Bible Stories

Throughout human history people have had different pictures of time, especially when they think of eternity or immortality. For many ancient cultures, especially in Africa, Asia and the South Pacific, the rhythmical pattern of the seasons - seed-time and harvest, hot and cold, wet and dry-has given meaning to life itself. The sun, the moon and the stars are the reference points. The goal of living is to harmonize through festivals with the cycle of nature.

There is little thought of the past or the future; the present is all-important. Ancestors are the living dead with whom immediate contact is possible. People from such cultures are offended by impatience, but not by lateness, and this is reflected in the behaviour of students coming from such cultures to study in the West. The apocryphal tombstone inscription,

‘Here lies the man who tried to hurry the East’, aptly illustrates the tension between different views of time.

Hellenistic culture, which pervaded the world of the New Testament, was dominated by a cyclic view of time. For Plato only eternity as timelessness was real. Time was but a copy of eternity and no event in time had any ultimate meaning. This made the death of Jesus foolishness to the Greeks. The errors of Gnosticism which infiltrated the early church go back to the Greek view of time. The Gnostics saw salvation as deliverance from the wheel of bondage. Hindus also picture time as an endlessly recurring circle. Each life is repeated time and again, in successive reincarnations.

Time is real

The Christian picture of time is quite different, because Christianity has a different view of God as creator and saviour. The Bible speaks of yesterday, today and tomorrow and of God’s intervention in history and in individual lives. But time is never viewed as an abstract philosophical concept. God acts in history. Time, like the created world, is real because it is part of God’s creative action. It is not illusion. We speak of God’s intervention in the world as ’salvation history‘.

In the incarnation, cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ we see God’s unique and final act that has significance for all time. All those who share in God’s eternal life, whether they lived before Christ or after, do so because of this one event in time. Many in the East and West have found this hard to accept. For Mahatma Gandhi no atoning event 2,000 years ago could have eternal meaning now, though he himself wept at the sight of a crucifix. He had a different understanding of the meaning of event and time.

The Bible speaks of time as chronos, chronological time of days and hours, and as kairos, time of opportunity, promise and fulfilment. We should not exaggerate the difference between these two understandings; both are biblical and should be held together. Christ came in a specific moment of time, and he promised to return visibly in a moment of time. Yet the Bible is rich in expressing times of opportunity and promise. The ‘day of the Lord’ is seen as the time of fulfilment. At the last day there will be a new creation and time will be caught up into eternity.

Many Christians have pictured time as a straight line, or as a line moving upward, to reflect the idea that biblical time has purpose and is moving towards a goal. Movement along the line is from past to future; God’s creation began time, Jesus Christ’s coming is the mid-point, and his return will bring time to an end.

Because time is so real to us, we are tempted to think that God is also bound by time and we become involved in unnecessary debates. God is eternal. He is the I AM (’Before Abraham was born I am,’ said Jesus); God, who is eternal, created time and surrounds it on all sides. Our future is always present to him. Some have found help in C. S. Lewis’s picture of time as a straight line along which we travel and of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. God from above or outside or all around contains the whole of time and sees it all.

No human analogy or picture can fully explain the mystery of time and eternity. But we can share John’s confidence that, when a person responds to Jesus Christ, eternity breaks into time and he experiences God’s eternal life here and now.

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