The Time for God

“‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!’”(1:15)

Today Mark is telling us the first words of Jesus who started his official life. The first word of the sentence is that “the time” has come. The time in the Bible is not “chronos” which means sequential time but it is “kairos” which means a moment something special happens. The time in the Bible does not mean just May 3, 2006, but it is the spiritual moment in which God’s will be fulfilled. But generally speaking we cannot recognize this kind of kairos. Because chronos has been inscribed as the ultimate tie deep inside of our minds.

Time experienced by us who are living on earth is calculated usually by the speed of light. If we could move faster than the speed of light, the present time is said to move slowly. In a theory, time might go backwards. But it is impossible for time to go backwards because we are living in the world controlled by irreversibility. But anyhow it is evident that time regarded as the ultimate must be relative.

In this viewpoint, it is not unreasonable that the time in the Bible means kairos. To look at the time as the duration of being completed of life could be much richer understanding than the mechanical viewpoint for the time. The problem is that if we could have that kind of understanding or not for the spiritual time.

We Christians need to see the time as a dimension for the relationship with God. Just like time goes faster or slower according to the degree of density of love to the lovers, time for us Christians goes by how close relationship we have with God, doesn’t it? But it is very frustrating to see that their relationships with God do not change to most Christians even after years pass by. It means that they have more knowledge about faith-related life, but no change for the real relationship with God. To Christians living like this, the time for God does not mean anything special. To those people the spiritual time does not seem to exist at all. Without the change of an inner life, that means no growth and depth, it means we are dead spiritually with only superficial time passing.

The time for life that God prepares is related with all the species on earth as well as with a person and also with the whole mankind. Is modern civilization controlled by the time of God? Does modern life science accept God’s life movement? Do the politics, economy, culture of today in the world recognize the fact that God is near? Even if people in the world do not understand God’s time, we Christians should recognize this precisely. So we should do our best to work in order to vitalize God’s life according to our position in life, just like the phrase in the Lord’s prayer: “as it is in heaven your kingdom come as it is on earth”.

“The time to be fulfilled” as described 2000 years ago has become fulfilled now? God’s time does not move by calculation of chronos. And also that time is not moving by proportion to historical time, either. That time is moving only by God’s way, and by the people who recognize that, the time could expose itself clearly, or it might be still hidden. In this point the spiritual recognition of Christians today is very important. Today if we understand exactly God’s kairos and live according to that, the moment of right now could be God’s time.

Lord, how much do we recognize your time in our living today?