“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4.) What does “fullness of time” mean? Is it referring to Newton’s absolute God-time? Or Einstein’s relative time within creation? Or something else? Time has no effect on God who is timeless in his transcendence. God created time and is outside time. However, when he is immanent———as in the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection———God acts in time. So we may say that God is outside time but can act in time.

Time is a great mystery. Since all creation was affected in the Fall (Rom 8:18-22), time itself, which is a part of creation, was necessarily affected. Time was intensely impacted———decaying into the past (“crumbling” in the words of the theologian Thomas Torrance) because of the Fall. But the Resurrection of Jesus Christ ripped the fabric of space-time, stopping time’s “decay into nothingness”, miraculously reversing the “arrow of time” (entropy) and bringing the future into the present. The resurrection literally redeemed and recreated time itself.

There is a fascinating article written in 1951 by the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner entitled “The Christian Understanding of Time”. Here is an extract . . .

“Certainly it was an act of great intuition on the part of St. Augustine when in his Confessions he dared, for the first time in history, to put forward the idea that the world was neither timeless and eternal, nor created at a certain point in the time-series, but that the world and time were created together. Therefore if the world and time have the same beginning in creation, it becomes meaningless to ask what God did before the creation of the world. The whole schema of before and after, the framework of time, cannot be regarded as existing before creation, but as coming into being with creation, itself a temporal fact. We can hardly overestimate the depth of this audacious idea and cannot but wonder at the genius of the thinker who fifteen hundred years ago anticipated the most recent results of astro-physics which followed from Einstein’s theory of relativity on the one hand and Planck’s quantum- physics on the other hand. In Augustine’s mind this idea that time is co-extensive with the world was an intuition gained not from scientific data but from his Christian faith. It followed from the fact that he took in earnest the centre of the Christian message—the unique event of the revelation and reconciliation of God in Jesus Christ.”

Thomas Torrance, Scottish Protestant theologian, commenting on Brunner’s article in his powerful 1976 book “Space, Time and Resurrection”, writes . . .

“The kind of time we have in this passing world is the time of an existence that crumbles away into the dust, time that runs backward into nothingness. Hence the kind of historical happening we have in this world is happening that decays and is so far illusory, running away into the darkness and forgetfulness of the past. As happening within this kind of time, and as event within this kind of history, the resurrection, by being what it is, resists and overcomes corruption and decay, and is therefore a new kind of historical happening which instead of tumbling down into the grave and oblivion rises out of the death of what is past into continuing being and reality.”

This is why I wrote in my 5-part series on Resurrection that . . .

“The resurrection of Jesus Christ was the most significant and far-reaching event (incredibly decreed from eternity past [1 Pet 1:19-20]) to detonate within the space-time universe. It ruptured the very fabric of reality, sending shockwaves to the furthest reaches of the cosmos. The effect transcended the speed of light, immediately affecting every part of a fallen creation, serving notice that everything had changed. But it was not only efficacious within our universe; it also sent powerful blast waves echoing throughout transcendent reality well beyond the universe into the realm of eternity———rippling both forward and backward in time. N.T. Wright was insightful in his magnum opus “The Resurrection of the Son of God” when he penned that it fractured the present evil age (Gal 1:4) in which we live with the unstoppable and life-changing invasion of a future era that is the Kingdom of God. As a result, we now live in a time when two ages overlap, a time of kingdoms in conflict. The resurrection of Jesus Christ brought a future reality (when everything will be made new) into the present, thereby eclipsing time.”

In my Seminary Master’s Thesis entitled “Evil Necessitates The Existence of God”, I dealt with the “arrow of time”, that is the irreversible entropy of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In this fallen world, time is decaying, flowing irreversibly (“crumbling”) into the past. In this fallen world, time dies as it decays into the past. However, those secure in Christ who experience the power of his resurrection, are freed from this irreversibility of “dead” time that is decaying because of a fallen creation. This is why the concept of time is so puzzling. At the moment of Christ’s resurrection, the forceful incursion of a new age (the beginning of the Kingdom of God) ruptured the fabric of time, bringing about the current era of two kingdoms in conflict . . . a conflict that will inevitably be brought to an end with the decisive return of Christ. As Torrance writes, those in Christ “are caught up in a vectorial movement that runs counter to the regressive flow of corruption and decay and carries us forward into the future to the final and full disclosure of our real being in Christ.”

The resurrection of Christ, while somewhat akin to the unimaginable power of initial creation ex nihilo, surpasses it by obliterating death and decay. As Torrance characterizes it, the resurrection is the “Archimedean point for theology”; in other words all reality is now reoriented because of it and revolves around it. Evita Peron is famous for her saying “time is my greatest enemy.” Indeed. Time is the great enemy for everyone except for the Christian. For the believer, Christ’s resurrection changes time from a great enemy into a great friend that is now unstoppably drawing us into the final glorious consummation of all things.

Torrance concludes, “far from violating or abrogating time, he [Christ] redeemed it. Just as in justification the law was not destroyed but established, so in the resurrection time is not annihilated but recreated, for it is taken up in Christ, sanctified in his human life and transformed in his resurrection . . . In the risen Christ, in whom hypostatic union between God and Man is carried through to its telos, there is involved an hypostatic union between eternity and time, eternity and redeemed and sanctified time, and therefore between eternity and new time. The resurrection of the man Jesus, and his exaltation to the right hand of the Father, mean the taking up of human time into God. In Christ the life of human being is wedded to eternal life. The ascension also means that this time of the new creation in Christ is hidden from us, and, as it were, held back until in the mercy of God Jesus Christ comes again to judge and renew all his creation. Nevertheless it remains valid that in the risen Christ our human nature in its creaturely and temporal existence is redeemed and renewed and established through being taken up in its affirmed reality into the life of God . . . The Church thus lives, as it were, in two times: in the time of this passing world, that is in the midst of on-going secular history and world events, the time of decay that flows down into the past and into the ashes of death, but also in the time of the risen Saviour and of the new creation that is already a perfected reality in him. This happens through the koinōnia of the Spirit, so that the Church lives and works and fulfils its mission in the overlap of the two times or two ages, this present aeon that passes away and the new aeon that has already overtaken us in Christ Jesus, the end-time that has telescoped itself into the present and penetrated the Church through the coming of the Spirit.”

Amen.

Eph 5:16 ehorts us to “redeem the time” (ASV). It means that we are not to live as those blinded by the god of this age (2 Cor 4:4), who are dead and asleep and who are locked into a “dead” time that is crumbling into the past and nothingness, but understand that we are already risen with Christ in recreated time (Col 3:1) that violenty irrupted the future Kingdom of God into our present existence. And time is now running out as the final consummation inevitably, irresistibly and unstoppably approaches.