Praying The Past

Praying the Past

Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. Psalm 139:16

IMAGINE GOING BACK IN TIME and being an invisible observer to the moment of your worst mistake. You can’t stop what is about to happen, but you can talk to God about it. What would you say? How would you pray for the outcome of this unfortunate event? What would you want God to do in the aftermath? On the flip side, imagine observing the moments of your best decisions. What would you ask God to do with them? How would you want them to shape the future?

If God is outside of time, can we pray to change the past? Perhaps not, but we can certainly pray for the effect those moments had. We can be assured that God knew then of our prayers now. He was an observer too, and he looked ahead to our conversations with him today. We can pray for the outcomes of horrible events to be minimized and the outcomes of great works to be magnified—bringing healing and fruitfulness for ourselves or others. We don’t stand outside of time as God does, but our prayers just might. He has known them in advance. If he is not bound by the limitations of time and space, neither are the prayers he has already heard, including those that have yet to be prayed.

This is no New Age, out-of-body projection, of course. God never invites us to engage in such things. See it instead as a spiritual exercise that acknowledges God’s authority over time and space. God gave Ezekiel the ability to see an alternate version of Jerusalem in the Spirit, transported Philip geographically, and opened the eyes of prophets to see events beyond their time. He can certainly apply our prayers to past, present, and future, just as he applies them in our homes, across nations, and beyond seas. We can pray across history, bringing past events and works into greater (or lesser) effectiveness today, envisioning the God who stands outside of time massaging its movements for his purposes. He had perfect foresight then and has perfect hindsight now. Your times—and all times—are in his hands.

In God, time and eternity are one and the same thing.