Its About Time

Introduction

When I look at the menu options for the age of the universe, I will order the young earth every time.

The atheistic, old earth model of 4.7 billion years has a host of associated moral problems. Even if scientists think they have an explanation for all the phenomena, which they don’t, it is a meal that nobody really wants to eat, as it is unsalted, ungarnished and boring.  

Then you got your old earth creationist meal, where God took his sweet time growing the earth through the epochs of history, the origin of species complimenting this view like a dry Chardonnay with wagyu steak. This seems to be the best of both worlds, as you don’t have to deal with the young earth’s scientific quandaries or the incredulous stares of others, and you get the benefit of having the same, loving God slow-cooking the cosmos. Unfortunately, there are significant problems with this perspective both morally and biblically.

No, I’ll take the young earth meal, the one where the cook brings the steak sizzling right to your table and cautions the plate is still hot. This steak was grilled with a six-day sear and comes with a side of fresh cut home fries boiled in oil like a witch. Biblically, morally, this meal needs no salt. Scientifically, however, there are some obvious questions that arise, and one of those is how could the Chef make the meal so quickly, when all of our scientific doohickies tell us that steak dinners take a very, very long time to get to the table. This inevitably leads to the concept of Time and its passage.

What I want to do here today is talk about Time, for it is a very great mystery to me. These mysteries are augmented by my belief in a young earth, as the Genesis account runs seems to clash with the presumed timeline of the universe. But this pickle has also forced deeper and older considerations of what this phenomena is, and how God intended Time to be more than a stopwatch. Explaining the six-day creation in six literal 24 hour days is sufficient, but not satisfactory. Why did he do it this way? When you have an omnipotent Being capable an anything, then how He choses to do things means something; it tells us something about Him. Why six days? What is it about Time?

So what follows will be scattered paragraphs of mental wanderings. Heck, if you are one of those romance novel aficionados who need a sexy plot, you may want to skip this one altogether. 

Musings

Built in to the creation narrative of Genesis is what seems like an obvious contradiction. God creates the heavens and the earth. There they hang, a cold, black ether with the Spirit of God hovering over the roiling deep. God speaks with the first and most famous of all four letter phrases “Let there be light”, separating the light from dark, calling one Day and the other Night, and you have your first day of creation checked off.

The assumption on first reading is that the “light” must be the Sun since how can you have a day or night without the rising and setting of the Sun by which we track day and night? However, we don’t see the Sun created until day three. Questions queue. How does that work? How can you say days have passed when what defines a day hasn’t yet been created? Thus the brain is pickled.

That, at least, is at first glance. We see the physics of the universe created on the first day and with it space, but what is not mentioned is Time, which scientific progress has taught us is knit together with space. Perhaps we need to assume, and I don’t see how we cannot, that Time as we know it was brought into existence with the initial ex nihilo command. An arrow was strung and twanged into motion, and this arrow of Time only flies in one direction. 

Into this universe in motion, God put an image of Himself. This was not a photograph, but one of those new fangled motion pictures. We are here to image the Creator in space and time and we image the Creator most truly in the choices we make – for God is free to be Himself and act in accordance with His own being.

Did Time exist before creation? I don’t know, but I suspect it did, as the ancient stories tell us of angels who fell into disobedience, which means there was a before and after, and therefore some kind of progression of moments.

Scientist often describe Time as an arrow and this arrow is the unalterable direction of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This Law dictates, in a closed system, the entropy of that system will always increase or stay the same, never decrease. Since the working assumption is that the universe is a closed system, as least physically, then the arrow of Time is the inexorable movement towards heat death. Since this law is a law, it cannot be broken which means this one-way heat death cannot run backwards, despite all kinds of movies wishing the opposite. Sorry McFly.

Time, through entropy, eats everything. It bites steel and munches mountains and will reduce the pure and unfiltered life of a toddler to the dust of its constituent parts. It is merciless, unstoppable, irreversible. Aging, from the best we know, is the unwinding of the telomere caps of the genome which bind the string of genes together like the plastic caps of a shoelace. Time nibbles and niggles the knot until it unravels and you with it. Through Time, we are assaulted with the insults of the Sun, the chemicals of the earth and entropic misspelling of DNA into cancerous death sentences. Without constant upkeep of food, water, and oxygen, each one of us is ever on the brink of dust. Life ought not ever be boring with such a beast on the hunt.

