What Then Is Time?

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. PSALM 90:2

Book XI of the Confessions begins with the first verse of the Bible, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and it very quickly runs into a question that has troubled thinkers ever since. If God made the world at a beginning, what was He doing before? Augustine records the answer some wit had given — that God was preparing hell for people who pry into mysteries — and refuses it. It is one thing, he says, to answer a question and another to make fun of the questioner; he would rather say I do not know than raise a laugh at a serious enquirer. So he sets out, prayerfully, to think about time. Few pages in all of Christian writing have been read more often by philosophers. But Augustine wrote them as a prayer, and they are meant for ordinary believers too.

The question no one can answer

He admits at once that he is out of his depth. “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” We speak of time constantly. We plan, remember, wait, hurry. And yet when we try to say what it is, it slips through our fingers. The past is no longer; the future is not yet; and the present, if it lasted, would not be time at all but eternity. It seems to have no width. How can we measure something that is always vanishing?

Augustine’s answer is that we measure time in the mind. There are not really three times, past, present and future, but three presents: a present of things past, which is memory; a present of things present, which is attention; and a present of things future, which is expectation. “It is in thee, my mind, that I measure times,” he says. Time, for a creature, is a kind of stretching of the soul, reaching back in memory and forward in hope.

For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. JAMES 4:14

God’s To-day

Against this fragile, stretched-out creaturely time, Augustine sets the eternity of God. The answer to the question, what was God doing before creation? is that there was no before. Time itself is something God made. “For there was no ‘then,’ when there was no time.” God does not live through a very long succession of moments. He does not have a past He has left behind or a future He is waiting for. He simply is.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM. EXODUS 3:14

Augustine puts it in lines of great beauty. “Thy years are one day; and Thy day is not daily, but To-day, seeing Thy To-day gives not place unto to-morrow, for neither doth it replace yesterday. Thy To-day, is Eternity.” Every moment of history is present to God at once. He is not hurried by our deadlines nor delayed by our waiting.

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 2 PETER 3:8

This is not a cold, abstract idea. It is profoundly comforting. The God who is eternal is never taken by surprise, never runs out of time, never arrives too late. Our yesterdays and tomorrows lie open before Him. The prayer we prayed ten years ago and the need we will have ten years from now are both in His today.

But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end. PSALM 102:27

A life scattered and gathered

Then Augustine turns from speculation to his own soul, and the tone changes. Having spoken of the stretching of the mind across past, present and future, he confesses that his own life feels less like a stretching than a scattering. “Behold, my life is but a distraction,” he says: pulled this way and that by many things, torn apart by the passing of time. It is a description that many modern people, with their divided attention and crowded calendars, will recognise at once.

The remedy he finds is Christ, the Mediator between the One God and us many. By Him, Augustine prays, he may be gathered up from his old way of life to follow the One, forgetting what is behind, not scattered but stretched forward, not distractedly but intently, towards the prize of his heavenly calling. He is borrowing the words of Paul, and he has turned a philosophical puzzle into a way of life.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. PHILIPPIANS 3:13–14

Living in time before eternity

Augustine’s reflection leaves us with several practical wisdoms. First, humility. If we cannot explain even time, which we live in every moment, we should hold our theories about God’s ways lightly. Second, peace. Our times are in the hand of One who is not subject to time, and so we need not be frantic.

My times are in thy hand. PSALM 31:15

Third, attention. Since the present is the only point at which we touch time, it is the only place we can obey God. We cannot live in the past, and we cannot live in the future. We can only live, and love, and pray today. Fourth, hope. Our scattered lives are not meant to stay scattered. The eternal God has entered time in Jesus Christ, so that creatures of time might at last share His everlasting day.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. PSALM 90:12

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Notice this week how often your mind is in the past (regret) or the future (worry). Each time, bring it back to the present and pray.

2. Take one anxiety about the future and consciously place it in the hands of the God for whom tomorrow is already today.

3. Identify one source of distraction that is scattering your life, and set a limit on it for a month.

4. Choose one thing you will stop looking back on, and, like Paul, deliberately forget it before God.

5. Read Psalm 90 aloud at the start of the week and ask God to teach you to number your days.

A PRAYER

Eternal God, You were before the mountains, and You will be when all our days are done. Your years are one day, and Your day is always today.

My life is scattered among many things. Gather me by Christ, the Mediator, and set me on the one thing needful.

I place my past and my future in Your hands. Teach me to live and love and obey You now.

And bring me at last into Your everlasting day, where there is no more waiting. Amen.