Peace be with you. Friends, many mythologies and philosophies in the ancient world hold

the time is cyclical. What I mean is it just kind of goes round and around.

Never really getting anywhere but just kind of a constant repetition, a bit like the change

of the seasons or the revolution of the planets that time is just cyclical. Think of the

modern philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who spoke about the eternal return of the same.

That's kind of that idea. So here it is. It's going to go around and around and then return

to where it was before. Cyclical view. Many people today I think hold to a kind of meaningless

view of time. The time is just one thing after another. It's not really coming from anywhere

in particular. It's not going anywhere meaningful. It's just one thing after another.

Well to both those finely despairing understandings of time, the Bible says no. The Bible has

a purpose of sense of time. Time is moving in a direction. It's moving toward a fulfillment.

I'll see why? Why? Because of God. God is not hovering somewhere in a way beyond the

world indifferent to it. No. God is the author of creation which means He's the author

of time. And that means time has a purpose. It's got a trajectory. It has an energy. It's

moving somewhere. And see we Christians hold. The trajectory of time is precisely toward

Christ. St. Paul spoke about Christ as the recapitulation of all things and of all time.

Time moves toward Him. And it means in his historical coming but then even more so in his

second coming at the fulfillment of the age. Time is purposeive. It has a trajectory. It's

meaningful. Now here's an analogy. The time is just a jumble of one thing after another.

Or think of the time that's implied in a novel. A novel that's written by someone and he's

telling a story that's unfolding. And now no novelist is just going to share a jumble

of one thing after another. No, a good novelist is telling a narrative that's moving toward

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