Time Continuum

Laurence Hull Stookey says that we ought to think of time as existing on a continuum. Picture it as a line that we are still connected with the past behind, the future ahead, and the crossbar of the present moving forward. “The present is but the moving edge between the past and the future. In some sense the present barely exists. This should not suggest that the present is unreal or unimportant, but only that it is always a moving edge of the thinnest sort. In a moment you will read a word set in all capital letters; your reading of that word is now a future event. BUT now your reading of that word is a past event. In this understanding of things, the past is far more than prologue and the future far more than a distant dream. The present cannot be conceived in isolation, as if it had a life of its own. Always the past, present and future are of a piece” (Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church, p20).

Christ is the great arche, the thing in which all things consist and cohere, including the past and the future. We know that every person’s identity is bound up in the past and the future, and this means that in order to be made whole in Christ, our time has to be reconciled to him. If someone is troubled or haunted by their past, this means their present (and likely future) is negatively dominated by it. If someone takes sinful pride in their past, for example by way of an accomplishment or heritage, this will distort their identity in the present. There is no escaping our intimate connection to where we come from, what we have done, and what has been done to us. But there is relief and grace only if we submit it to Christ, the great forgiver and healer. Paul called himself the chief of the sinners because he was a persecutor and murderer of Christians, among other things. Yet when he looked back on his past, he found even before his birth the plan of God: “But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles. . . .” (Gal. 1:15-16). Jesus didn’t knock Paul down until the Damascus road, but providence was always at work in Paul’s life preparing him–even through and in spite of his sins–for obedience to the Gospel and work in the kingdom. His past informed his Christian life.

For the Christian, a sinful past need not pose any trouble to the present. It might pose consequences, but those consequences are still part of God’s plan for good to the person now.

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