Somewhere deep in the bowels of Hell, Satan convened his demons.
"How do we capture the souls of these humans?" he asked them for suggestions.

"O Father, of Lies, tell them there is no Heaven", said one. "With no prospect of eternal reward, they'll have no reason to live virtuous lives"

"O Master of Deceit, tell them there is no hell," said another. "Having no fear of final judgment, their human natures will lead them to ruin."

Then a senior demon rose and faced the assembly. "If you really want to capture the souls of humans, " he said, "Just tell them there is no hurry."

Now is the time. Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation.

The relationship between God's time and man's time is of utmost significance. If this were superfluous, God would not have drawn our attention to it Himself. A thousand years of man's time are like an evening of God's time. So, to know one is also to know the other.

We must not, to begin with, mistake the meaning of this paradoxical statement. It is not a statement on the insignificance of time in human zone, though it could seem so. Time matters to God! God is sovereign over time. All of time belongs to Him. Yet, He pays minute attention to every particle of time. In that sense, to begin with, a thousand years are 'like an evening gone'. To understand this, let us couch this idea in parabolic terms. A thousand Rupees to a billionaire is, perhaps, what a Rupee is to you and me. A billionaire may treat a Rupee with indifference. But God is not indifferent to the worth of even a small particle of time. He takes care of the contents of millennia as minutely and carefully as we would cherish the experiences of an evening, if our life were to shrink to its short span. God values time. Of that there is no doubt.

If thousand years are like an evening to God, the converse should also be true: an evening is like a thousand years. Years, whether counted in thousands or millions, imply a succession of evenings! In God's scheme of things all evening belong together and comprise the building blocks of the mansion of time. You cannot value years if you do not value days. This truth has decisive practical application. Whether or not we value our life can be seen clearly from our attitude to time. As a rule, those who devalue their own worth are sure to be lazy and poor at time management. They are unlikely to be punctual. As a result, they recognize opportunities only in retrospect, and are marked by grumbling rather than thanksgiving.

This offers a valuable insight into the Parable of Lost Sheep, which is fundamentally about seeing issues from a godly perspective. The proof of the caring character of the shepherd in the parable is that he attaches supreme significance to every sheep. None of the hundred should be lost. He would have clung to the remaining 99 sheep, abandoning the lost one to its lonely death, if he could not look beyond the given moment. The prospect of rejoicing with the whole flock, after retrieving the lost one, belongs to a zone beyond the given. In the mind of the caring shepherd, the moment of loss and the moment of restoration co-exist in faith. But for this, his conduct is irresponsible and reckless. Yet, his is the only outlook that makes sense, in particular with reference to the plight of the lost sheep. The world, in the wake of the materialistic worldview, measures everything quantitatively. Quantity belongs to today, here and now. As regards tomorrow, flocks of one or 99 are the same; for they are not yet, and are equally unreal! In course of time, one sheep could multiply to a hundred and the 99 could shrink to none, depending how things develop. Materialism makes sense on the scale of man's time. Its treasures, says Jesus, will not endure; they are vulnerable to rust, moth and thief [Matthew 6:19-24]

All of the time is God's. It is when we think we have expelled God from time that we develop the illusion that we are living in man's time. Whether or not we are willing to subject ourself to God's authority is seen best in terms of our willingness to function in terms of God's time, on which depends our "sent-ness"; for the harvest is the Lord’s, not ours. Those who see the harvest as their own will not consent to be sent, but insist on everyone and everything coming to them! This is where religious authorities, including those bearing the label of Christianity, go grossly wrong! In the world, Jesus warned His disciples, men love to Lord over others. "It shall not be so with you." [Mark 10:42-44] Why? Because, they are to function according to God's time. On the scale of man's time, it is inevitable that men play God. And not even God is safe when that happens! This explains why the sphere of religion abounds in cruelty and bloodshed, including cruelty to God. Truth to tell, the Victim in every instance, is God Himself; for there is not a blow struck on this earth by human hands that does not fall first on the face of Jesus [Acts 9:4]

The fact that a thousand years are like an evening gone embodies a profound paradox: human life is incomparably significant; whereas human actions and achievements are, in themselves, woefully insignificant in the light of eternity. While activities may seem to take place within the zone of man's time, life exists in its integrity and wholeness only in the haven of God's time. Because for God a thousand years are like an evening, the sum total of our life-time's actions and achievements individual and collective count for little on the canvas of eternity. They cannot impress God! Yet we are created in the image and likeness of God. So we matter a great deal.