Clocks and watches don’t make Time, they only track it, and the Sun, Moon and stars are means by which we track the progress of this arrow as it flies. Just because there was no Sun or Moon to track the first and second day’s open and close, it doesn’t follow that there was no Time, only the earthly means of tracking had not yet been invented. This means that whatever division God made between light and dark that marked off the first couple of days is a division with a deeper and meaningful purpose. On day three, God got around to inaugurating an overseer of the day (Sun) and night (Moon) to govern those allotments which had already been in cycle. God made Time on day one, and clocks on day three. No problems there.

These governors of the day and night give us some natural circadian rhythms. There are twenty-four hours in a day as we know it, but of course these could have been divided any number of ways with any number of names. The idea of sixty minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute comes to us from the Babylonians, who used a 60 base numbering system where today we use a 10-base. The Greeks used this sixty base counting system to divide a circle into sixty parts, making a proto-latitude and longitudinal system, overlaying a grid of time on space. The Egyptians also contributed in our current 24-hours day/night rhythm. Today, the definition of a second is now the amount of time it takes for the cesium atom to twerk its little behind 9,192,631,770 times. This gyration is so accurate, an atomic clock only loses one second every 30 billion years. Pretty good.

The circadian rhythms of creation account for a good number of our calendrical features. A year is the time it takes for the earth to make one lap around the Sun; a day is one pirouette of the earth en pointe; hours and minutes are mathematical derivations of each of these. However, there is no reason found in nature for the week, which means the span of seven days is an arbitrary amount of time, naturally considered. But not supernaturally considered. Seven, of course, is the number of completion. The work of the worlds happened in six days and on the seventh came the rest. This means the gift of the week is imposed upon nature, plopped right down on top of it, to make a point. And that point is rest.

Hebrews tells us that the Sabbath rest of the week’s end is really a metaphor for the rest we find through faith in Christ – a rest from the work of the law and self-righteousness (Hebrews 4). The institution of the week-length is for the purpose of forecasting the salvation of Jesus Christ from the work of the flesh as the Sabbath was a rest from the work of the week.

The young earth position of a six day creation is completely missed when it is taken to task on the time frame alone. It was six days, days as we know them, and this without the Sun for a couple of them. But we also have to think deeper to the reality of what God intended with Time. The Earth is a stage and Time is the movement of acts from curtain up to curtain close, and just like the props on a stage are meaningful to the plot, so is the movement of action from scene to scene. Time is of the essence.

The inventions of seconds and minutes and days, however they came about, is the story of the harnessing of time, which is itself part of the creation mandate to subdue the earth and take dominion. Not in the sense that we can alter time in any way, but rather that by the honing in on the passage of time, we may more rightly subdue ourselves.

No one gets more seconds in the day than anyone else. With Time, all men are equals. It cannot be inflated or deflated; it is the most stable currency. (Economists are currently searching for a time-based currency, as it is unalterable and utterly equal, impervious to government molestations). When we think of how we are “spending our time” that phrase is more accurate than we know. Each person gets a daily portion to choose how they will spend this mana from heaven. While we are all guaranteed the same allotment of Time in a day, God reserves the right to cut off anyones allowance when He sees fit, according to the council of His will, and we ought not presume upon the Almighty that we have more days than we do. But all things being equal, we each have to decide how this allowance will be spent.

Unfortunately (?) the length of time doesn’t not indicate our wisdom in how we spend it. Psalm 73 laments how the wicked seem to being doing just fine and enjoying long life, even though their behavior is reprehensible. Why the Lord doesn’t always cut off the wicked when they use their time wickedly is a mystery we cannot fathom. Manasseh, the longest reigning king of Israel, was the most onerous. Some righteous men are cut off in their prime. There is no rhyme or reason but the rhythms of heaven.

The length of our days is not meant to be our business (one of the sins of suicide), only what we do with the time we are given. I did not choose to be born in the 20th century, but here I be, reciting my verse as I pace the stage for several scores of years. No matter, I must make choices with the time. But one of the choices I do not get to make is whether or not to choose what to do with the time – I will be held accountable for the investment.

I stood at the microwave this morning, watching the seconds tick down as my egg casserole heated up, glowering that the microwave was also counting down the seconds of my life. Thank you, microwave, for teaching me to number my days and giving me a heart of wisdom. And a belly of eggs.

Time cannot run backwards. What is done is done. What was missed was missed. The future bears down like a train, passes us in train cars of moments, and freezes into the past. One science fiction novel, the name of which I forget, imagines a man traveling to the past hoping to alter it, but finds even the grass hard as diamonds, and he, a ghost compared to the immutable reality of what has been done. Seems true.

