What Time Really Is - And What It Tells Us about God and About Ourselves
God is love. Love has both its strong, tough side and also its tender side. Take, for example, time, which I say is time-wind, the omnidirectional pre time force (Masters) in which we are bathed.
Time is the most gentle evidence of God's tremendous creative force which He sent and sends forth to both create energy and matter and to sustain them.
The same power that creates the stars and the galaxies, and which created our sun, is the same force which we sense as the gentle time wind.
We humans can sense the passage of time, and we grow impatient or nostalgic depending on how we are emotionally relating to our perception of it. But regardless, it is gentle. It gently and relentlessly breaks down and wears away things, so that they might return to the dust of which they were composed.
Time is the most gentle evidence of God's tremendous creative force which He sent and sends forth to both create energy and matter and to sustain them.
The same power that creates the stars and the galaxies, and which created our sun, is the same force which we sense as the gentle time wind.
We humans can sense the passage of time, and we grow impatient or nostalgic depending on how we are emotionally relating to our perception of it. But regardless, it is gentle. It gently and relentlessly breaks down and wears away things, so that they might return to the dust of which they were composed.
Time also is there as we are born, as the little child learns to walk and talk, as we fall in love, and as we walk hand in hand with our partner, remembering what was and appreciating what now is.
Animals are not aware of the passage of time. But we are. This is, as I have often pointed out, a proof for the existence of the soul, which is outside of time. The still soul, is the relative stillness by which the movement of time is sensed.
Our Creator is in the timeless realm, where there is no change, no past and no future, only a blessed present. He creates because He loves to create, and He made humans to appreciate and love Him as they discover and stand in awe of His marvelous creation.
Therefore, dear reader, use your time wisely. If you are young, the Good Lord wants you to delight and discover His great green earth with its marvels and science. Do not spend all your time texting, playing video games, and looking for a high.
If you are growing older, your time is growing shorter and shorter. Sober up and begin to graciously leave behind the things of youth. Do not spend your time resenting others or blaming someone for some lack. Instead learn to be still in your soul and seek to discover the reason for your existence.
Time is love and law and order. Time is love because it is a palpable evidence of the potentiality for growth, for life, for learning and discovery, and for a co-creative life. Time is order because it regulates every movement, holding all in gentle obedience to the Lawgiver and the Giver of Time.
All of this ministration and providence is extended into the material creation. Time is a substance, a metaphysical substance, and it is also light, energy, and gravity.
But time, which is one of my favorite subjects, is very special for us humans and takes on a special meaning for us. We don't have an intimate relationship with gravity or energy, but we do with time.
Animals are not aware of the passage of time. But we are. This is, as I have often pointed out, a proof for the existence of the soul, which is outside of time. The still soul, is the relative stillness by which the movement of time is sensed.
Our Creator is in the timeless realm, where there is no change, no past and no future, only a blessed present. He creates because He loves to create, and He made humans to appreciate and love Him as they discover and stand in awe of His marvelous creation.
Therefore, dear reader, use your time wisely. If you are young, the Good Lord wants you to delight and discover His great green earth with its marvels and science. Do not spend all your time texting, playing video games, and looking for a high.
If you are growing older, your time is growing shorter and shorter. Sober up and begin to graciously leave behind the things of youth. Do not spend your time resenting others or blaming someone for some lack. Instead learn to be still in your soul and seek to discover the reason for your existence.
Time is love and law and order. Time is love because it is a palpable evidence of the potentiality for growth, for life, for learning and discovery, and for a co-creative life. Time is order because it regulates every movement, holding all in gentle obedience to the Lawgiver and the Giver of Time.
All of this ministration and providence is extended into the material creation. Time is a substance, a metaphysical substance, and it is also light, energy, and gravity.
But time, which is one of my favorite subjects, is very special for us humans and takes on a special meaning for us. We don't have an intimate relationship with gravity or energy, but we do with time.
For example, it is a constant reminder of both hope and a sense of urgency. We use time, the time which our Creator has given to you, to make plans and live for some reason. Whenever we sense time, we may be reminded that we have places to go and people to see before our time is over, that there is much to still discover, and that there is something each of us should accomplish before we die to leave this world a little better for our having been here.
However, we also are reminded by time that the hour glass is pouring out its sand. When ours ends, we will have no more time unless we discover the secret to time transcendence.
In other words, time has a special place in our consciousness. Awareness of time makes us nostalgic about the past, wistful over lovely prior delights, philosophical about the present and hopeful but anticipatory of the future.
In order to better understand the promise and peril that time holds for us, let me take a temporary detour into the topic of law and salvation, because it will elucidate the tension. friction and even the conflict between the material and the spiritual, and between the timeless soul in a time bound body--so please bear with me.
Paul talked about the law, and how when we were subject to the law we could not be saved by the law. A new covenant was needed, a new way of relating to the law. Not that the law would pass away, but that a new way of relating to it would permit us to transcend the death sentence of the law.
