Love Everlasting: A Practical Theology of Time
Love Everlasting: A Practical Theology of Time coming soon!
Love Everlasting: A Practical Theology of Time coming soon!
Most modern cosmologies assume as a primary condition of the Big Bang that the universe had no edge or center. …
Time challenges our faith. Indeed, it is difficult to prove faith outside of time. A primary discipline of the spiritual …
Though decay and increased chaos can be used to see that time moves forward, they are not why it does so. The Day approaches. Time is taking us to a destination. It’s not simply carrying us downstream into the depths of pointless despair. We are to gather together to exhort and provoke one another to love and good works because what we do matters and has eternal consequence.
Our Father’s default setting is dynamic progression. Life moves forward from seed to body, blades of grass to fields of green, trees to forests, fish to schools, fowl to flocks, heifers to herds, one flesh to families, families to tribes, and tribes to nations. His blessing brings increase in quality and quantity.[1] Conversely, wicked disobedience brings the curse of caustic decay. Though many other examples of this principle can be found, Genesis 1-3 and Deuteronomy 28 are sufficient to illustrate the point.
Onward, forward, and go are imperatives intrinsic in the kingdom of God; flinching, backsliding, and turning away win no commendations from the King.[2]
Day One measures a definite value of time. We know time is there because it is being measured for us. One way time has been classically defined—or qualified through measurement— has been “matter in motion through space.” But if the Bible is true, then this cannot be what time is because time came to be on Day One and space shows up on the second day.
God speaks to Moses from a thorn bush. The holiness of God has invaded the curse of the ground and commands Moses to bare his feet in the presence of the Almighty. The Lord has plans for this prince-turned-shepherd, this child of Jacob from Egypt. He is to be a prophet, a savior. He will have mastery of snakes, power over leprosy, and call the wind to divide the waters. This encounter deals with who Moses was, what God intends him to be, and who he would foreshadow.
I spent the first two decades of my adult life installing office furniture for a living. The trade is project driven, particularly for independent contractors. It proved a tough business model because economies of scale were hard to come by. We made our money on skilled labor, not tangible goods. Widgets are scalable. Williams, Wades, and Wandas can’t be scaled into profits; they have to be sped up.
“Immediately” is the spice-word of the miraculous. Any healing Jesus does is exciting, but the instantaneous ones carry exponential weight and wonder. To illustrate what I mean, let me begin with one that lacks this powerful adverb.
Luke 17:12-16
12 And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off:
13 And they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.
Almost two decades deep into the exponentially increasing digital heights of the twenty-first century, I still wear an analog watch. I wake, sit on the edge of my bed, rub my eyes, and reach over to strap time to my wrist. This ticking machine keeps me partially bound to the illusion that the act of wearing a time ruler grants me some measure of control over its domain. With it, I can confidently push to be “on time” to meet my obligations or accomplish my desires. But the reality is that even as I press and discipline myself to be on time, I never truly am. Time is actually on me.