Obviously time is a relative commodity: a half hour in a hammock on a Saturday afternoon is hardly the same as a half hour in the dentist’s chair. We call someone in Europe late on a Saturday night; they are already into the new week. Or we stand under the stars and watch them as they were long ago, not as they are tonight. But more than that, the flow of time itself seems to be speeding up. Like a stream cascading increasingly downward until it pours itself into the ocean of eternity, it seems the rate of descent of our sinful world increases the rapidity of time’s passage.
In the early chapters of human history, the patriarchs moved from century to century with hardly a ripple. A 2500 bc camel looked pretty much like a 2000 bc camel. A double-wide, matrimonial-size tent in Abram’s day could have passed for the tent that Moses used 500 years later.
With the arrival of world empires, time swept the nations along at an ever increasing rate. Within the span of a few hundred years at most, everything changed. Literature, language, architecture–the tides of conquest brought new cultures. But eventually God would say, “Thus far and no further,” and the proud wave would crash on some enemy’s shore, leaving behind only a few broken remnants of its glorious past.
By the time of the dominance of European monarchies on the world stage, everything was replaced during the lifetime of one ruler, perhaps five or six decades. If you know your stuff, you can distinguish a Louis XIV table or an Elizabethan dress or a Victorian novel. Yet even then, societies remained relatively stable.
When we think of our own century, each decade marks a world of change. The Roaring Twenties. The Dirty Thirties. The War Years. The Prosperous Fifties and the Baby Boom. The Angry Sixties with venerable institutions swept away in the floodtide of rebellion. The Seventies saw the beginnings of the Information Age, a portent of what lay ahead. Our world (the Global Village) now has the finest of communication systems–with virtually nothing worth saying. The Eighties and Nineties have fast-forwarded by us, and now we stand at the threshold of a new millennium.
Those who dare to look ahead can hardly keep from being overcome with time-sickness. Like motion-sickness, it is a violent reaction to the constant unsettling movement of things. “Modern man,” someone observed, “is staggering between Vanity Fair and Armageddon.”
So what time is it on God’s clock? U Thant, head of the United Nations in 1969, said he thought the world could only make it another ten years. Obviously we’re living on borrowed time (2 Pet. 3:9). But what time is it?
It is time to take sin seriously. “The time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God” (1 Pet. 4:17). As the world’s standards plunge into deeper darkness every day, we must realize the danger–that our own standards, while remaining a respectable distance above the world’s, would make us more like Lot than we care to realize. He thought he was doing a good thing by offering his daughters to the men of the city!
It is time to take our responsibility seriously, “high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed” (Rom. 13:11). How much there is left to do! “You cannot kill time without injuring eternity,” wrote Thoreau. It’s no time to faint.
It is time to take the Lord and His claims seriously. “Sow to yourselves in righteousness,” cries the Lord, and “reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, till He come and rain righteousness upon you” (Hosea 10:12). Have we been crying for the rain but have failed to break up the fallow ground, exposing our dry condition to heaven? If we do not love Him as we should, tell Him so. Ask Him to woo you as He said He would do to Israel. After all, His secret name is Love.
Paul wrote, “Brethren, the time is short.” Now it’s two thousand years shorter than that. It’s time, all right.