God made a new covenant whereby the law would be written in our hearts, and by willingly obeying the law in our hearts, we acknowledge God and relate to Him as children. Instead of relating to the flesh and the law governing the flesh, we relate directly to the Spirit.
This is very important. After the human race fell in the Garden of Eden, a distance came between us and God. A chasm that left us subject to the flesh and death. Through the Law of Moses and the prophets God still dealt with His people, but as with fleshly creatures of the earth.
Christ came from God to deliver us from death and sin, and from subjectivity to the flesh and the lusts of the flesh. He also came to deliver us from the letter of the law which was a good restraining factor but not that could redeem or save us.
And so, Christ conquered death and sin. He said no to the pride of life and the lusts of the flesh. He humbled Himself and conquered human willfulness, and He related directly to the Father, doing the Father's will and looking every moment to the Father for what to do and what to say in each moment.
He took up His cross and He denied Himself, and became the new Adam. The old Adam disobeyed God and failed. Christ, the new Adam, was true to His Father and never failed.
The New Covenant which God made with His people is very significant. This new Covenant is only possible because Christ never failed. Christ defeated death and Satan, and because Christ never failed, Satan stands accused of taking and killing an innocent man.
Christ is now the first of a new race of humans and with this new race of humans, God has made a covenant. He will write His laws into our hearts and He does so with His Spirit.
Our spirit may now relate directly to God's laws and to God's Spirit, through His Son, Who is now the High Priest of the new Covenant.
Another interesting thing is that in the Old Testament, they were instructed to make temples and exactly how to make them. The sacrifices and rituals were prescribed in exact detail, in order to be pleasing to God.
The temple built of stone was where the people related to God. Now under the New Covenant, God said that He would dwell with His people. And the dwelling place of the Most High God is the human being.
Our bodies are temples of the Living God.
Through the sprinkling of blood, the ground was purified. Through the shedding of Christ's blood, the earth is redeemed, and human flesh, because of the innocence and purity of Christ, is made acceptable for those who love Christ and obey Him.
The law is not done away with. It is still in effect. It orders and restrains us, and it is a set of precepts of right living. But we also see that it only reveals our weakness, our sinfulness and our inherently lustful and disobedient flesh to us. It stands as a standard and reminder to us of how we have all fallen short of the law and why under the law our end is death.
But now the children of God, those called by God and chosen by God, preordained to be His and who are destined to recognize Christ and love and follow Him in spirit and in truth.
Now do you see that God's own are no longer subject to the law but are now answerable directly to their Maker Who deals with them like a Father and writes His laws into their hearts with His Spirit. Likewise the spiritual man or woman will discover the secret to no longer be subject to time, as he or she was prior to regeneration, but is now subject to the Timeless One Who lives in the Timeless dimension where there is no sin and no death. Christ said that "the Kingdom of God is in you." Luke 17:20 and "the Kingdom of God is inside of you, and it is outside of you." Gospel of Thomas Saying 3.
Stand now in awe of the love of your Creator
And worship Him,
O lowly creature of little faith.
Bend bend your knees to His gentle lordship while you still can
That your days may be long
In the land which the Lord your God gives you
And that He may take you into His family
And call you by your name
To be one of His own.
But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:23,24 ESV
Our flesh is subject to the external law, and by it we are restrained. But the law only revealed our weakness and wrong. The law and the letter of the law cannot save us; in fact it condemns us. But the Spirit giveth life.
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 Corinthians 5:17
Read more articles about time
Destiny: Excerpts from The Majesty and Mystery of Time
Rethinking Heaven
Transcending Time
What Time Really Is and What It Tells Us about God
Do we begin again to commend ourselves? or need we, as some others, epistles of commendation to you, or letters of commendation from you? 2. Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: 3Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.
4And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: 5Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; 6Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
7But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: 8How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious? 9For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory. 10For even that which was made glorious had no glory in this respect, by reason of the glory that excelleth. 11For if that which is done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious.
12Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech: 13And not as Moses, which put a vail over his face, that the children of Israel could not stedfastly look to the end of that which is abolished: 14But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the old testament; which vail is done away in Christ. 15But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon their heart. 16Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away. 17Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. 18But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. 2 Corinthians 3Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, 2a minister in the holy places, in the true tenta that the Lord set up, not man. 3For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. 4Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. 5They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.” 6But as it is, Christb has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. 7For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.
8For he finds fault with them when he says:c“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord,
when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah,
9 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers
on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.
For they did not continue in my covenant,
and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord.
10 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, declares the Lord:
I will put my laws into their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
11 And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor
and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’
for they shall all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.
12 For I will be merciful toward their iniquities,
and I will remember their sins no more.”
Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. 17Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 18And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; 19To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. 2 Corinthians 5
However, as it is written:
“No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him”b—
10but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.c
1 Corinthians 2:9-13
