A Christian Worldview on Past, Present, and Future

The Three Faces of Time: Past, Present, and Future

The distant past came and left. The great minds, writers, and path-pavers of the old days carved out their spot in history by the long standing nature of their penned, painted, spoken and lived works.

The present is here, right now. It is on-going and yet gone in a breath. The great minds, writers, and path-pavers of the present are chosen by public opinion--usually Top 10 charts, streams, or sales numbers. We do not know if they will be a part of the ever-growing Pantheon of great, culture shaping, "Classical" creators. We may have our guesses as to who will be admitted, but no one will know for certain until the present becomes the distant past.

The future is anticipated and unseen. The great minds, writers, and path-pavers of the future may be born or unborn, ready for greatness or praying it one day comes. In a secluded season of maturation, the future great mind prepares or receives daily nourishment from its mother.For the great mind born, threats to their greatness face them on all fronts. They may have their chance at shaping the world through their gifts stolen by force, coercion, manipulation, immaturity, or another enemy. However, the great mind who endures faces these threats. They understand the distant past, observe the choices of the present moment, and describe the unknowable future in a way to others that makes them appear prophetic.

The Sacrifices and Consequences of Timeline Idolatry

All three of these categories of human time and experience are invaluable. Yet, a consistent sin of any institution is timeline idolatry. In our worship of either past or present or future, we offer sacrifices.

We may sacrifice the present for a ludicrously implausible future--one of hoverboards and fully digital lives--a future that, while novel, contains no healthy innovations.

We may sacrifice the future to the present. In our individualistic American minds, our comfort and our basest desires can be and are met immediately. This puts what would perhaps be a plausibly healthy future for ourselves and even others in jeopardy. We create unhealthy social structures, unnecessary technologies, and pathways of entertaining escapism that only hold their value because they help us release us momentarily from those very structures and technologies that we ourselves created.

We may sacrifice the present and the future to the past by holding anything from ancient times as purely and wholly deserving of our time and attention. The past, perhaps, does deserve a higher percentage of our reverence and effort to understand given what we have available to study from past human triumphs and mistakes. And yet, to give reverence to old texts or wisdom simply because it is old ignores that we may be experiencing in real time what may be living and breathing moments of the past for our unknown future.

A Christian Worldview: Why We Must Value All of Time

Why concern ourselves with a term like timeline idolatry? What is the significance in labeling it a sin?

Approaching this from the Christian worldview, it is important to contend with the temptation as humans to idolize anything and everything, including certain eras of the human experience.

If as Christians we are to be representative of Christ, we must refuse and out-right contend with that desire to prefer and only live within either the past, present, or future alone because God himself upholds all moments of human experience as valuable.

When asked about his identity, Christ stated plainly, "Before Abraham was, I Am." If the phrase "I AM" united Jesus' nature with YHWH, the creator God--who is past, present, and future--then all moments in time, from the birth of the cosmos, to my present sitting in front of my laptop writing, to where my life will end up twenty years from now, are valued in the sight of God.

Therefore, it is essential we look to the past to see what wisdom has endured and connects to our present circumstances.

It is essential to know and understand the winds of the present so as not to cave in to desires that are driven by an idolatry of immediacy that repeat the mistakes of the past.

It is essential to look to the future, to see what sort of world we are carving based on our interpretation of the past and our observations of the present, so that we may pursue a world that honors those who have lived, are living, and will live in the grandness of YHWH's creation.

What is at stake if we do not do this? If we sacrifice all things for either the past, present, or future alone?

All things. All things are at stake.

The past will oppress the present. The present will cannibalize the future. The future will arrive not with newness, but rather with an eerie sameness and monotony, looking and sounding exactly like the past and present, only dressed in a new coat of paint.