Timelord or Timeless?
I have been a fan of Doctor Who from time to time (:-)), both as a child and later with my own children. But it seems to me a sort of running joke to call Doctor Who a Timelord. Despite having a machine that can travel anywhere in space and time, she/he is unable to steer it reliably and spends the first ten minutes of every new story working out where he is (usually Earth!) and what century it is. Clearly the doctor is in no way in charge of time, even his/her own time.
But we know someone who is in charge of time. God holds all of time in His hands, He exists outside of time, but He also steps into time to share in our human experience of time. Jesus is described as “the same yesterday, and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). I love the way past, present and future start to blur when we look into the things of God. The kingdom of God is near (Mark 1:15), and yet we are to pray that the kingdom would come (Matthew 6:10). It is here, it has come upon us (Luke 11:20), and yet it is still to come. It is present and it is future.
Our God, as the creator of the universe, created time. He created all the ways that we measure time, and all the ways we experience time. We measure years by the earth’s motion around the sun, days by the earth’s rotation, our months originate in the moon’s movements, and our hours are subdivisions of the day. The Bible refers to time in many hundreds of places. We have silence in heaven for half an hour, Jesus in the tomb for 3 days, the 6 days of creation, the fasting in the desert for 40 days, the Egyptian famine for 7 years, the desert wanderings for 40 years, the Jews in exile for 70 years, Methuselah living 969 years, and so many more.
Meditating on Psalm 32 brought out some interesting time points to me. Verse 1 says we are blessed when our “transgressions are forgiven”, when our “sins are covered”. I like this because we have the present tense are, but past participles forgiven and covered. So forgiveness is now, but also it’s past, it’s done. Verse 5 expands this to include the future tense: “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”, while still recognizing the completed nature of that forgiveness: “you forgave the guilt of my sin”. Likewise in verse 5 “You are my hiding place”, and “You will protect me… and surround me”. We are secure now because we can trust His past work on the cross to forgive our sins, and His eternal unchanging future love and protection.
When we have an eternal friend perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that past, present and future combine. Our God is completely unlimited by time, in contrast to every other relationship we have. Even our best human friends are time-limited; they have to do other things, see other people, go to work or meetings, and our time with them has natural boundaries. Our most wonderful parents, who for many years may pour thousands of hours a year into our lives, are nevertheless also time-limited. They have to go to work, our brothers and sisters may compete with us for their attention, and ultimately their lives will come to an end, and they will leave us behind. All our human relationships are constrained by time.
But Jesus is always available, He is never too busy, He never has to sleep or go to see someone else. He can have personal conversations with millions of people simultaneously. He is utterly unconstrained by time. He holds time in His hands: Psalm 33 puts it beautifully when it says: “The plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of His heart through all generations.” (Psalm 33:11). He is the Lord of time, He is timeless in the sense that He is unaffected by time, time does not change Him as it changes us and everything in our world and even in our universe.
He can even delete time! When He says, in Hebrews 8:12, that He will “remember their sins no more”, He is promising that there will be no memory of large chunks of our lives. This is logical, since to remember our past sins would be a very sad business, whereas in heaven there is no crying or pain (Revelation 21:4). We will be like Him, so if He won’t remember our sins, surely we won’t remember them either. This will be “time surgery” on a massive scale, beyond anything we could really imagine. Then again, with no sun or moon in heaven, any sense of time is going to be completely alien to what we understand here on the Earth. Thankfully we will understand when we are there, because our minds will be expanded. Here we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall know fully (1 Corinthians 13:12).
