The Time of Your Life - Part 2

What is Time?

By T. M. Moore | Published Date: January 01, 2013

Yours is the day, yours also the night; you have established the heavenly lights and the sun. You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you have made summer and winter.   - Psalm 74:16 & 17

~  Taking time for granted?

Susie and I sometimes enjoy watching “Antiques Road Show” on our local PBS station. I’m always amazed at the knowledge of the appraisers, their understanding of the provenance and peculiar details and beauty of the item they’re considering. I may look at a cabinet, for example, and think it’s interesting or even beautiful, but I’m sure I wouldn’t know why, or whether my judgment was reliable beyond an expression of my own taste.

But what I particularly enjoy about this program is watching the faces of people who learn, through the detailed explanations given by their appraiser, that this old piece of junk they’ve stacked books on for years is really a precious and quite valuable artifact. They never knew what they had, because they didn’t understand what it was. However, the resolve of every one of them, from that moment on, is to treat this discovered treasure with the respect it deserves.

The time of our lives is like that. We take our time for granted, which is not to say that we don’t value it. We do, and we try to use it well for all the things we consider to be most important. But I suspect that most of us don’t think of time as a precious gift from God, bestowed by our Creator, one moment at a time, with a particular use and purpose in mind. For us, time is just something out there, something everybody has, that we use up as the moments pass for whatever matters most to us, in the confident belief that we’ll always have more time to do more of the same.

~  Understanding time

But what is time, really? Can you go down to the local grocery and purchase a box of it? Can you swap some of your time with a friend so that you get better time, or, at least, time you consider to be more valuable? And what about the time you had yesterday? Where is it? And the time for tomorrow? Why are we so certain it will be here when we need it?

Time is not only a gift of God, it is a creation of His as well. God does not exist within time; He is eternal and does not experience anything like the succession of moments we know as time. God made time and He gives time to His creatures, one moment at a time, every day of our lives. Time exists somehow within God (Acts 17:27, 28) and is dependent, like everything else, upon His upholding Word (Heb. 1:3).

We measure time, from the human perspective, in various ways – seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years, and so forth. But these are not true quantitative measurements of some material quantity – like a half gallon jug measures a certain amount of milk. Our measures of time are more on the order of estimates (as we think of the future), experiences (with respect to the present), and records (as we think about the time that is gone by). All time comes from the Word of God (Jn. 1:1-3), is sustained by the Word of God (Heb. 1:3), and returns – like the talents in Jesus’ parable – to its Creator and true Owner (Rom. 11:34-36). There is as yet no future time, and the time we’ve used up is gone forever; we cannot return to it. The only time we ever have is the present moment, and each of those is supplied for us, as an act of free grace, by the eternal God and His Word. He has a precious purpose for the time He gives us – that we might know Him, enjoy His blessings, express His glory, and demonstrate His love – but, for the most part, the human race squanders the time God gives them for merely personal and pragmatic ends.

~  Not our own

Our time is not our own, just as we who know Jesus Christ are not our own (1 Cor. 6:19, 20). What we hardly think of as more than passing moments for temporal endeavors, God creates and bestows as investments of eternal glory, to be used and enjoyed as creatures destined to live with Him forever.

- This study by T.M. Moore, and others like it, is made available at ColsonCenter.org.