The age to come is the one which is breaking into ours, it’s the one where Christ’s kingdom rules and reigns triumphantly, the one where death is defeated by the hand of Life riding a white horse. We are saved for this glorious revisioning of the cosmos.

I suspect most of us give little thought to time. It’s simply something we move through, or exist in, or bemoan the passing of as the years slowly strip away the vigour of our youth.

The fact that what time is amounts to a philosophical question that is notoriously tricky and nevertheless vital to any sense of trying to live a good or harmonious or flourishing or blessed (delete as appropriate) life, is a fact that passes most of us happily by.

Afterall, philosophers are a notoriously unhappy bunch, so contemplating their tricky questions is unlikely to contribute to our sense of a good life, right?

That may be, and yet the Bible has a lot of things to say about time as a broad concept and as something to be inhabited well. Our theology, at least at the popular level within our churches, leaves these questions alone most of the time. It sounds esoteric, irrelevant, and impractical.

While I would want to mount a spirited defence of the relevance of the esoteric and impractical, today is not that day, and my introduction is already long and meandering enough to have lost you.

Here are five theses on time.

We Are Saved from Time

In Galatians 1 we are described as being delivered from the ‘present evil age.’ We are saved from a time. We tend to think of salvation either psychologically (rescued from the guilt or shame of sin), ontologically (union with Christ), spatially (rescued from Hell or the earth for heaven), chthonically (rescued from the powers of evil and death), or in terms of dominion (transferred to the kingdom of light).

All of those are Biblical, though I would suggest that spatially is not the best way of describing that particular set of realities. Rarely do I hear anyone speak of salvation chronologically (or kairologically?). We are saved from time.

There are lots of things to bemoan in our age, and there have been in ages past too. The Bible would see these as a weave stretching back to Eden: not several ages but a succession of sin’s dark marring written across the face of the world. We are rescued from this age, so we do not have to face its consequences if we choose not to, we are free to call it evil where it is and should do so, and we do not have to live according to its rules or principles.

In other words, we’re free from the curse of this time.

We Are Saved for a Time

Positively we are rescued for the age to come (Matthew 12, Ephesians 1, Hebrews 6)—that time after our stint in the presence of Christ in what we often call ‘heaven’ as shorthand. By the age to come we mean the time after the resurrection of the dead and the triumphant and everlasting victory of Jesus the Christ over all powers and authorities.

The age to come is the one which is breaking into ours, it’s the one where Christ’s kingdom rules and reigns triumphantly, the one where death is defeated by the hand of Life riding a white horse. We are saved for this glorious revisioning of the cosmos.

This time is breaking into our time because Christ came at the end of time (1 Peter 1, Galatians 4, Matthew 26, Mark 1, John 7). We now live in the collision of two epochs, the time between the times.

Read More