Commentary
This is a poem I started writing yesterday and finished up this morning. Yesterday, I thought of the phrase, “running out WITH time,” and asked myself how that might upend the notion of “running out OF time.” So, I didn’t know where I was going to go with the poem, but started writing anyway.
In a friend’s Sunday School class several few years ago, the friend asked us all if we thought there would be no time in Heaven. It seemed that my friend and I were the only ones willing to assert, “I don’t know of any reason why time should NOT continue to exist!” It surprised me that we were in the minority on this one.
Where do people get the notion that time will cease to exist in the eternal state? I suspect one source is a spillover of neoplatonism. But take this with a huge grain of salt. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, “I served with a philosopher. I knew a philosopher. A philosopher was a friend of mine. I am no Philosopher.” Regardless, the theory is that people with this thinking lump time in with matter, and therefore consider it unworthy of their ideal, immaterial “Heaven” (a disgusting non-place, if you ask me–I’m looking for the restoration of God’s GOOD creation).
Another possible source is an old translation of Revelation 10:6
And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer:
Revelation 10:6 KJV
Most modern translations render that along the lines, “that there should be no more delay.”
I ran my poem by a philosopher/theologian this morning, and he assured me that whatever reasons people come up with for saying that there will be no more time in Eternity are a matter of “blindly swallowing [wrong notions of secondary issues] without theological reflection.” Whew (it could have been me)!
Back To The Poem: Time Our Fellow Inmate
Here’s how I got around to using my upended phrase…. It occurred to me that people may think of time as one of life’s evils… that it limits us, perhaps even imprisons us. If so, the answer is to think of time not as the prison, but as a fellow inmate! Someday the prison of current limitations will be torn down. Then we’ll escape our prison cells and joyously run out WITH our fellow inmate, time.
To be continued….
