Someone said that it takes two to tell a truth, one to speak it and one to hear it spoken. There are truths
 that we only grasp after we have given them verbal expression for the benefit of someone else. We may think we understand a truth, but when we try to share it with another person we often discover that we only half understand it ourselves. Then the attempt to communicate it clarifies our thoughts and the would-be teacher becomes his own pupil and learns from himself by the effort of telling.

"If we assume that all matter were to disappear 
from the world . . . there would no longer be any 
space or time." 


Albert Einstein 
 (1879—1955)

"Here you must put time out of your mind and 
know that in that world there is neither time nor a 
measure of time, but everything is an eternal moment". 


Martin Luther 
(1483—1546)

"Creation was with time, not in time."


Augustine of Hippo (354—420)

"Time shall be no more."

(Revelation10:6) 
John the Apostle 
 (0—100? A.D.)

"Time began with the world — or after it." 


Philo Judaeus 
 (B.C. 20—40 A.D.)

Since Einstein was himself a Jew and undoubtedly acquainted with the literature of his forebears, it is not perhaps so surprising that such a thought as the coincidence of the creation of matter and the creation of time should have been in his mind when he formulated his special theory of relativity and made time part and parcel of the physical world.

Linear time vs. endless eternity
 - Einstein wrestled with the problem of time, with the nature of time as opposed to eternity, of time as an abstract reality. The problem arises from the fact that one cannot have a span of time. It won't stay still long enough for us to measure it. Eternity is not time stretched to infinity on either side. There is a very significant difference between eternity and some immense stretch of time, for the simple reason that no matter how long this span of time is, we can always shorten it by chopping some off. Whereas eternity remains as endless as ever no matter how much we "cut off it." At least we imagine we could do this, though in actual fact we don't know how one can reduce the length of something, which has no extended existence. Only NOW exists, and it exists as a point, not a dimension. It has only location. The past is gone, and the future is not yet. We are therefore left with nothing to shorten; only with something which has no length. Ten days never exist at one time, nor even ten seconds, nor even ten millionths of a second! How then could we ever speak of reducing them? Time becomes a position in eternity, nothing more.
 Thus while we do seem to reduce time by having spent some of it, we cannot ever seem to shorten eternity no matter how much we have spent of it. In the very nature of the case, eternity remains unaffected by what has already passed. The categories of time and eternity are clearly not the same. What is appropriately spoken of as shortening in the one case becomes meaningless in the other. If we have a very large number and we subtract something from it, what remains is less than it was. If we have an infinite number and subtract something from it, we still have infinity remaining. When something is forever, as much remains no matter how much has already been subtracted. Thus while we may speak of time which is passed, there is no such thing as eternity which has passed. Otherwise we would have to ask the absurd question, Is God older today than He was yesterday?
 One of the earliest symbols for eternity was a circle. We walk around the circle through so many degrees of arc but we do not actually shorten the distance we yet have to journey to complete the circle. As much remains of it to walk around as ever. The circumference persists intact and unchanged. We can go on and on endlessly, like the marching column of caterpillars whose head has been induced to link up with the tail and so they journey on, each following the leader in front, until at last they starve themselves to exhaustion.
 Eternity does not flow past us, for if it did some would already have been used up. The concept of an exhaustible resource can never be applied to the word eternity. Only if eternity was like a circle would it then escape this inevitable limitation: but circular movement imposes a no less undesirable limitation, namely, repetition. Some ancient philosophers viewed heaven as cyclical, but even then they saw it as ultimately having an end, as though the circling movement gradually slowed down and finally stopped.
 It is not surprising that cultures which emphasize material things and reify (make a thing of) time, tend to view history as linear, as a long line of successive events with a firm beginning and a well defined ending. Cultures which attach more importance to the spiritual aspects of life have tended towards a view of history which has no beginnings or endings in the linear sense. Things just go on forever. Such is the Hindu view, so are all reincarnational views.

The Old Testament saint was promised "long life" (Exodus 20:12); the New Testament saint is promised "life more abundant" (John 10:10). To think of length as the essence of eternal life is to suppose that the reality of it is to be measured by how long it lasts. How long must a thing last to have real existence? Surely the reality of existence in eternity is not measured by "how long"?

