Length, width and height give form to our world. Time gives conscious reality. Most people wear a timepiece of some sort, perhaps a watch or a phone. Everybody knows what time is, unless they’re asked to explain it. Time gives sense to our world.
But through human eyes, time is an illusion and a paradox. It exists, yet it doesn’t exist. Philosophers of ages past observed that the future has not yet come into being, and the past is gone forever. The fleeting present, in constant motion, cannot be captured or examined. Yet everyone knows by experience that our entire creation exists as a function of time.
A long-forgotten jester once observed, “Time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” This wisecrack tells a cogent truth.
Only the present exists as a series of tiny, indivisible moments that give the illusion of flowing events, much as a series of movie frames yields a picture. Yet, to look at an unwinding strip of film is to realize that the pictures there are dead, even if some of the people in the photos are still alive. Not to say that their lives are not captured somewhere. Those lives – our lives – are real, and will be reviewed one day, if Scripture is to be believed. What we do here is real … has been real … always will be real.
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