Time is such an elusive factor – a discussion within the scientific community, a theological / theo-philosophical discussion (I am not of the ‘God outside of time’ school, but cannot easily resolve all the factors – another post another day!), and in the light of the video that I reference here it is a challenge prophetically. I am deeply disturbed by the ‘again’ language that is used explicitly and implicitly. In times past I came across people who said that the most basic step in the prophetic was to have authority over the weather but I have come to the conclusion that the greatest requirement is to enable kairos time (arrival of heaven) to chronological time. Otherwise history just repeats.
I recorded three videos, the first one here and I will publish one a day over the next couple of days. The first is on the issue of time and not being caught in the snare of ‘again’. The second is a shift I see that is vital that we move from ‘demonstrating the power of God’ as a conclusive sign to that of the presence of God, and the third I look at the shift from Jerusalem –> West, and now what?
Some ponderings this morning… Just thoughts rising in real time in response to what you shared.
I really appreciated what you had to say, and it’s stirred something in me.
I find myself wondering—what if Jesus didn’t come through time at all?
Not aligned to it.
Not pulled in by it.
But rather, rupturing it completely—splitting time open with His presence, and bringing the Kingdom in a way no alignment could have prepared for.
I think about how He came, and maybe the how is just as important as the when.
Maybe the how gives us clues for now.
Maybe kairos isn’t primarily about timing at all—but about rupture.
He came through a girl no one saw.
There was no strategy, no symmetry, no fanfare.
Just blood, and breath, and fear, and a body.
You could interpret that as divine timing, but to me it feels more like rupture.
So when you speak about the knot breaking between the premature and the too late—
I wonder if what’s needed isn’t better discernment, but holy rupture.
I think about how Jesus entered the wilderness—not because a season had shifted, but because the Spirit led Him there.
He didn’t go to synchronise, but to empty Himself. To descend.
I think about how He stood up in His hometown synagogue and said, “Today this is fulfilled.”
And they tried to throw Him off a cliff.
It wasn’t the wrong time.
But maybe, in a way, there’s never a right time for that kind of systemic rupture.
It’s always too much.
It doesn’t stand inside time—it breaks time open.
And it simply wasn’t the version of kairos they wanted.
I think about how He wept at the tomb before calling Lazarus out.
He waited four days.
It looked too late.
But it wasn’t about delay—it was about making space for the ache.
When God ruptured time, He didn’t do it with clocks.
He did it with love.
The love of God making Himself known again to those who had failed.
Maybe what we need is to return to the wilderness—not as a place of strategy, but of seeing.
To find the spring where Hagar named God.
To sit beside the Christ who said “today” far more often than “soon.”
I wonder if the future is meant to be pulled into now—but not in the abstract, way we often think.
Maybe it’s meant to come as rupture.
As presence.
As something lived from the place that has already been split open.
Sometimes I wonder if we’ve been reading the Bible the wrong way around.
We start in Genesis and try to build forward, as if Eden is the origin point and Revelation is the finale.
But what if the truest reading begins in the garden where Jesus stands with wounds?
What if resurrection isn’t the climax, but the compass?
And what if the only way to rupture anything is to pass through death?
What if we’re not heading toward the Kingdom,
but being invited to live from it—
backwards into the ache?
I guess I’m wondering if part of why we get stuck is because we’ve been reading forwards to back,
as if we’re going somewhere Jesus hasn’t already opened.
But Jesus didn’t come to push us forward—even though in a way, He also did.
Until the whole world is filled with glory so paradoxically it’s not future or past it’s movement.
So yes, there’s expansiveness.
But it’s not driven.
It’s breathed.
He came to breathe Eden back into our lungs.
And maybe the real reading starts in the locked room—
with wounds, and peace, and no more schedule.
Could it be that “the Kingdom is at hand” doesn’t look like repeat?
Maybe it looks like return.
Maybe it looks like rupture.
Oh dear! Is there room for another rather long comment?
Martin notes that actions determined in some way prophetically are susceptible to matters of timing. He says that those that are premature tend not to develop fully, those that are tardy often miss their opportunity.
