Within time, there are often markers or signs that point to events that must occur.
This is true in the life of the individual, and it is true as well in the life of a community or a nation:
Events occur in a certain preordained order.
These markers are the fixed times at which each event must come about.
That is to say, there is a course of events that advances with the assistance of a variety of mechanisms, a series of causes and effects that operate on one side of causality.
Then, a heavenly decree determines the exact moment that the event must come into effect, and with that, it occurs.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz