The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Mark 1:15 (ESV)
Exodus Fulfilled – Part 4
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3
The Ancients wrote and spoke differently to us. Where we view time as a linear marker of our days and the events of our lives, the ancient Hebrews viewed time to be the rhythm of life. They didn't view the past and future as the march along a straight line, but rather time was the content of an experience that they had had, or did not yet exist. For them, the content, or context, actualised the event or time.
When the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote his book, he didn’t do it from the point of view of, “there is a time for everything. Therefore, there must be a time to be born and a time to die, a time to kill and a time to heal…” He had observed the “times” of life, as in the content and context of different “times”, and then wrote “there is a time for everything”. It’s an encouragement not around marking time in a diary or calendar for specific things, but to make the most of the ‘time' that we are in. Time was a present tense thing for them…
They didn’t participate in Sacred Feasts and Festivals to “observe” or “remember” times past, they were a ‘time' to partake of the actual event itself. When the Israelites did Passover every year, they didn’t do it to remember the Exodus, but rather to partake in and experience Exodus for themselves. To live in the moment of it. It was the actualisation of the truth of the experience. These festivals and feasts, which were appropriated by God, are mostly what the Bible means when it says “God’s appointed time.” It was a time to stitch the times together, in a sense, to experience what God had done, and in this way, was still doing. Hence the Exodus, (new creation, redemption, salvation) was re-actualized each year in their lives. It was happening now as they participated in the ceremonies and rituals of repeating events causing the New Creation.
When Mark wrote his memoir, so to speak, of all that had happened in his life, the first words he records Jesus as saying are, “The time is fulfilled…”
On days where I’m feeling particularly melancholy, I can imagine that we are on the precipice of the world ending. There is enough hate, and terror and weapons and evil around to bring about such an event. The end of all things. BUT on those same days, babies are born, forgiveness takes place, bridges are mended or built, and hope is ignited through kindness. It seems that these two contrasting possibilities are alive within us and among us at the same time. “The time is fulfilled – The Kingdom of God is at hand.” Hate and love, war and peace, confusion and conviction. He is stitching together the time. Fulfilling exodus… from bondage to freedom, from lost to found, from darkness to light.
The Exodus has been actualized with the Resurrected Christ once and for all. Hopelessness to hope, death to life, the breath of God breathed into dust… And now we don’t have to observe a feast or festival to take part in God’s redemption. It dwells within us and among us at all ‘times’, if we dare to look. Time itself is being redeemed.
Mark's book carries the theme ‘how do we move through suffering.” How do we move through the unexplainable, the darkness, the bondage, the waiting, the longing, the brokenness…? The times where we are looking for “God’s perfect timing” to heal and make new and redeem and release and make right?
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart…” Ecc 3:11.
Every season, every “time” that you go through in your life is the perfect space for God to reveal his kingdom, his beauty and grace to you in new and different ways. The eternal that has been stitched into your heart resonates with the divine, beckoning you to keep on going, to live this moment fully, to see and hear, turn around and see him in the midst of your time. His Kingdom is here within it: the resurrection, not just a memory or a moment of time in history, but alive and taking place with you at this very moment. Although you may have to search it out, it is surely there.
Go to Part 5 – Day to Live
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