Time & Eternity

Ecclesiastes 3: 11
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

 “I know what time is until someone asks me to define it.” St. Augustine


We are told in Ecclesiastes that God is at work in time bringing about His good purpose in our lives (see also Rom. 8:28).  While we are confined to time, as creatures in time, we have been given an inward sense of eternity.  This means that time has significance for the Christian in light of eternal reality.  Here are a couple of things to note about what the Bible teaches us about time.

Time is always experienced as now.  Time is just the successive events of what we experience as now.  Right now as you read this, wherever you are, you are in the now of time.  When we look back at what has just happened, it now belongs to the past.  The future is still to come.  For Christians the future is anticipated as a glorious hope.  We have hope because we know that God has all time in His hand, and we have the promise of His salvation, which entails, the past, the present and the future.  As Paul states in Titus: “a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time.” (Titus 2).  Therefore time is a gift and not a right.  C.S. Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Letters about the man who thought “time was his own,” and was very distraught over those “interruptions” that “stole” his time away.  Looking forward to a quiet evening at home and then interrupted by an unexpected visitor.  Feeling that his time was stolen, this is thought as an intrusion into his rights.  For the believer, God has given us time as a gift and there are no claims to our time.  It is God’s time.  Where you are now, and whatever interruptions or the persons who needs you now, is not a violation of your rights, but an invitation to live in God’s now -present time.

There are two Greek words for time used in the New Testament.  One is the word Kronos, which means measured time, or calendar time.  It is where we get the word chronology.  The second word is Kairos; it is not measured time, but momentous time.  It is the time not measured or predictable, but the opportunities God gives us to obey, to respond to Christ, to say yes to God.  It is the word most used in the New Testament.


The pop rock group, Chicago in one of their songs asked the question, “does anyone really know what time it is?”  For the Christian, that is not the primary question.  What is important is what you are doing with “your” time.  Right now is God’s time and it belongs to Him.