What Is Time?

Today's Scripture

Psalm 90:2-4 — "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God... For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night."

2 Peter 3:8-9 — "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance."

The Big Idea

In Book XI, Augustine asks a question a child could ask and no philosopher has fully answered: what is time? His discovery — that past and future exist only inside the mind, as memory and expectation — explains why we feel so stretched, scattered, and anxious. But the point of the puzzle is pastoral, not academic. We are creatures of slipping moments held by a God who never slips. Our times are in his hand.

Reflection

A question that melts when you touch it

Reading Genesis — "In the beginning, God created" — Augustine stumbles onto a question that will not let him go. What was God doing before the beginning? People in his day had a joke answer: preparing hell for people who ask nosy questions. Augustine refuses the joke; he says he would rather admit "I do not know" than mock an honest seeker. Then he gives his real answer, and it is better than the joke: there was no "before." Time itself is a created thing. God did not make the universe at some point on a timeline; he made the timeline. Asking what came before creation is like asking what is north of the North Pole.

That settled, Augustine turns to the deeper riddle, and it leads him to one of the most quoted sentences in the history of philosophy:

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know." — Augustine, Confessions, Book XI

Test it yourself. You have used time all day — you woke up on time, you have plans for later. You know time the way you know how to ride a bike. But try to define it and it melts in your hands:

"If nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were coming, there would be no future time; and if nothing were, there would be no present time." — Augustine, Confessions, Book XI

Follow the logic. The past has stopped existing. The future does not exist yet. And the present? Try to grab it. This year shrinks to this month, this day, this hour, this second — and even a second is partly gone and partly still coming. The present has no width at all. Stand at a microwave watching the countdown: 3, 2, 1. Where did each second go? You live your whole life on a vanishing point.

Scripture feels this fragility keenly. James 4:14 — "What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes." That is not an insult. It is a diagnosis — and the first step toward peace.

The clock inside you

So where does time live, if past and future do not exist out there? Augustine's answer was revolutionary, and psychologists are still catching up to it: time, as we experience it, lives in the mind.

"It is in you, my mind, that I measure time... The impression which passing things make upon you remains, even when the things themselves have passed. It is this impression that I measure when I measure time." — Augustine, Confessions, Book XI

The past exists as memory — an impression that stayed behind, like a footprint in wet cement. The future exists as expectation — a picture we project forward. The present exists as attention. Your soul is doing all three at once, constantly, every waking hour. Augustine's word for this is distension — the soul stretched out in different directions, like a person trying to hold three doors open at the same time. No wonder we are tired.

And doesn't that name your actual life? It is 11 p.m. and you are replaying the awkward thing you said at lunch — living in a past that no longer exists. Then you switch to rehearsing tomorrow's test, or appointment, or hard conversation — living in a future that does not exist yet. The two thieves of regret and worry steal the only moment you were actually given. Jesus speaks directly into the stretched-out soul: Matthew 6:34 — "Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." He is not being casual. He is being precise: God gives grace in day-sized portions, and worry always tries to live where the grace has not been issued yet.

The God whose name is present tense

Now hold our slipping, melting time next to God's relationship to time. Augustine writes one of his most stunning paragraphs in praise of the difference:

"Your years neither come nor go... Your years are one day, and your day is not any and every day, but Today... Your Today is eternity." — Augustine, Confessions, Book XI

God does not lose his past or wait for his future. He does not experience time as a leaking bucket. All of it is present to him — one unending Today. Moses sang the same truth a thousand years before: Psalm 90:2-4 — "from everlasting to everlasting you are God. For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past." And when Moses asked for God's name at the burning bush, the answer was pure present tense: Exodus 3:14 — "I AM WHO I AM." Not I was. Not I will be. I AM.

C.S. Lewis put this insight in the mouth of a senior demon coaching a junior one — the demons' job being to keep humans out of the present:

"The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity." — C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

The present is the one place where your time and God's eternity actually meet. The past is closed; the future is fog; but now is an open door. And something in us already knows it. Ecclesiastes 3:11 — "he has put eternity into man's heart." That is why no creature but us is haunted by time — why we keep photographs, dread birthdays, and ache at how fast children grow. A fish does not feel wet. We feel time, because we were built for something it cannot hold.

This is also why God's apparent slowness is never neglect. 2 Peter 3:8-9 — "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years... The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you." From inside time, waiting feels like abandonment. From eternity, it is patience with a purpose.

Gathered up by the God who entered time

Augustine does not end Book XI with a philosophy lecture. He ends it with a confession: my life is a distension — I am scattered across times I cannot hold. And then he reaches for a Bible verse, the very one that gathered him: Philippians 3:13-14 — "But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." Not scattered among many things, Augustine says, but stretched out toward one thing. The cure for distension is direction.

Here is the gospel turn, and it is breathtaking if you slow down for it. The eternal God — the one whose Today is eternity — entered time. The great I AM took on a body with a birthday. Jesus lived inside our minutes: he waited, he grew, he was twelve, he was thirty, he ran out of hours like we do. And on a specific Friday afternoon, at about the ninth hour, he gave his life for us. Eternity let itself be measured by our clocks so that creatures of vanishing moments could be brought into his unending Today. Your past — including the parts you replay at 11 p.m. — is not hanging over you; at the cross it was dealt with, and in God's memory it is covered. Your future is not fog to him; it is already held.

That is why the psalmist could pray in a crisis, Psalm 31:14-15 — "But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, 'You are my God.' My times are in your hand." All of them. The ones you regret, the ones you dread, the one you are in right now. A hand is the safest place in the universe for a mist to live.

So how do we live? Not anxiously, but not carelessly either. Moses prays, Psalm 90:12 — "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." Jonathan Edwards, at nineteen, turned that verse into a personal rule:

"Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can." — Jonathan Edwards, Resolutions

And Thomas à Kempis, the medieval monk, added the perspective that makes every moment honest:

"Happy is he that always hath the hour of his death before his eyes, and daily prepareth himself to die." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

That sounds dark until you remember whose hand your times are in. For people held by the eternal God, numbering our days is not morbid math. It is gratitude with a calendar.

Going Deeper

Tonight, do a one-minute experiment Augustine would have loved. Sit somewhere quiet and notice where your mind goes: how many seconds before it bolts to the past (replaying) or the future (rehearsing)? When it bolts, do not scold it. Just say one sentence: "My times are in your hand." Then return to now. Repeat for the full minute. You are not emptying your mind — you are standing at the point where time touches eternity, and meeting the God whose name is I AM.