Day 271: There Is A Time For Everything

Within the limits of this present world order, all creatures are subject to the processes of time. Time is one factor in man’s total experience which he has no power to change. All men in this world are creatures and slaves of time. No man has the power to arrest the course of time, nor to reverse it.

This inexorable dominion of time in the affairs of men has always occupied the thought and imaginations of thinking men and women throughout the recorded history of the human race. In different ways and at different periods men have sought to escape from time’s dominion – but always in vain. The English poet Andrew Marvel gave utterance to the cry of the human race when he said:

“For ever at my back I hear Time’s winged chariot drawing near.”

In countless different forms and figures of speech, poets and philosophers from all ages and all backgrounds have given expression to the same thought – time’s unalterable course and inexorable dominion over all men and all created things.

In recent years the science of physics, through the theory of relativity, has made a notable contribution to man’s understanding of time. Briefly, this theory states that the two categories of time and space are inseparably related to each other, so that neither can be properly defined or explained except in relation to the other. We cannot accurately define space without relation to time, nor time without relation to space. Together these two constitute what science calls “the space-time continuum.”

If we seek to relate this modern theory to the revelation of the Bible, we may say that this space-time continuum is the framework within which the whole of the present world order exists. By a sovereign act of God, this space-time continuum came into being together with the present world order; and by another sovereign act of God this present world order, together with the space-time continuum in which it exists, will once again cease to be. Before, behind and beyond the whole space-time continuum, the eternal nature and being of God continue unchanged.

The Bible reveals that, for the present world order as a whole, the end of time will come at a moment preordained by God. However, there is a sense in which every individual even now alive must bow before this divine edict that time shall end.

As individuals we do not need to wait for the end of the present world order. A moment lies ahead for each one of us when time shall be no longer – a moment when each one of us shall come to the end of time’s course and step out into eternity.

In the home of the late Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, the hands of the clock were stopped at the hour of the president’s death. This is a picture of what awaits each man, no matter what his station in life may be. For each man individually there comes an hour when the hands of the clock stand still – a moment when time ceases and eternity begins.

Someone has expressed this same thought by saying, “The clock behind all other clocks is the human heart.” When this clock ceases to beat, then all other clocks cease to tick. For each individual, the end of life is the end of time.