- Chapter 11: "No More Delay!"
IF YOU HAVE EVER WATCHED A BASKETBALL or a football game, you know that when a team calls “Time out!” there will be a pause, a time of waiting. If the coach or manager wants to communicate a message to the players, he calls “Time out!” At that point, everything comes to a temporary halt. That is the rule of the contest. The game clock stops. The ball is inactive. There can be no scoring. “Time out!” is a period of waiting until the referee blows the whistle, calling the players back to their positions so that the game can continue. When that whistle blows, the referee actually is announcing, “There will be no more delay!”
I use that illustration to make plain the meaning of the activity related in Revelation 10. One of God’s mighty angels proclaims to the entire creation: “There will be no more delay! The God who lives for ever and ever, the God who created the heavens and the earth and the sea, will now bring to pass all that He has planned on behalf of His creation. There will be no more delay!” For years we have read this announcement in the King James Version of the Bible, where the wording is “There should be time no longer.” In our hymns and gospel songs we have made wide use of that phrase, singing about time being no more, looking forward to a period when time will cease. But actually, that great angel messenger was proclaiming, “The time-out is ending. The long pause is over. There will be no more delay. The living God is now prepared to reveal the consummation of all things!”
Now, if any of us who believe the Bible and are expecting the Lord’s return should be granted an audience before the United Nations assembly and should start to explain God’s plan for the consummation of this age, we would be booed and hooted out of that impressive hall! We would quickly be evicted—and not just by atheistic Russians or Chinese, but by American, Canadian and British delegates, too! We will never get a hearing at the United Nations for God’s plans. But the prophetic word of David and Isaiah and Daniel and Paul and Peter still stands. These men were not mistaken in their faith. And, thankfully, the words of our Lord Jesus Christ will stand!