In the Fullness of Time

As Robert Jenson has argued, the big question of religion is the question of eternity: How is God related to time? For Greco-Roman paganism and for the great religions of the far east, god or the gods are immune to time, alien to time. The whole point of Plato’s forms is to provide a stable fixity to changing sensible reality.

Many Christians think of God’s eternity as timelessness. But Ecclesiastes 3 points to something else: Our lives are patterned by different times: times of weeping and laughing, times of seeking and times for giving up; times to speak and times to keep silence; a time to kill and a time to heal. 

Timing is everything. We never experience time in the singular. We experience times – times for this and then that. And we are called to respond fittingly to each time as it presents itself.

And Solomon adds that God makes all things appropriate or beautiful to the time. He governs time. He orchestrates the times. But He is not absent from time or alien to it. He weaves the various times of human lives into a tapestry. We may not be able to see the pattern in the carpet, but we trust that God harmonizes the changes of our times.

The great demonstration of this is the incarnation. God acts at the right time. The timing of the incarnation is perfect. In the fullness of time, God sent the Son. At the right time, Jesus died for us. The Son of God entered our time to show the Father in our history. Without ceasing to be the Lord of time, God came to us in time, not to rescue us from time, but to redeem all times. 

God the Son entered time so that whatever time it is – a time to live, a time to die; a time to seek, a time to give up; a time to weep or a time to rejoice – each and every time is a time of encounter with God in Christ through the Spirit.