Live rightly, discern the times, redeem the day
“Live rightly, discern the times, redeem the day”
“Heraclitus’s famous saying that “you cannot step into the same river twice” is usually only half understood. Not only will the river be a different river when you step in it again, but you yourself will not be the same person who stepped into it before....
...We only live once, and time is short, so time throws down a gauntlet at each moment. Do we rise to meet it and seize the moment or not? Life’s challenge, as the British king Cymbeline says to his lords in Shakespeare’s romance when he hears that the Romans have landed, is to “meet the time as it seeks us.” Or in the famous lines of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar mentioned earlier, there are tides in the affairs of men that must be “taken at the flood.” [which...leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallows and miseries}.
NOT A MOMENT BUT A WAY OF LIFE
The Bible’s idea of carpe diem, “seize the day,” or “redeeming the time” is sharply different from the direction to which most people take the ideal—toward the selfish, the short term, and the purely spontaneous. There is no surer foundation, no stronger propulsion, and no more soaring vision of carpe diem than within the biblical or covenantal view of time. Yet just as freedom is not “the permission to do what you like” but “the power to do what you should,” so “seizing the day” is far more than the matter of bare choice—Krznaric’s “that you choose rather than what you choose.” Why you choose, how you choose, and what you choose are all vital and decisive factors in the Bible’s understanding. As we have seen already, repentance and forgiveness are the key to “redeeming the time” in terms of the past...Seizing the day or redeeming future time is rising to life within a powerful matrix of truths that sets out an entire way of life in which the ideal of carpe diem can come to its highest fruition. God calls us in the flux and flow of time and history, and the gift of being able to seize the day flowers from a way of life that weaves together three principles: “Walk before God,” “Read the signs of the times,” and “Serve God’s purpose in your generation.”
...Freedom, as C. S. Lewis argued in The Great Divorce, is the gift by which we humans most resemble our Maker. Freedom is therefore the grand assumption of human history, just as history—both for better and for worse—is the grand demonstration of human freedom. We must never allow words such as freedom to become civic or pious clichés. The stakes are too high to treat freedom casually. The Bible’s view of humanity is the highest and most balanced humanism in all history, and the implications for freedom and responsibility are momentous. Humans are exceptional among all the forms of life on earth: created to be both free and responsible, we are exceptional in that we alone can exercise our memory, our vision, and our will to make choices that make a decisive difference for good or ill, for order or for chaos, for justice or injustice in our planet home. Countless millennia after creation, we humans are still exceptional, we still have choices, and our choices still have consequences—now more consequential than ever.”
Os Guinness
Interview with Hank Hanegraaff - Bible Answer Man podcast
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