Behold, I bring you great joy that shall be for all the people! Amen.
This morning’s sermon is drawn from our epistle reading. The central verse is Galatians 4:4.
But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those who were under the law.
This is the Word of our Lord!
Where is the Life we have lost in living,
the wisdom we have lost in knowledge,
the knowledge we have lost in information?
Twenty centuries have brought us farther from God
and nearer the Dust.
This is from the opening of T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from the Rock. “Life” is capitalized because Christ the Life (see John 1) is what we humans have by and large lost in living our lives. Not an optimistic view of the course of time since the birth of God in Bethlehem, is it?
Eliot was writing in 1934 about the decline and fall of Western civilization. As Bob Dylan sang in the 1960s, “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” but not for the better. Here in the time of CHRISTmas we smile sadly at that song while we add a further step to the decline and fall of America and the West.
Where is the Life we have lost in living,
the wisdom we have lost in knowledge,
the knowledge we have lost in information,
the information we have lost in ideological lies?
Twenty-one centuries have brought us farther from God and even nearer the Dust.
What are we to do? According to the apostle Paul, we need a new philosophy of time.
Philosophy
You might be worrying that I’ve forgotten I’m supposed to be preaching a sermon this morning, because The Biblical Philosophy of Time sounds like I’m teaching a philosophy class. I haven’t forgotten; let me recite a Bible verse so that you can feel comfortable and indeed motivated to take such a thoughtful look at the words of God about time. The passage I have in mind to get us ready for our text for today is Colossians 2:8-9.
In Colossians 2, the apostle Paul who wrote our Galatians Epistle for this Sunday after CHRISTmas writes, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, the kind that depends on human tradition alone and the ABCs of this world, but not on Christ.” It’s understandable if a church worries when a preacher says, “I’m going to preach philosophy in the sermon this morning.” But it’s also an indication that the church has not been reading or listening to the apostle Paul. Where is the wisdom we lost in knowledge?
The word wisdom in the New Testament is part of the compound Greek word philosophy. Up until very recently, when as Eliot wrote, “wisdom was lost in knowledge,” philosophy did not refer to one discipline in the multitude of the departments of a modern university. In the time of the New Testament, philosophy included all careful thinking and studying. Philosophy is a traditional word that means “the careful, lifelong seeking and befriending of wisdom.” That’s the word sophos in philos-sophy.
Maybe some of our daughters or women hearing or reading this sermon have the name or the middle name of Sophia, which is the second part of philosophos, the befriending, like a brother or sister or dear friend, of wisdom. True, everlasting wisdom, the wisdom that the Greeks and the secular philosophers today cannot possibly achieve because it comes only through the Word, is Christ himself.
We know this because in the opening of 1 Corinthians, St. Paul writes, in a passage most of us here know by heart, “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom.” That’s our word, sophos. Paul continues, “But we apostles, we preach Christ, Christ the Crucified – the power of God, and the wisdom of God.” Sophos again.
You may also notice, as a very small footnote, that St. Paul was very capable of engaging in philosophical discussions with philosophers on their own terms. Remember Acts 17 and his philosophical sermon in Athens, where he obliterated the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, showing them they weren’t doing decent philosophy because they weren’t paying attention to the resurrection of Christ.
So, contrary to hollow and deceptive philosophy, our philosophy must be kata Christon, based upon Christ himself as its only ground. Paul goes on in that Colossians passage, “And in him dwells the fullness of God; he is the head over every ruler and authority.”
Time
In Colossians, Paul writes about the fullness of Christ; in Galatians, he writes about the fullness of time. Same Christological vocabulary. There is an analogy or biblical parallelism here. The fullness of time follows from the fullness of God in Christ. The concept of fullness, whether in the Old Testament psalms or in the New Testament epistles is tethered to the fullness of God in his creating work but especially in the person of Christ the Word of God who became flesh. We can talk about the fullness of time only because of the fullness of God, not the other way around. In other words, the biblical and authentic philosophy of time is not like Newton’s science (the empty container space which has things in it) but like Einstein’s science (space-time which reshaped not only physics but also our philosophical understanding of reality itself).
There is a major philosophical writing from the last century titled Being and Time, but the biblical philosophy of time would be titled Christ and Time, with the subtitle How the Fullness of God in Christ Incarnate Creates the Fullness of Time.
Furthermore, God fitted us for this philosophy of time in two ways. First, he made us fallen human sinners in such a way that we deeply desire the right philosophy of time but cannot achieve it on our own. Second, through his Scriptures God provides the philosophy of time that we human beings cannot live without. Thus, our philosophy of time cannot by the nature of things be a hollow and deceptive secular philosophy, but has to be based on Christ, the incarnate wisdom of God.
