Eternity, Time and the In-Between

[HKHaugan]

What time is it anyway? Typical question, right? But there’s the problem. Just what are we talking about when we use the word ‘time’?

There are two Greek words for time in the Bible. One is chronos, man’s time, and the other is kairos, God’s time. The first demands a clock, a calendar and a written schedule. The second demands belief, trust and faith. They are quite different. The importance of the two is to ask which one takes precedence in our daily life. If we say chronos then we lose eternal perspective and we are only concerned with what we can get in the here and now. If we say kairos then we have to ask where man’s time fit in. This is the crunch as we try to follow the Lord’s claim on our lives. This is where we are totally dependent on the Lord and how he handled the difference. This is when chronos falls under the authority of kairos.

But we have a third word and that is ‘aionion.’ It means eternity. Eternity is where everyone will be after they die. Unfortunately the chronos idea seems to monopolize how we use that word. For instance we may be waiting for someone and, impatiently wondering when they’ll arrive, we say, “I’ve been waiting for an eternity.” In others words our clock and our personal needs dominate how we evaluate our particular circumstances.

That subtle nuance seeps over into other situations and we may say that a speech went on and on eternally or that “I have better things to do than waste my time here.” When you add the name of a movie “From Here to Eternity” it has another flavor. It has about it the idea of eternity being an endless succession of days.

Now here’s the problem. If we don’t have a truly spiritual perspective then we are conditioned by man’s idea of time and we push aside the idea of eternity because we define it in our terms and dismiss its importance since the present is all that counts. But what happens when I succumb to this kind of thinking is that the chronos idea limits me to the period of the in-between of life and death making me vulnerable to the dark spirits of fear, anxiety and control. Simply put, I become a slave to time and every next moment is a threat unless I am in control. Symptoms? I am always looking at my watch, nervously trying to think how I can manage what happens next, having expectations of why the world is against me and looking for someone or something to blame for what I consider a predicament.

The good news is that the Word, Jesus, has brought us words that define eternity in kairos fashion. Remember how the Gospel of John starts? “In the beginning was the Word.” That means that Jesus the Word existed before there was a beginning. If that’s the case then man who is imperfect because of sin is not the place to start, Jesus is. So what does He say about time, eternity and in between?

First, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent (John 17:3).” What Jesus is saying is that eternal life is relational, spiritual and personal. What it is not is man’s time. It is kairos, God’s active presence that is before, during and after man’s ‘time.’

Second, time biblically is an event. God’s presence is active which means that life is spiritual, personal and immeasurable by human standards. What happened in Jesus is a series of events that cannot be measured in time. If there is a measure involved it would have to be the event of belief, trust and faith shaping obedience to His Father’s will. The clue here is Jesus saying, not that His time has come but that His hour has come. Hour here is from the Greek ‘ora’ which has the connotation of an event that is taking place, a personal event, a spiritual event, a reality event. In essence God is doing something that is timeless. Yes, His journey to the Cross can be dated but not in terms of eternity rather in terms of an event, the Cross, that is God covering every event in every life from birth to death. There is no distance between God’s events.

Third, God is timeless. God is, was and will be spiritually and personally moving. There is no tense in God. He just is. Is, was and will be are what we experience as time. When Jesus was describing Himself He said ‘I am,’ “I am the bread of life, I am the good shepherd, I am the light of the world, before Abraham was I am.” He is identifying with what eternity is all about and that is God’s presence and His including us in Himself who is believing, trusting and faithful which is the nature of eternity because it is the nature of God and therefore us who are images of God. God’s qualities, His grace, His love, His mercy and His forgiveness are timeless. There is no measurement that can contain them. If there is a measure it is Jesus who demonstrates His qualities in the flesh.

All of this is why we have to be open to the Holy Spirit. There is no such thing as more or less faith. Either you have a relationship with Jesus or you don’t. Is it more or less effective, more or less full, more or less faithful, loving and graceful? Only God can weigh those. We can speculate but is that ‘a waste of time?’ No, it is a waste of relational and spiritual experience. It is a waste of kairos. Staying open to the Spirit is always being in a relationship with Jesus thus in the Word thus in eternity.