Our Bourne of Time

“Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,” wrote Charles Lamb to a friend; “and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.” As usual, the gentle, stammering little man with the tragedy-scarred face speaks for most of us. And yet (again as usual) he hints at neither the heights nor depths of man’s agelong confrontation of these two imponderable realities, for man has always been space-haunted and time-haunted. Nor has modern thought reduced the mystery. Instead, it has deepened it, for it asserts, among other things, that there is a sort of incredible interchangeability between the two concepts, and between them and motion. The lay mind is increasingly inclined to agree with certain modern physicists who declare that the ultimate nature of reality is, quite explicitly, unthinkable.

These words, therefore, are not written in any hope of shedding broadly philosophical light on the mystery of time. Their purpose, rather, is to point to one or two beams of light shed on the subject by Scripture.

Time The Shadow

Because it is impossible to define time (although it seems easy when one first sets out to do so), most of our inner awareness of it is expressed in the form of similes and metaphors. Time is said to creep with petty pace or to rush like a winged chariot; to flow silently like a dark river or to blow upon our faces like an interstellar wind; to drift down like snowflakes or to blow over man’s habitations like sands of the desert. Or it may be personified: “Old Time the clock-setter, that bald sexton, Time,” writes Shakespeare; time the reaper; time the devourer; time the dart-thrower; time the shadow at our elbow.

Some simply deny its existence. To the nominalist, “time” is no more than the word we have invented to denote a feeling we have, a feeling of purely subjective significance.

To the scientist, time is a phenomenon susceptible to measurement and instrumentation. His search, therefore, is for a scale, a universal constant. Until recently, the speed of light in space has served this need, but now experiments with “laser” light (Light Amplified by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) suggest that light is traveling faster than it used to. This has led to a query in a recent magazine: “Is it the speed of light that is actually changing, or time itself?” (Time, April 20, 1962). The mind finds itself incapable of pondering the second alternative.

The practical-minded man sees time as a simple matter of minutes, hours, days, and so on. But he may be quickly forced to admit that these are merely statistical derivations from the fact that our earth happens to revolve about the axis and about the sun at a certain (and changing) rate.

On the other hand, it is the Newtonian conviction that time is absolute, that each moment possesses in itself a temporal reality, not dependent upon the relationship of any given moment to all others nor upon that moment’s relationship to co-existent events.

A recent book on the subject—and there are surprisingly few in the history of philosophy and science—The Natural Philosophy of Time, by G. J. Whitrow (London, 1962), denies both the Newtonian and the subjective views. To Dr. Whitrow, there is a “unique basic rhythm of the universe,” but it is not absolute in the sense of being without beginning or end. “The concept of the first moment of time is not a self-contradictory concept,” he writes, “for it may be defined as the first event that happened.…” But, objects a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement of June 22, 1962, this asserts that “there was a time after which there was a time before which there was no time.” Dr. Whitrow would probably acknowledge this, for to him time is event; in a static universe there is no time. After the last event has occurred, after the last atom has disintegrated and energy is lost from totality, time will cease again. If, however, the slightest particle in the universe moves, time begins, marks the event, and stops again when the particle finds its rest.

But whatever may be the contradictions and confusions inherent in intellectual attempts to define time, man’s emotional and artistic responses to his temporal environment have been almost uniformly poignant. Each individual’s experience of time transcends abstract theories about it, and that experience is uniform. It teaches that time is linear, and that its inevitable sequence is this: nothingness-beginning-middle-end-nothingness. It is the nothingness at each end which haunts and frightens. “Our little life is rounded with a sleep”; man is a tragic figure (as all great literature depicts him) because he is a transitory one. Every moment lived leaves one a little closer to the end. The grains of sand can be seen as they fall into the bottom half of life’s hour glass, but the top half is covered and no one can tell how many golden grains remain. Hence the hedonist’s frantic effort to jam into every moment as many pleasurable sensations as possible; hence the mystic’s efforts to transcend the condition of mortality and link his soul, in ecstasy, with eternity; hence the despair of the suicide who finds it intolerable simply to wait, in suffering, for the final running out of life.

The naturalistic philosopher, incidentally, has a difficult time explaining man’s time-caused sadness. Whence his ineradicable longing for a condition which, to the naturalist, he has never known and which, by the nature of things, he can never achieve? What “natural” forces have implanted this hopeless dream and this inconsolable sadness?

The mystery is deepened by man’s incapacity, in his own wisdom, even to imagine what he does want. Not simply an indefinitely extended lifetime, surely. The Wandering Jew was cursed, not blessed, by everliving. The Sibyl of Cumae had eternal life, but when (as Petronius tells it) the boys jeered at her in her cage and asked, “Sibyl, what do you want?” she replied, “I want to die.” Nor does he want absorption into the Wholeness of things, as taught by certain oriental religions, for that involves total loss of being, a prospect which daunted even the fierce hearts of Milton’s fallen angels. Nor does he seriously want the fleshly paradise of the Moslem, where all sensual delights are eternally magnified and the pains eradicated. Solomon had a chance to come pretty close to this ideal, and it bored him to distraction even before he had lived out his human lifetime.

In all of human history, true light breaks from only one source, the pages of Scripture. There we learn that man will never be satisfied with less than, first, a re-made, regenerated life, righteous and reconciled to God; and, second, a radically different, time-less environment, whose dimensions are the limitless ones of God, the God whose self-definition is the simply majestic assertion, I AM.

