What is time? In one sense it’s how we measure the succession of present moments. There’s “now” and “now” and “now” and “now”, trailing off into the past, just as there’s a line of new “nows” marching our way. We’ve all agreed upon some interval of measurement to mark this passage, and we call it time. In another sense, it’s the totality of all those moments put together – past, present, and future. There is an intrinsic physicality to time, just as with every other created thing. Every physical object has three dimensions – height, width, and depth. All three must be present for a thing to exist at all. So it is with time. The past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, just as solid as the dimensions of a block of wood. I would like to suggest that this is a truth we all intuitively hold and one that testifies to the reality of our Creator, who alone is outside of that very time He has created. I think it is a fitting meditation for the start of this new span of a time we call a year, and hopefully, you will find some comfort in it.
Take a piece of paper and draw a line from side to side. Write above that line “My Time on Earth.” On the far left write “My birth” and on the other side write “My death.” You don’t know when that right mark will happen, but you know it’s there, in the future. You know you wouldn’t be here now if that mark wasn’t there, just as surely as the marker of your birth was in the past. How do we know this? Because it is the nature of all created things. They have a beginning and an end by definition. You could start making marks on that time-line to indicate events that have already occurred, but it would be hard to know just how to space them out. Where would today’s mark be in reference to the right side of your line? Sure, knowing that the average life-span of a person is somewhere around 75 to 80 years, you could use that to guess your proximity to the end, but you really don’t know, do you? But do you see how the entire line must hold together? Regardless of where the middle and end will be, you know they’re both there; they have to be!
Or take this blog post. You are at the approximate middle paragraph of it, but it wouldn’t be the middle if there weren’t more paragraphs to come and others that had gone before. Indeed, there would be no blog post at all without the three – beginning, middle, and end – I wouldn’t have published it incomplete. And even if I had, all three would still exist. They would just have shifted in position, and certainly be less satisfying! So too the timeline of your existence has been written out by the hand of God as well. Your future is as firm as the past you left behind. This thought may sound incredibly unpleasant, even fatalistic, but it was not so for the psalmist who wrote “You saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” (Ps. 139:16) Here the psalmist sees his own completed timeline existing by the hand of God before he was even born, and yet seems to take great comfort in the thought. How could this be?
Because he didn’t see his story as the product of some impersonal force, such as Fate or Chance, but as the writings of a gracious Author, about whom he could say, “How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand…” (Vv. 17-18) He knew that the One who gave him being, by whom he was “fearfully and wonderfully made” could be trusted with every portion of his timeline. But make no mistake, even the unbeliever knows the timeline has been written. It’s what fuels our obsession with time-travel stories. Long before H.G. Wells published his classic novel The Time Machine in 1859, we knew the past and future were out there somewhere, but it wasn’t until the industrial revolution that our hubris prompted us to think that we could actually make a means to get there. And why would we want to anyway? Simply put, we crave a different sort of salvation than the one our Creator has provided. We wish to fix the past ourselves, rather than accept the mercy His blood provides. And we’d rather know today the outcome of tomorrow than trust the Author of our story.
Can you see how this little timeline exercise of a simple Image Bearer points to One who’s truly outside of time? Just as you hold that paper in your hand, with the entirety of the timeline before you, can you see, at least to some degree, what time must be like for our Lord? Of course, for you, the right side of your line is blank, but it isn’t for your Creator. As you look into a future so uncertain and opaque and limp along from wounds you’ve suffered in the past, may you know this year the peace that comes from resting in the goodness of the Author Who has written every page of your past, present, and future, and will be near you through every “now” that comes your way.
