“Everything outside God is held constant by God over nothingness. Creaturely nature means existence in time and space, existence with a beginning and an end, existence that becomes, in order to pass away again. Once it was not, and once it will no longer be. And it is not one but many. As there is a once and a now, there is also a here and a there. The world, in this process, is called time, and, in this separateness, space. But God is eternal. That does not meant that there is no time in Him, but it is a different time from ours; for fundamentally we never have presence, and for us spatiality means apartness.”
[On Jesus coming as the judge]
“First let me say something about the Christian concept of time. We cannot but realise that here a quite strange light falls upon what in the genuine and proper sense is called real time–time in the light of God’s time, eternity. Jesus Christ’s having come, all those past tenses, would answer to what we term the past. But how inappropriate it would be to say of that event that it was past. What Jesus suffered and did is certainly not past; it is rather the old that is past, the world of man, the world of disobedience and disorder, the world of misery, sin, and death. Sin has been cancelled, death has been vanquished. Sin and death did exist, and the whole of world history, including that which ran its course post Christum, right down to our day, existed. All that is past in Christ; we can only think back on all that.
But Jesus Christ sitteth beside the Father, as He who has suffered and has risen from the dead. That is the present. Since He is present as God is present, it already admits of being said that He shall come again as the person he once was. He who is today just as He was yesterday, will also be the same tomorrow–Jesus Christ yesterday and today and the same to eternity. Since Jesus Christ exists as the person He was, obviously He is the beginning of a new different time from that which we know, a time in which there is no fading away, but real time which has a yesterday, a today and a tomorrow. But Jesus Christ’s yesterday is also His today and His tomorrow. It is not timelessness, not empty eternity that comes in place of His time. His time is not at an end; it continues in the movement from yesterday to today, and into tomorrow. It has not the frightful fleetingness of our present. When Jesus Christ sitteth at the right hand of the Father, this existence of His with God, His existence as the possessor and representative of the divine grace and power towards us men, has nothing to with what we are foolishly wont to conceive as eternity–namely, an existence without time. If this existence of Jesus Christ at the right hand of God is real existence and as such the measure of all existence, then it is also existence in time, although in another time than the one we know. If the lordship and rule of Jesus Christ at the Father’s right hand is the meaning of what we see as the existence of our world history and our life-history, then this existence of Jesus Christ is not a timeless existence, and eternity is not a timeless eternity. Death is timeless, nothingness is timeless. So we men are timeless when we are without God and without Christ. Then we have no time. But this timelessness He has ovecome. Chrst has time, the fullness of time. He sitteth at the right hand of God as he who has come, who has acted and suffered and triumphed in death. His session at God’s right hand is not just the extract of this history; it is the eternal within this history.”
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