Here, then, is the verse from Ecclesiastes 3 which demonstrates this deep human need for the revealed philosophy of time. The opening of Ecclesiastes 3 is where Solomon declares that there is a time for this and a time for its opposite. A time to be born and a time to die, for example. Then that whole section on time comes to a crescendo in this verse.
He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, without the possibility that mankind will find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.
The Hebrew word behind this translation actually means “appropriate and beautiful” in its time. God has made everything “beautifully fitting” in its time. Furthermore, the LORD God has also imparted the desire for eternity in the human heart, but without the possibility that mankind will find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.
You already sense this desire for eternity. You don’t have to worry about me going around and calling on you one by one (this is not the time for it), but we could do it. If I asked each of you, “Do you recognize, do you feel that you have in your heart of hearts, in your very human being, a desire to know everything that reaches back to the beginning and everything that reaches into the future?” you would say, “Well, I do, but it’s very frustrating because I don’t know much about the past and I certainly don’t know the distant past any more than I know the future.”
The words actually in this text explain the fact that God has placed eternity in our hearts. It’s there even after the fall, you see. Maybe especially it’s there after the fall, thank God. Remember, we cannot know time apart from God’s Word. The exact Hebrew wording is OLaM, it actually means the hidden past and the hidden future, because to us, the past is a dark, unseen thing, just as the future is, apart from God and his work.
The Philosophy of Torah Time
Our text has three parts. The middle verse is the center of gravity for today’s philosophical sermon about Christ and the fullness of time. Before the fullness of time there is our hereditary pre-CHRISTmas slavery to sin and an utterly false philosophy based on human tradition and the ABCs of this fallen world. After the fullness of time our hereditary slavery to our fallen human nature is, horrible to say, still in effect in our country and in our world as we head into 2026.
I.
Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave, although he is owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. So we too, when we were children, were held in bondage under the elementary principles of the world.
II.
But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba! Father!” Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.
III.
However at that time, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those which by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles, to which you want to be enslaved all over again? You meticulously observe days and months and seasons and years. I fear for you, that perhaps I have labored over you in vain.
Before the fullness of time, we recognize that time is not the famous arrow of time of physics, but the gravity well of an upcoming promise in time concerning the woman’s offspring who would be from outside space-time.
Note well, we were held in bondage under the elementary principles of the world. The word elementary principles comes up about three or four times in our Bible texts this morning. In Paul’ Greek it is a word that has been translated as elementary principles, elementary materials, elements of the world, even spiritual principles in the world.
But at base, it’s the word stoicheia, which means the ABCs of this world. Apart from Jesus, apart from Baptism and the Scriptures and Holy Communion and his work in our lives, what we had in our childhood was the wrong norm, the wrong standard, a presumed knowledge that’s no knowledge at all, because we were basing everything on the ABCs of this world.
The distressing reality is, as we see in the third part of our text, that the problem is the same after the fulfillment of every promise of Christ the Messiah in this twenty-first century after the fullness of time.
It is the Problem of the Life We Have Lost in Living. However, brothers and sisters in Christ, the Problem is worse, because as Paul said to those Greek philosophers in Athens,
Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. (Acts 17)
The Problem of the Life We Have Lost in Living is not simply a matter of ignorance; in fact it entails the blatant, stubborn, malice aforethought rejection of Christ the incarnate Word of God in our schools, in our halls of government, in our courts, in crumbling Western civilization.
Still, to those who have ears to hear – and given that “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God” (Romans 10:17), there is this winsome call in this text about the fullness of time.
But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles [that’s those ABCs of this world] to which you want to be enslaved all over again? You meticulously observe days and months, seasons, years. I fear for you that perhaps I have labored over you in vain.
Time is not an endlessly recuring cycle. Time is not the fire within which we burn. Time, according to the Scriptures, is a creation of God filled to the brim with fullness of God in Christ Jesus, whose incarnation is the one and only means by which we sinful but never-ending human beings will spend eternity with God in Heaven.
This is the biblical philosophy of time, a philosophy of life based not on mere human tradition or the ABCs of the world, but grounded in Christ, in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead. There is no viable alternative.
So teach us to number our days, That we may present to You a heart of wisdom. Do return, O LORD; how long will it be? And be sorry for Your servants. O satisfy us in the morning with Your lovingkindness, That we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days You have afflicted us, And the years we have seen evil. Let Your work appear to Your servants And Your majesty to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us; And confirm for us the work of our hands; Yes, confirm the work of our hands. (Psalm 90)
The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, shall keep your hearts and your minds through faith in Christ Jesus. Amen!