We need hardly mention that thousands of preachers and teachers are in various ways obsessed with the days and the times, usually in the context of largely fictive eschatological expectations. The whole arena of time and timing is, frankly, the most appalling dog’s dinner of claim, counterclaim and negation almost all of which is driven dogmatically by the perceived needs or ambitions of very particular forms of Christianity. In other words, the arena is very crowded with very loud voices. That this is not what Martin discusses should be obvious but I can never be confident that this doesn’t need to be said.
What remains in Martin’s description, recognizing that this is just the first of a series, is that we are still, broadly, dealing with only one perspective upon the nature of time. This is time that is unidirectional, it passes and we inhabit its momentary present, the old arrow of history. Our rhetorical and missional needs change in time, well, they do if we are alert to them and sufficiently agile in our response. But we are plagued by the stories of people who lived ahead of their time, or held on to past time in nostalgia. Nostalgia is not problematic because it is about something past, it is problematic because it changes the past, idealizes, reassesses, uses clumsy or weary recollections. It is problematic because in every case it tends to be deceptive and is far too comforting in its selectivity.
I want to suggest another conceptual framework entirely. Here, time is not linear it is entirely relational. This is time as it exists within and between agents of action, of speech, of events. This form of time is more like a permanent moment whose qualities and even feasibility are only capable of meaning in relation to the same moments experienced or inhabited by others.
I need to dig in a strange field, briefly. There is a strong aspect in String theory that says that beneath the most basic subatomic particles these strings exist and they vibrate in a way that determines whether a particle is (becomes) a proton, an electron, a quark or whatever. The whole universe, all of physical existence, in this model, has one dominant metaphor, music. The universe is a symphony of vibration. It is constantly new, always occurring, if it stops, poof goes reality!
Music is time. This is the case physically, in sound. The frequency of what we experience as tones or notes, is measured in hertz. A very low note vibrates, say, at 100 hertz (100 times per second) a note at the top of the range of our hearing might vibrate at 15 or 20 kilohertz or 15,000 times a second.
But time has several functions in music. Dynamics or the relative loudness of a sound is a measure of a sine-wave at any frequency, it is a measure of energy expended in an instant of time.
There is a moment in musical time that enables you to tell if you are hearing a trombone or a cello without this tiny moment, all instruments sound almost identical. That moment is called the transient. It lasts somewhere between eight and fifty thousandths of a second. It is the bit between a sound not existing and existing and it contains all the information we call Timbre. The colour and texture of the sound.
Before I lose you completely, this is not academic or a divergent theory. It is about understanding the tools that we can use to understand time in a way that liberates the idea of time from some sort of predetermined calendar of expectation. Bear with me, please.
Sticking with music but zooming out. An orchestra, perhaps the loveliest thing that a hundred grown-ups can do together, is a community. Every member has a particular skill, fills a particular role in a complex relationship with every other member and all of them acting in concert (no apologies, it is not a pun) in response to the declared intention of a composer (the text or score). It is a fabulous, lively, hugely dynamic thing, constantly negotiated always changing entirely mutual endeavour. But in this illustration time is only and always entirely relational. Here time is measured in relation to a set of conditions that need to apply in order for a moment to arrive. You play a note or refrain not because there is a mark in the syntax that says so, you sound your note because you understand why other notes, phrases, musical lines need to be complete before you make a sound and you must make your sound before the next note, perhaps from sixty feet away is sounded. In an orchestra there are small teams who frequently have to play identically so you are listening to your team intensely, you are watching the leader of your team to anticipate when they are going to move. The leader of your team is watching the leader of other teams, say the second violins listen constantly to the first violins, who respond to the teams in the brass section who respond to the bass section or the cellos. Quite how you play your part is also negotiated, that’s why there are qualitative differences between performances, between orchestras, between pieces.
OK, too many words. My point is to ask what sort of sensibilities, in relational time, can we bring to bear? What are the signs, what do they signify and how do we detect them? The next set of questions, were I to ask them, would be about what happens if there is nothing in the score to tell us what to do? What sort of attention do we need to give if we are improvising our music? How do we learn to trust each other, or ourselves, with that task.
