Tempo Series

Tempo

Genesis 1

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

1. The first day

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

John 1:1 AMPLIFIED BIBLE “IN THE beginning [before all time] was the Word (Christ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God Himself.”

God created light and separated it from something that pre-existed “darkness”. God did a separation between light and darkness and he named these distinct thing. This happened in a period of time. The Bible says that God called this period “The first day”.

Was this a literal day of 24 hours? Some people take Scripture to the letter and they say that this happened in 24 hours. Personally I have a different view of things. At this point of Creation the earth is not even mentioned and we have no reason to believe that God measures time according to our clock.

Notice that for God the day starts in the evening, “it was the evening and the morning of the first day”. We don’t even know what God did in the afternoon. The measurement of time cycles from God’s perspective is very different from ours.

2. God’s Clock

2 Peter 3:8–9

‘But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.’

We can see from this Scripture that there is difference between God’s clock and our notion of time. When the Bible says “a thousand years” this means that, “a day for God is a lot bigger than our 24 hour day.

Notice that there is a new notion explained here. It says, “God is not slow”. It also says that from a human perspective it seams that he is slowing down His promises. The reason why he does it is because he want’s to give us the opportunity to come to repentance.

Revelation 10:6, KJV “And sware by Him that liveth for ever and ever, Who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things therein, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should BE TIME NO LONGER:”

There will be a period called the “End of Time” where the clock will change from 24 hours to “God’s Standard Time”. We will study this aspect of time in another day.

Time

Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them

Time the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another.

Tempo

• The speed at which a passage of music is or should be played.

• The rate or speed of motion or activity; pace.

• The tempo of a piece will typically be written at the start of a piece of music, and in modern Western music is usually indicated in beats per minute (BPM).

• In Classical Music there are descriptions for this measurement (Adagio, Vivace, Allegro, etc.)

The easiest way to operationalize speech tempo is to count the number of syllables in a given time period and report syllables per second. This is known as the speech rate and in English it usually runs between 2.3 and 4.3 syll/sec (Goldman-Eisler 1968). It is possible to measure an overall speech rate for a person, and if we control for the types of situations we have recordings of, then we could report that Robin speaks faster than Bernice, who speaks faster than Harry; they all speak faster than the average person from Montreal, but slower than the average inhabitant of Toronto.

One of the interesting things about “tempo” related to syl/sec is that Moses had a different tempo than everybody else.

Exodus 4:10

Moses said to the LORD, "O Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue."

Was Moses impaired? God doesn’t think so but what was socially seen as a handicap was in fact a gift from God that allowed Moses to fulfill his call. We can never look at our handicaps as a form of defect but we should accept everything we are as a gift from God.