Time To Turn In

Surely earthly time must be one of the mysteries into which the angels long to look. It is not “eternity” which is strange to them, but the confining bourne of time, where men live. Time, they may be imagined to reason, is a strange, bewildering phenomenon, derived from the appalling fact of rebellion, sin, and their consequence, death.

And so Scripture shows it to be. The tragic picture of man in history, his hand ever at his lips bidding adieu, his heart ever oppressed by the fear of ending, his mind tormented by bewilderment—this is not the picture God originally painted in Eden. Before the fall, Adam and Eve existed in a living, dynamic condition of sequence and change, meaningful in that events were relevant to each other, but were not part of a chain ending in nothingness. Only with rebellion from the God of eternity did man’s dimensions shrink to his own scale and his philosophy become bounded by his own dimmed reason. Bereft of relevance to that which is Absolute Being, man was forced to think in terms of dualism, to attribute reality only to the tension existing between opposites. Thus light is real only because there is darkness; good is real only because there is evil; life is real only because there is death; and time (being) is real only because there is non-time (non-being). This is the two-sides-of-the-coin fallacy which, at least for the existentialist, logically demonstrates that the essential quality of human existence is tension, anxiety, between being and nothingness.

Scripture refutes such dualism. By sin came death, scriptural death, separation from God, which in Scripture is always distinguished from physical dissolution and which is never described as non-being or nothingness.

But from the first tragedy-darkened pages of Genesis the light bursts forth; for just as God in his omniscience and love transformed the terrible fact of death itself into the means by which the Son, sent in the fullness of time, made atonement for sin, so did he insert (as it were) into the fabric of eternity this incredible thing called time. By this amazing device, by creating time and by inserting it between the pronouncement of doom upon sin and the carrying out of the sentence, God gave Adam, and all men, “room” to repent in. The very burden of time, therefore, under which all men suffer, was made the channel of God’s grace, for he transcends time, foresaw its every instant, its beginning and its ending, and determined the moment within time when his Son should invest it with eternity by giving his life a ransom for many, an event in time, effective out of time. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, not because he subjectively feels time differently from us, but because he is outside it, using it for his eternal purposes and to his glory.

In timelessness, in eternity, every act is eternally valid. Only in a temporal environment can we “put things behind us,” change direction, turn—as the Bible so often exhorts men to do. There is no scriptural hint that Satan can repent. His rebellion occurred in the fixed condition of eternity, and is eternally binding, for “God spared not the angels that sinned but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into claims of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment” (2 Pet. 2:4).

But God’s love showed itself to man by removing him from eternity and by putting him into time. Quickly Adam was barred from the tree of life, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Gen. 3:22). (The tree is to appear no more until it grows in the Holy City, “in the midst of the street of it,” bearing twelve manner of fruits, its leaves “for the healing of the nations,” Revelation 22:3.) The mysterious mode of being into which Adam was placed may be said to have two effectual terminations: first, of course, the ending of each individual life in death; and second, the foreordained termination of the entirety of human history, after which all things will be made new (Rev. 21:5). No man can foretell either termination, nor whether, in his case, the latter will forestall the former. He only knows that now he is.

Scripture leaves no doubt about the use which man is to make of his incalculable gift of time, nor about the terrible urgency of using it rightly. “… Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is” (Eph. 5:14–17). “For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succored thee; behold, now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).

To all such exhortations, the world’s wisdom recommends instead a little more slumber, a little more sleep, a little more folding of the hands in sleep, on the grounds that “there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?” (Eccles. 3:22) All Satan need do is to cast man into a state of impotent Prufrockian lassitude, or to divert him with baubles; for simply not to seize, in time, the proffered salvation is to enter eternal doom. There is no hint in Scripture that anything remotely resembling the astounding time-bound drama of human history will ever again be injected into timeless existence. Hence the tireless urgency of the prophets; hence the parables, metaphors, allegories, and direct injunctions throughout Scripture to act speedily; hence the burden of drama of such verses as this: “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37).

Time In God’S Hands

Every life on this planet, therefore, occupies, with regard to time, one or the other of two radically different conditions. Those souls who have, in effect, said to God, “We will hear thee again of this matter,” and who are yet dead in trespasses and sin, simply await the running out of time in order to enter an eternity of separation from God. Those who have accepted the offer of divine pardon through faith and repentance have already died spiritually, crucified with Christ, and have received the new life in Christ, a life panoplied with the glory and eternity of the Son himself. For them, time’s teeth are drawn, and death is swallowed up in victory. What remains of human life to them is lived “as workers together with him,” in the knowledge that their labor is not in vain but is effective to their present well-being and future reward. So far is mere physical death from being fearful that Paul found himself “in a strait betwixt” a desire to continue his labors in love here, and “a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better” (Phil. 1:23).

We shall never truly comprehend the nature of time while yet we remain confined within it. But from Scripture we can see something of its origin, its use, and its relevance to eternity. We can remember that “time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop,” and escape becoming those “wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever” (2 Pet. 2:17). And we can marvel at God’s sovereignty and grace in using for his purposes this mystifying phenomenon, this strange thing “of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed.”

END

Objection

If Jesus had only argued,

We could have answered Him.

If Jesus had only said,

“Don’t you think …?” instead

Of “You must believe …,”

We could have answered Him.

But since He came

With all the authority of eternity

Behind His every word,

And since He was, Himself, the Word,

We have no way to argue,

No way to connive, debate;

No right to speak.

If Jesus had sought an argument

We might have given one.

But he seeks our souls.

FRED MOECKEL

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