by Kenneth Sheets
God renders to everyone and everything that which is exactly right. He never gives to any individual more or less than is perfectly due. For Him to do otherwise would be for Him to violate perfect rightness, thus misrepresenting His own person, a condition which cannot exist.[1] Accordingly, every human being receives that which is exactly right in regard to his or her response to God’s manifestation of Himself. Stated differently, God evaluates, He “judges,” perfectly and remunerates each one in perfect rightness, as defined by the criteria of His eternally established design for all that exists.[2] His criteria cover not only the physical, social, and moral interactions for the whole of creation, they define the state of man’s relationship to his Creator. Man may accept or he may reject the Creator’s criteria, and the Creator will “judge” him accordingly.
The problem for man is that God’s “judgment” is absolute and eternal, but man must make his choice to accept or reject in time, that aspect of human existence which makes life “temporal.” From the moment of conception to the instant of death, human life is temporal, measured by the passage of minutes and hours and days and years of time, that is, man lives in time. This has led many to conclude that time is human in origin, something that humans developed to help them in their interactions with other humans and the world in which they lived. This view makes man the creator of time, and thus, the one who defines and controls it; he is the master of time, and his perception determines its nature and significance. In reality, the creator of time does determine these things, but the creator of time is God, not man.
Seen, then, as an aspect of the perfect design of God, time not only brings perfect order to the sequence and progression of life events, it also gives purpose to human temporal existence. God did not establish time as a nonessential part of life. Just as the Creator can do nothing which is not significant and meaningful, when He set in order the repetitive motion of earth and planets and stars, He was providing the perfect environment for all humankind, whether they walked with Him or in violation of His way.
God established time as a perfect aspect of human existence even before man violated the design of his Creator. Then, after the ädäm’s violation brought about his alienation from God, the Creator drove the man and his woman from His garden and from access to the tree of life. In His perfect understanding of His human creature, God barred their access to “the tree of life” to preclude their eating from the tree and then living a never-ending existence in a time-governed creation. The two conditions were totally incompatible with one another, especially in regard to accomplishing God’s purposes.
The alienation that man sensed as soon as he violated just one aspect of his Creator’s design was an alienation that required reconciliation; for man to “live forever” in his alienated state was not the design of God. In fact, He had already prepared the way of reconciliation, and that way would be revealed in time. God thus established time so man would have a sense of his own finiteness and the limited nature of temporal life. Man needed to know that he would not “live for ever,” and that every condition associated with his temporal existence and in eternity to follow was established by his Creator and not himself. This meant that the Creator, the One who is transcendent over and controls both sides of physical death, had already established another set of conditions for man’s post-death existence.
The criteria of the Creator governed man’s temporal existence, that is, the time between conception and death, but those criteria did not end at death; they merely changed to a different set of criteria, some of which would not vary greatly from those before death, but many of which would be very different. Death would not provide “escape” from God’s design; it merely changed which aspects of the design applied. Death would not end accountability; it merely changed the criteria associated with accountability. Death would be an irreversible change from one state of existence to another, but it would not end existence, and man needed to live within a system which made that truth inescapable. God had designed man to conform to His design from conception to eternity, and thus, He placed man in an existence that constantly reminded him of both the nature and extent of his accountability. The Creator provided time as one essential aspect of that existence.
Having used the repetitive motion of the earth and heavenly bodies as the basis for time, God made time incremental and measurable. Longer repetitive periods may, in turn, be subdivided into shorter repetitive periods, all of which are interrelated. Thus, years may be subdivided into seasons and months, and months into weeks and days, and days into light and dark periods and hours, and hours into minutes and seconds, and on and on until one reaches the smallest increment of time which cannot be further subdivided.
Time, then, is composed of an incredibly large, finite number of extremely small bits, increments, moments, quantum particles of time, that mark progression in the creation from one moment to the next. The inseparable relationship between the continuing repetitive motion of planets, etc., and the quantum particles of time which compose all intervals of times dictates that the particles of time themselves are continually passing. Their progression, then, their “passage,” cannot be arrested or reversed. The Creator established this condition, and nothing in the creation can change it. Moments come, and moments go. They are future, then they exist, and then they are gone, past and irretrievable, lived and no longer livable, relentless in their passing into the realm of history, unchangeable, despite man’s contemplations and his best efforts to make it otherwise.
Man cannot escape its effects; he lives within time, and it inexorably moves him from moment to moment, solidifying the conditions of past moments, rendering them unalterable, but at the same time rendering every subsequent moment affected by those past conditions. Thus, the temporal life of man is a composite of the effects of the conditions of past moments, moments that bore within them, while they existed, the possibility of differing choices, differing decisions, and very different result prospects. Once past, however, man must live with the “fruit of the seed that he has sown,” the results of the decisions he made in the moments of the past. This is the nature of human life, and that is the way God designed it to be: the decisions of past moments affect the moments of the present and the future.
While this criterion of God’s design might at first appear undesirable, it is in fact just the opposite. In His infinite wisdom and understanding, God has provided man with the means to insure future success and blessedness. Man may, in any present moment, choose to receive the truths of God’s revelation and enter into a reconciled state of existence that allows him to walk in intimate fellowship with the One who brought all things into existence. On the other hand, man may, in every present moment, choose to reject God’s truth and the success and blessedness available to him, but all the while he must know that, at any present moment, God may terminate his opportunity and authority to choose, and thereby confirm the choices he has made. At the moment of termination, the moments of the past, and the decisions made within them, will become unchangeable, an unchangeability established by God Himself, and man will live or perish with the effects following from them.
Because every man lives in time, every man faces some moment when the degree of his reception or rejection of God’s temporal revelation will be established, never to be changed in all of eternity. That moment for most comes individually as death overtakes each, but the moment of death may be essentially identical for a number of people, whether living together or remote from one another. An event of war or weather or other natural force may bring death upon a large group of individuals in a single moment, but regardless of the cause or the size of the group, death establishes in a moment the individual choices of those involved, whether to receive or reject.
In this respect, both the Lord’s return in judgment and His sudden removal of believers at the rapture are “judgments,” “discernings,” on His part that will affect not just a large group of people, but indeed all temporal human existence. He will “judge” at those moments which individuals have actually believed His revelation, and He will thereby establish the individual choices of each as well. Regardless of the nature of the event, that “judgment” will occur at a moment in time, and the “group” constituted by all humans who are “alive and remaining” at that moment will experience in some way an end of the conditions of life they have known and will enter into a new set of conditions, set by the One who brought the event.
Just as death or the Lord’s return brings about a set of conditions wherein man’s freedom to choose is terminated, in like manner, the Creator may at any moment change the conditions of human temporal existence, especially to any new set of conditions that He has already revealed to man are coming. That revelation constitutes a part of the overall revelation for which He holds man accountable. Man has been instructed by the perfect instructor, but like a child in school, he chooses to receive wise instruction or, for whatever reasons, to let it pass, but he cannot escape the accountability.
[1] Titus 1:2. He is the “non-false” God, that is, He cannot misrepresent His true self in any way. Man or angels may misconstrue God’s perfect representation of Himself, but their misconstruing does not change the perfection of Divine activity.
[2] Numerous texts of Scripture indicate that God’s design, and the criteria comprising it, were established before “the foundation of the world.”