Our life is God's invention and He attaches immeasurable value to it. It is somewhat like seeing human beings from an aeroplane, flying at an altitude of 5000 meters. People, walking on the ground, seem crawling worm-like, moving in humiliating insignificance. Yet, we are up there because human beings are great enough to invent the marvel of an aeroplane! So, viewed from the perspective of God's time we need to be more and more humble the higher we go; just as humans on the ground appear to grow smaller as the plane ascends. Our actions assume worth to the extent that we are rooted in God. People on the ground may seem worm-like as the plane ascends but the pilot in the cockpit does not, or should not! The he and the passengers do so, on the account of aeroplane, this marvelous invention will become a human scandal: a curse on our species. The spiritual application of this idea is that we cannot, and must not, calculate our worth only in terms of what we do or achieve; but also in terms of who we are, which is more fundamental. Jesus, hence, put the focus on who we are: the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and the leaven in the lump. On the scale of man's time our actions may seem more important than our spiritual identity (who we are); but on the scale of God's time our actions matter only because of who we are.

"A thousand years are like an evening": a few overtones:

1. God has time for everyone and everything. Thank God, He is not a miser of time, or beset with the epidemic of business! So, He has time for you and me and does not hurry past anyone. [Probably that is why we have no value for God; for we are conditioned to fear and respect only those who rub salt on the wound of our insignificance!] God packs it into an evening what it would take us a thousand years to do. This is not a matter of physical powers but of the power of God's love; for time is a function of love! We have, time for what we love; and time begins to stretch according to the reach of our love. Ask a mother, if you are not convinced.

2. It is a statement on God's faithfulness that endures over generations. Because a thousand years are like an evening, God does not forget! In the Bible, this enduring memory is an important aspect of the very Being and Identity of God. He is "God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob." The promise He made to Abraham took generations to fulfill! God remembers! We forget because we change. God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. Life would have been impossible if God was a victim of amnesia, like we are! Paradoxically, it is because God remembers, and not because He forgets, that He forgives. "Forget and forgive" implies a senseless concept. What is forgotten is not forgiven. God forgives because He remembers His faithful ways with the human species from time immemorial: the promises He made with our forefathers in faith, the chequered history of faith and the fact, as the Psalmist says, "that we are dust". He remembers, above all Himself; whereas we forget, over time, who we are and what we are calling is. This interferes, in a real and substantial way, with our duty and freedom to forgive. The freedom to forgive is the sign of being the 'Children of God' over and above being the children of men.

3. Human life exists within time and space. God is not limited by either. This is at the root of miracles, which are anything but miracles from God's perspective. They are simply an exercise of His authority over the time-space delimitation presupposed in creation. Several of the miracles happened because God has the authority to foreshorten time. For that very reason, miracles can continue to happen, if God chooses to. That is to say, at His word what would normally take several months or years can happen upon the instant. This is, besides, the proof that there is an eternity. Time is both the enabler and constrainer of human existence. But time is, because Eternity is. Else, time will accommodate only blind chance and absurdity. That which changes has to be rooted in that which does not. We cannot be wholly free as long as we live in within the elbowroom of time. We are the children of eternity and only in that eschatological homeland can we be truly free. God is creatively free within time, because He is eternal and beyond time. What is within time is subject to change, which also makes growth possible! God neither changes nor grows, though He is the reason why there is growth at all in any sphere or particle of life.