Finally, I can show you something that feels a bit like this. There is a young British musician causing a stir at present. I’ll link to one video of him creating music in the moment with a very good orchestra at the Kennedy Centre.
https://tinyurl.com/42hxfc7k
But I would encourage you to seek out other videos where he plays unwritten music, by conducting audiences of many thousands of people in making sounds entirely unrehearsed and unplanned. Please seek them out, because Jacob Collier is a sweet example of what it means to begin to understand the moment. And I think finding the moment is close to the sort of time Martin is talking about. Being ready for that moment, of course, is a slightly different matter.
(There, I did it. I got through this whole comment without mentioning aesthetics once! Doh! But I am not sorry, we live in need of a revival of aesthetic sensibility because it might be this that opens insight into the moral, political and social moments in which we live. As Wittgenstein said, Ethics and aesthetics are much the same thing, and as I suggest, it is not just ethics that benefit from this sort of discernment.)
Comments!!! Wow and thanks to Heidi and Chris.
Time!!! Such a huge discussion and when it gets to the philosophy and the science of time…
Time and relationality – this for me is the strongest reason for resisting God is outside of time. Sequence in time does not mean linearality but I think that sequentiality seems to be part of the God we proclaim and part of what is necessary for personhood.
String theory is very attractive – probably won’t win the day in the scientific world cos there is probably an intrinsic battle between ‘music / art’ and science. Maybe more than a scientific theory it is an imagination that could bring us closer to experiencing the cosmos (I wonder if Brueggemann might have been impartial to a bit of string theory!!!).
And time – at least totally distorted with the resurrection – what on earth are multiple people doing coming out of their tombs in Jerusalem? Surely they of all people knew it was not the right ‘time’… and as you say Heidi it is not just the resurrection when this takes place.
Maybe what we perceive as chronological time is only a perception (after all there are those who push that further and that we all live in a simulation… a step beyond ‘a yellow submarine’!), it seems for sure to be relative, to speed and position within. Perception or not (and I don’t think it is simply a total perception) our ‘task’ seems to be that of aligning ‘chronos’ to ‘kairos’. That is where hope comes – not so much hope in Ecclesiastes with ‘nothing new under the sun’. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And if that is the case re-incarnation might be the most hopeful option – though why would it offer more hope, just a repeat?
Imagination… so vital. I wonder if someone might write a book along the lines of the prophetic and imagination?
The way we are headed – into the future – is into the past. Characters have changed, but characteristics not. War, famine, pestilence… And fuelled by ‘who will be the greatest’.
I dare to believe for something different. For we see through the lens of new creation (a time framing vision: ‘I saw’).
Just a couple of brief notes. Some will only serve to increase the more abstract descriptors and would take your thread away from your intention (and be quite difficult as well). Without being too cryptic…
1. Arts/science categorical distinction in popular thought is little more than a squabble in a culture war. A better question might be is there an inherent conflict between aesthetics and mathematics and that is a far more settled matter.
2. Aesthetics should not be conflated with the arts even if the arts are the most convenient location of examples. Aesthetics brings into play aspects of consciousness, relation, proportion, expression, impression… it is about harnessing a wide range of facilities and sensibilities as we seek to make shared decisions or evaluations.
3. The idea of the moment is that it locates the sense of time and timeliness within particular arenas or fields or something spacial (a community or people, perhaps). It is about how we perceive the state of the players and the game and goal, borrowing from football, of course, something I know absolutely nothing about. But look at how moments are negotiated and perceived and exploited. In part it means that we can exclude some aspects of context because those would be unaffected so we would be drawing our data from a more focussed and perhaps a more conversational process.
4. You are exploring the nature and dynamics of the prophetic and seeking forms of alignment that, presumably, create the conditions of change. This already puts you in a quite advanced position in terms of freedom to perceive. You are not bound by social identity constraints as some are. You are not bound by empirical assumptions about cost or value as most organizations are. You can be blessedly free of the dead hand of precedent. Whatever is at stake you are free to deploy whatever aesthetic sensibility you wish in that there might be a harmonious moment, a pattern might emerge, a beautiful alignment might make itself apparent. A rhythm might be heard. A crescendo sensed.
And on and on…