Thought for Today
Genesis 3:8 They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
Ecclesiastes 3:1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
Mark 1:14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15 and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
Acts 1:6 So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?"
What is time? Is time a fourth dimension, alongside length, width and depth? Or, is time simply the way of measuring how far along Creation has progressed from “Genesis 1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,” to “Matthew 6:10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.?”
The Cambridge Dictionary tells me that the meaning of ‘dimension’ is “a measure of something in a particular direction, especially its height, length, or width; a part or feature or way of considering something.” (dictionary.cambridge.org) That still leaves me with those same questions. What is time? Is it a dimension? Since I am now a minister, does it make any difference? Actually, since I am a minister who was initially trained as an engineer, it truly does make a difference.
In my baccalaureate studies, I took a lot of courses in mathematics. Many of them were courses in calculus. “Calculus is the mathematical study of continuous change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape, and algebra is the study of generalizations of arithmetic operations.” (en.wikipedia.org) Many of us know the whole story about Sir Isaac Newton having an apple fall on his head and ‘discovering’ gravity. He is also sometimes credited with ‘inventing’ calculus. I learned calculus along with my basic courses in physics. We focused on the time rate of change of variables, especially location. I have long suspected that Newton was most probably motivated in his thinking by noticing that horses run faster than people . . . or something else equally as mundane.
One of the most fascinating things for me about time has always been the way we choose to measure time. “The duodecimal system, also known as base twelve or dozenal, is a positional numeral system using twelve as its base.” (en.wikipedia.org) There are 12 months in a year, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute. All are multiples of 12. Irrespective of the alleged superiority of the much-vaunted metric system, I never studied or read about attempts to deal with a metric, base 10 measurement of time.
How does any of that have anything to do with our faith or the Bible? Jacob had 12 sons who were the eponymous ancestors of the 12 tribes of Israel. Jesus chose 12 disciples. Upon Judas’ betrayal and subsequent death, the remaining 11 chose a 12th to retain their number at its original composition. The explanation for our measurement of time usually offered deals with the earth’s orbit around the sun; but, as a Christian that indicates that God built a duodecimal component into Creation itself.
When we are young, we don’t think as much about time as we do in our maturity. Time then seemed to pass at a glacial pace. That is not the case for me now. Maybe Einstein called his theory Relativity because he developed it later in life (?).
There are days now when I feel time moving so fast I get dizzy and feel the need to hang onto something fixed and stationary. My recourse is inevitably to hang onto my faith and to God’s promises. My quotation of John 14:2-3 yesterday is one of my favorite fixed points to grab hold of when time seems to literally fly.
Stay safe, find your faith-anchor, trust God,
Pastor Ray