re looking in general or in specific. It came from somewhere and it’s going somewhere, and God is the one who knows and guides the whole story. Which is why I like to look at the word history as His-story. God wants to procure to Himself a people who will love Him by choice, and by human standards He’s giving us a long time to decide.