Angels do not have material bodies, although it seems they can sometimes assume them when fulfilling divinely appointed tasks such as the rescue of Lot and his wife from Sodom — "taking them by the hand" to hurry them out of the city (Genesis 19:16). But if they do not have material bodies as normal to their existence, they do not normally occupy space either and therefore do not live in time as we do.
 Moreover, they existed before the creation of the universe, since they were already present at its inception and rejoiced to see it (Job 38:4-7). Did they therefore exist before time and thus outside of it?

They were, however, created beings and therefore not "inhabitants of eternity" as God is. What then was the nature of the framework of their existence if there was no time until the creation of the physical universe which came "later"? Can we speak of a before and an after in eternity while as yet there was no physical world in existence to constitute time in which to set events 'before' and 'after'? Is there a sense in which eternity does witness sequences of events that supply the ground for the terms before and after even though there is no actual passage of time involved? Is this the sense in which the Son of God said, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58) , re-asserting the NOW of his eternity by the words "I am," in spite of his use of the word "before"? Is there some kind of proto-time or pseudo-time in which the angels lived while awaiting the creation of the universe? Or are we to restate Augustine's insight by saying that time began with the creation, and read this to mean "with the creation of the spirit world" — this, then, being the first stage in the creation of the physical world?
 To state this as simply as possible: Did time strictly begin with an act of creation per se — that is, the creation of the spirit world, this being only one kind of time? Was a second kind of time then initiated with the creation of the physical world? When this physical world comes to an end, will this second kind of time also terminate? But as to the first kind of time, appropriate to a created order that is spiritual, will it continue as long as created beings continue to give it meaning? It may indeed be beyond our comprehension — but it still bears thinking about. . . . 
 If we limit the existence of time to the creation of the physical world we find ourselves called upon to explain how the creation of the angels, the bringing of something into being that was not there before, could occur when there was no time to accommodate this before. We therefore seem to be forced to conclude that the beginning of time was marked by creative activity per se, not merely with the creation of the material world as Augustine saw it. This makes the angels an essential part of the created universe in a way that we do not customarily think of them, but it does seem to be in accordance with Colossians 1:16. Here the creation of principalities and powers is linked with the creation of the material universe that constitutes the heavens and the earth, as though in a sense they all belong together. The creation of the spirit world and the creation of the physical world are thus lumped together without distinction.

In short, as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews said long ago, "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear" (Hebrews 11:3). Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, said, "We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:18). And in Hebrews 10:34, the writer assures us that we have "in heaven a better and an enduring substance." In the English of the King James Version "substance" means reality, the kind of reality of which the chief quality is its permanence and unchangeable character. It is the material aspect of the present world that is wrapped up in its temporality. What is physical is temporal: that is why space (which physical things must occupy) and time are so intimately bound together and so impermanent. Time itself is fleeting. . . . 
 We know from Scripture that this present physical order is to come to an end. Thus in Isaiah 65:17 the Lord said, "Behold, I create a new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind." In prospect is a new universe and this new universe will be permanent. Isaiah 66:22 reveals: "The new heavens and the new earth which I will make shall remain before Me, says the Lord; so shall your seed and your name remain." Hebrews 1:10-12 seems to provide in more precise language the details of what is to happen to this present universe. "You, Lord, in the beginning have laid the foundations of the earth and the heavens are the works of Your hands: they shall perish; but You remain; and they shall wax old as does a garment and as a vesture shall You fold them up, and they shall be changed."
 That changed order is the subject matter of Revelation 21:1, "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away." The prospect is not a mere destruction of what now exists with nothing taking its place, but the creation of a new heavens and a new earth with at least one fundamental difference in it. It will never grow old. This qualifying statement is very important because it implies some kind of timelessness. The passage of time inevitably means growing old in our experience. It may be that in this new order some other kind of "time" remains which is compatible with the fact of creation. As we shall have new bodies and live in a new universe, so we may experience some entirely new order of "time," but it will not be something which is irreversibly expended as it is in this world in which we grow old and die. There will be no entropy, no "running down" of energy and no "running out" of time, no tiredness and no death.

Conclusion


Eternity, then, is not a mere extension of time. Nor is it to be confused with it. Time and eternity are clearly in different categories of experience. They involve two different universes which are currently co-existent. That the child of God should have a sense of "eternity" is only in keeping with the fact that in his new life he is "not of this world." In our present life, time and eternity are somehow interdependent, though it is difficult to see what form this interdependence takes. But it is reasonably clear that we can no longer merely add stretches of time together in order to build a concept of eternity. Experience on the other side of the grave will not be "an experience of inexhaustible time" but rather an experience of timeless-ness.