Time always comes up short. We haven’t enough to do all the things we want to do. Our days are numbered, and our number is bound to come up sooner or later. Andrew Marvell is right: “Time’s winged chariot” hurries near regardless. And yet we want to break outby any means. We try to prolong our lives by being “safe”, eating well, and staying fit—but the last laugh is on us. In medieval times many placed their faith in alchemy, magic, and witchcraft to no avail. Ponce de Leon sought but never found the Fountain of Youth. Today we read about “longevity companies”—In silico, Altos Labs, and Juvenescence—all of them working “to use A.I. to help humans live forever”. Last year, Business Standard reported, “In the quest for eternal life, US billionaires are turning to cryonics, the science of freezing bodies with the hope of future revival”. Others who are not so well-heeled place their hope in embryonic stem cell research—a dreadful option, for when this means the willful taking of human life, I am put in mind of the vampire legends. To gain life this way is to participate in the death of innocents. We drink their life blood.

Will science ever open the door to eternity? Will science ever solve the problem of time? Will scientists ever stop trying?

To have a beginning, a middle, and an end is to exist in time. We are born, we live for a spell, and then we die. It cannot be gotten around—not by science, not by any human means.

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Cosmologists say that some 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe began with a Big Bang. Since that time, they say, the Universe has been expanding, and all things are drifting farther apart, away from the Source. But it’s not just a cosmic reality. It’s here below, in our faces. A Christian might look on the world today and conclude that the nations are drifting farther apart, that open borders and globalism lead to The Tower of Babel, that human beings are drifting farther apart from each other—like planets or solar systems—and that we Americans are drifting away from the Source, the Light within us—or, as Jesus puts it, The Kingdom of Heaven.

Science and theology are not unrelated, and I think we find an answer to the problem of time in the Book of Genesis. For the Eastern Fathers say that before the Fall, our first parents existed in a state between time and eternity. For lack of a better term, it was a “mythological” state of being we can hardly imagine. But when they disobeyed God and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they fell into time and death entered the world. Now we experience both good and evil; we have knowledge of both; and sometimes they seem mixed—or perhaps we take one for the other. We are confused. The world is confused. Chaos comes. The center does not hold. As we exist in time, death is inevitable. We live to die.

To have a beginning, a middle and an end is to have knowledge of good and evil—and it isa kind of knowledge that always comes up short.

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But evil does not exist outside of time. Evil is real to us but unreal to God. For evil is darkness, and God isn’t: “God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5). This is to say that God is beyond all that is of time—all that we can see, touch, or hold in our minds. This is to say that only God is eternal. But the Scriptures tell us that there will come a day when time no longer exists. Then evil will pass away, and God will be “all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28).Then everything in the cosmos will come together in God. Then God’s glory will be the only reality, and in His Light we shall see Light (Psalm36:9). In that day we’ll see God, and we’ll see ourselves for what and who we have become.

Evil works in time, but so does God. This is The Good News. For in becoming one of us, God begins a process of bringing all things back to Himself—the Source, the Life-Giver, the Creator of all things. If the Universe is expanding—if the elements of the cosmos are drifting apart—God is working to bring all things back together. This may not be apparent to cosmologists who look to the stars, but it is a matter of divine revelation, known by those who keep seeking The Kingdom of Heaven.

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Can we compare the biblical Fall to the Big Bang? I suppose we might say that Adam and Eve fell from grace in a big way, and that we human beings have been drifting away from the Source and each other ever since. But the Bible is not science, and God is beyond science. Creators of A.I. have their fantasies; scientists have their laboratories; cosmologists look up, measure space time, and speculate. But we are left with precious few facts about our beginnings, the Universe, and eternity. Even if the Universe is13.8 billion years old, this is only a moment to God (in a manner of speaking!). We Christians only know that in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, we have been given a part to play in God’s plan to bring everything back together—and that we are to proceed humbly here below, in this life, in these times, in our own little ways. This is what the saints say.

Listen to them and dwell on that as you contemplate your own beginning, middle, and end.

Fr. Paul Martin
Annunciation & St. Paraskevi Greek Orthodox Church
New Buffalo, MI