4. Yet another derivative from the concept under consideration is the fact that God's mercies never end. God is eternally patient, because He is not subject to the tyranny of time. He knows our tomorrows, even though we don't our own. Patience is, among other things, a function of time. (Historians of cultures point out that impatience and intolerance are basic to "time-oriented cultures". In contrast, "space-oriented cultures" are more tolerant, but tend to lack in dynamism, as in the case, say, with the Indian culture.) Often it happens that events blind us to the promise of tomorrow. As the Psalmist says, weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning! We cannot pierce the veil of the night and behold the morning that fires the east. When we are impatient an evening seems a thousand years!! A significant application of this idea is that God's time is the unit of life; where as man's time is the unit of death. As each year goes by, we move closer to our death; where as when we live according to God's time, we take step closer to eternal life. (Hence the irony of birthday celebrations! The celebrants are blissfully unaware of the contradiction within it. Seen only in the light of man's time, birth anniversaries must seem alarming; for they warn us that we are inching closer to death. But, when under the light of God's time, birth anniversaries call for celebration; for we are progressing towards eternity. The correlation between life and eternity implies the absolute value of life! it is a logical imperative, hence, that when hope of eternal life evaporates, life looses its meaning and worth.) This truth can serve as a bulwark against SUICIDE. No one in touch with God's time can take his own life. Likewise, ABUNDANT LIFE is impossible, so long as we live under the logic of man's time. The liberation that Jesus promises [Luke 4:18 Setting the captive free...] has this implication to God's time. How can we, as children of God, live unmindful of God's time? This could afford a useful insight into what it means to be BORN AGAIN.

So the question arises in the end; which is the right or authentic unit of time? Or, which unit of time shall we adopt? God's or man's? Also, why do we sing, In your time...In your time...You make all things beautiful in your time..." The beauty, meaning and purpose of everything created is unveiled in God's time.

What happens when we switch over to man's time to God's time?
We become part of a larger flow of life and are liberated from our small and narrow worlds. A dreadening myth that those who live exclusively in man's time carry is the notion that a person's life begins and ends with him or her. Man's time is marked by discontinuity. The denizens in this idea of time attach no value to passing anything down from one generation to another. Each age why, each life- is assumed to be an accidental and discontinuous beginning. In contrast, from a spiritual perspective, life becomes themselves out through the centuries. Seen in that light, the vision of the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews makes eminent sense that we are surrounded by a 'great cloud of witnesses' [Hebrew 12:1-2] On the plane of man's time, this is, at best, quaint poetry!

Faith is germane to God's time. The desperation that many feel in respect of faith whether or not we are wasting our life, chasing an impossible ideal- is induced by man's time. We cannot stretch our imagination beyond the brink of grave, as long as we live on this plane alone. Faith in anything beyond the present is possible only when we switch over to God's time.

We regain a sense of proportion. Within the framework of man's time, the gravity of every man-centered and man-driven event looks exaggerated. It is in this light that we can understand best Jesus' exhortation that we should not fear human beings. We are sure to remain shackled by this fear till we switch over to God's time, wherein man's authority can be seen in perspective, as Jesus did in respect of the authority of Pontius Pilate. We magnify our woes, problems and difficulties as well as the important of others. [We become, then, a party to devaluing meekness. Those who strut around on the stage of history seem comic characters on the scale of God's time, not to say anything of those who inflate themselves in the institutional contexts. The Resurrection of Jesus is, in one sense, the meeting point of two modes of authority: those that pertain to God's time and man's time.) And we become, in the process, blind to the redemptive nuances of our suffering and struggles. It is impossible to have faith in God, if we do not also subject ourselves to God's time. Faith enables us to see the present in its true preposition.

[THE ARTICLE IS TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT ISSUE]
[COURTESY TO: THE CHRISTIAN MIND SERIES - CMS]

THE AUTHOR:

Rev. Dr. Valson Thampu, who combines wide-ranging experiences in higher education, social action, multi-faith initiatives, media, preaching, research and writing, has been engaged in mainstreaming the Christian presence in India. Leaving the certainties of a coveted job, he plunged into public life a few years ago and has become, in a short span of time, a household name. A proponent of the “spirituality of seeking,” as against the religiosity of mere compliance, Rev. Valson’s writings are distinguished for their originality of thought and freshness of style. All of his writings are a contemporary response to the words of Jesus, “Cast your net in the deep”.