Future potentialities become a past actualities through our actions, words, and beliefs chiseled on the infinitesimally thin slices of the present. It is our choices that determines how the myriad possibilities will be inked into the history books. Time is the merciless and relentless forcer of decisions; decisions for which we will give an account. Even to not make a decision is, by Time, frozen into a decision of not deciding. 

The illustration to the right is an interesting visual of how time works. On the bottom is the past cone, and it is a cone because there are many avenues that could have led to the decision point in time, transected by spacial plane, which then opens into another cone of possibilities moving forward from that point – going left or right, saying this or that. This represents a single moment of time, which was preceded and is followed by successive slices each with their own cones, all moving in the direction of the Arrow of Time.

What seems to emerge from this inexorable passage of time and our honing of the specifics of its passage, is the stewardship of how we use it and the accountability of the decisions made in it. These choices cannot be undone. We cannot go back in time (no matter how hard we wish!) and unsay what was said to your wife, husband or child. If we could, how many of us would erase those things?

When I was a kid I used to wish I could take a certain action – punch a kid, say – see what the consequences would be, and then decide if I liked this reality or if I wanted to hit the rewind button and take another course. Like those choose your own adventure books where you peek ahead to see if your choice will result in falling into a pit onto spikes.

First Judaism, then Christianity, changed time. Prior to this, and still today, in pagan beliefs time was cyclical: what came before will come again. Time is a wheel. Beginnings and ends were instituted by a Judeo-Christian belief that God is outside of the physical universe, began it, and will bring it to a completion one day in a fantastic end. In this end, men will be held to account for their actions, ultimate justice will be served, and those whose names are written in the Book of Life will enter into an eternity of Life, those not, an eternity of death. 

The cross of Christ does not reverse time. The aborted baby cannot be birthed. Time, on his awful throne, has decreed it so. But through Christ the judgement of the decisions can be reversed by the acts of sin being placed on the Son of God, who takes them on his eternal person, and sufferers the eternal punishment for them, freeing you from eternal consequence through one act of obedience (Romans 5:19). Sin, and therefore sin’s judgement, is eternal because it is against an eternal Being. It takes an eternal Being, then, to diffuse the sin. The other option is that the eternal sin be diffused by an eternity of Time, which is the judgement of Hell. The smoke of torment forever rising is the only other means by which the Holy God is vindicated (Revelation 14:11). It is either Him or you.

Time brings possibility and hope for change. Entropy is a Debbie Downer, says that all will fade and the Sun will grow red and fat and eat the Earth as a last act of cruelty before dying. Eternal life, perhaps, is the endless succession of moments, not apart from Time, but Time on your side, where we are forever going further up and further in, and all the change is in the direction of increasing joy and discovery. Eternal death, maybe, is at least in part the absence of Time. There will be no change, hopeless repetition of self-service, wallowing in the teeth-gnashing decisions that cannot be undone, and this for eternity.

For what it is worth, I think the best depiction of Hell is in the movie What Dreams May Come. In the movie, Robin William’s character dies, goes to heaven and later finds his wife suicided herself and is in Hell. Generally, the theology is abysmal, but the view of Hell is stunning. He finds his wife in a sagging, dark and disheveled version of the home they shared in life. This house is at the bottom of what appears to be the vaulted ceiling of a magnificent stone cathedral, but upside down, the house sagging on the floor in a puddle of murk. There is no fire, only grey and stale space. His wife sits in the house surrounded by memories or her failures and grief, unable to see or recognize anything other than her own self-loathing. It is the central reality of her eternity. She does not grieve, she has become grief. She is not separate from her regret, she is the recursive, grumbling, unchanging regret of a timeless eternity.

Conclusion

Considering all of these things, the reality of Time seems to me to come down to a central reality, which is that the purpose of Time is a running log of my stewardship and choices for which I am held accountable. To go left or right, to do this or that, to rest or work my fingers to the nub – I have been given the freedom and equality of all creatures to choose with Time recording the entries into the book. This a most honoring endowment by God, as what it means to be made in the image of God is to experience the consequences, good or bad, of how I reflect that image, my choices of what to do with time, and what choices I make in Time. There is an end to the beginning.

With Time comes choice, with choice comes accountability, with accountability comes the certainty of eternal death, in this death God brought a Savior to save and rest from the work, with this rest comes glory to God, to whom and through whom were all things made that have been made. In this river of Time we choose to store up treasures for heaven, where the moth and rust of Time do not destroy, or to heap up coals upon our heads. Thanks be to God that there is a propitiation for the the endless mistakes and prodigious wastes of my life in Jesus Christ who can restore the years that the locusts have eaten.