Thursday, November 5, 2020

Gerald N. Lund vs. God Existing in an "Eternal Now"

While I believe much of what he writes vis-à-vis exegesis of scripture to be a stretch, Gerald Lund, author of The Coming of the Lord (1970) and the updated The Second Coming of the Lord (2020), and other popular volumes and General Authority from 2002-2008; from October 2008 to the present, member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy, appears to reject the mistaken belief that God exists in an “eternal now.” Consider the following:

 

EARTH TIME, KOLOB TIME, AND GOD’S TIME

 

In his second general epistle to the early members of the Church, Peter wrote: “Be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). The world has puzzled over that statement ever since.

 

Fortunately, as if often the case, we are given clarifying information in modern scripture. Through the Urim and Thummim, Abraham was taught that Kolob is a celestial body that God said was “near unto me” (Abraham 3:3). Abraham was also taught that one revolution of Kolob (its orbit, we presume) was “a day unto the Lord, after his manner or reckoning,” but was “one thousand years” in our time reckoning (Abraham 3:4). This not only confirms what Peter said but enlightens us further on its meaning.

 

So why does this matter to us in this discussion on how soon the coming of the Son of Man will be? Because it gives us another perspective—God’s perspective—on time. We now know that it is not only our perception of time that influences how we experience it, but also where we are in space—another thing Einstein postulated. More importantly, we now have a precise comparison of our time and God’s time. So with that, let’s do some mathematical conversions from the “Lord’s time” to “our time.”

 

·       If one of the Lord’s “days” is 1,000 of our years, then one of his “weeks” would be 7,000 of our years. (This idea of the earth existing for only a “week” is found in the book of Revelation . . . )

·       On that same scale, our coming Millennium would last for only one of the Lord’s days. This gives more meaning to a phrase from one of our hymns: “Beautiful, bright Millennial day” (Hymns, no. 52). It also helps us better understand why the Millennium is sometimes called the “Day of the Lord” (see, for example, 2 Nephi 12:2; D&C 2:1; 43;20) and why the Lord could say that He is coming “tomorrow” (D&C 64:24).

·       On that same scale, one “hour” of the Lord’s time would be 41.7 years of our time on earth.

·       One “minute” of the Lord’s time would be 254 of our “days,” or about two-thirds of a year.

 

With these comparisons, let us now make some extrapolations between our time and God’s time. Hopefully, this will change how we think of words such as “soon,” “quickly,” “night,” and so on. As noted above, most of these phrases are found in revelations that were given almost 200 years ago, which is several complete “lifetimes” for us. But consider this:

 

·       The current lifespan of a person in the United States is about seventy-nine years. In the Lord’s time, that’s not quite two hours.

·       If we use Kolob time, 200 of our years—the time since these revelations were given—is only 2.9% of the total time of the earth’s 7,000 years of existence.

·       If a family had a daughter serving an eighteen-month mission, and had only 2.9% of her time left, she would be home in fifteen days. We would not think it odd if the mother said that her daughter would be home “very soon.”

·       If a person were serving a twenty-year term of service in the military and would be released in seven more months (2.9% of the total time), it would not surprise us if he or she referred to the required time of enlistment as being “near over.”

(Gerald N. Lund, The Second Coming of the Lord [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2020], 65-66)

 

Lund is not the only Latter-day Saint to appeal to the Book of Abraham to discuss God's experience of time. W.W. Phelps did, too, showing that early Latter-day Saints did not believe God existed in an "eternal now." On its, see


William Wines Phelps vs. God existing in an "eternal now"