New Year's Day? It's Only Time.

[HKHaugan]

When you approach a new year it is all about celebration on its eve and stalking the alleys of resolutions that are rarely met.  In other words it’s about having a good ‘time’ and setting goals based on wishes to be better in ‘the time we have left.’  Time is the secular motif, the context in which we place our ‘hopes and fears of all the years.’  We live by calendars, watches and schedules.  Apart from God it is one of our most elaborately worshipped idols and it ‘keeps slipping away.’  If you let it, the idea will consume you, as it can become an idol that demands constant worship.  It is just one of many that dot the landscape of our fears and aloneness. 

 

Again apart from God time is what we make it therefore it is not a permanent reality.  God is the permanent reality, the ever-present Father, Son and Holy Spirit who began the universe and everything in it. If we want to approach the subject of time then it must be in His context which is timeless and that doesn’t mean an endless succession of minutes, days and years.  It is all about presence, a timeless, watchless, clockless, calendarless personal and interpersonal presence.  It is a relational existence.  It is a faith-trust-believing reality that opens the gate to eternity in which there is no time.  

 

Think about the ways Jesus deals with everyone with who He comes in contact.  For Him it is an event, a reaching into the heart, touching of the inner person, the soul, the mind and the heart.  It is about love, compassion, forgiveness and transformation of the very nature of a lost image of God.  It is about curing and healing the blockages that sin has placed in our loneliness and fear, those things that are the momentary diversions that worshipping time inflicts within.  The illusion of time leads us to be wrapped in the moment of self-protection and defensiveness.  The timeless God comes to rescue us from time and its demons

 

Think about what Jesus teaches about Himself,  “I am the light of the world, I am the bread of life, I am the way the truth and the life, I am the Resurrection, I am the good shepherd.”  He doesn’t say ‘I was’ or ‘I will be,’ He says ‘I am.’  Especially significant is how He identifies Himself with those words of present presence when He says, “Before Abraham was I am.”  Isn’t that how God identified Himself to Moses, “I am?”  Jesus is always in the present.  He is just as present now as He was 2000 years ago and when the whole universe was created through Him.  Hebrews has it right when its writer says, “Jesus the same yesterday, today and forever.”  ‘Same’ there means ever-present, consistently personal and available without restriction by any concept that would bind Him to our thought patterns.  If He uses out thought patterns it is because He is the event bringing the depth of His mind and heart to bear so that we begin to let time fade and His presence grow.  As John the baptizer said, “I must decrease and He must increase.” 

 

When you see the word ‘time’ in Scripture it is used to gain our attention to eternity, which is timeless.  If you look at time in its spiritual sense it is a transition between the beginning of personal consciousness in a physical existence and the presence of a timeless God in the spiritual dimension.  When Jesus talks of time He relates it to an event that points to timelessness like “My time has not yet come (Jn.7:6).”  Here He is referring to His coming crucifixion and says to His disciples in the Garden “The hour has come.”  Jesus redeems the concept of time and makes it a means to grasp the existence of eternity, which is God’s timeless presence, His timeless presence and the timeless unrestricted presence of the Holy Spirit.  “Behold, I make all things new,” He says.  The newness is the change from time consciousness to God’s presence.  This is why Paul teaches “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.”

 

More about time and the Lord’s redemption next ‘time.’