Prophecy exists because God is purposeful, because he is Lord, and because he dwells outside time in a realm which creates and sustains time. He dwells in eternity. Let us examine briefly these three propositions. Of course, it will be seen immediately that these are propositions based on faith. Faith is a clue to the meaning of existence, an inward light which is kindled from the father of lights, and it sheds its radiance on the pathway before us as we journey toward him. The fact that God is, that he is "Being and Breath" outside of whom there is no "being" and that the world and all in it is his creature, cannot be "proved" by logic. That this God is personal and is active in the world, and that all existence is on a journey back to him from whom it came, also cannot be demonstrated by "proof." That time and space are creations of an eternal spirit who dwells in a different dimension, the dimension of eternity (which is outside of time) again cannot be seen with the "natural" faculties. All these propositions are assumptions of faith-"surmises" which are "invincible" against the "evidence" sometimes presented by materialistic philosophers who are full of themselves. George Santayana has a word for our generation-a word every whit worthy of a place in the Book of Psalms:

O World, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Let us examine briefly the three propositions with which we began this chapter. First, God is purposeful. Faith discerns divine purpose in history, a purpose that encompasses all time and space, the heaven and the earth and all that in them is. Paul apprehended the universe as a process conceived by divinity and moving toward the "dispensation of the fullness of times" when God would "gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him" (Ephesians 1: 10). The divine purpose is disclosed in Jesus Christ and seen in him to be at work in history. And what is of cardinal significance for us now is that the Spirit is always available to make Christ known to those who seek him.

 God is Lord of All

Second, the eternal God is Lord. This is also "of faith." He is Lord by right because he created all things and sustains them in being from moment to moment. The universe is not God's alter ego, as some would affirm. They are not correlates. He stands over and above creation, complete in himself. He does not depend on what he has made, for he is the fount of all existence. The artist is over and above the picture he paints. The playwright is over and above the play he produces. Beethoven was, in his years of complete deafness, over and above the sweet concourses of sound others made with his music. He dwelt in isolation from the symphonies he wrote in his latter days, although he was immanent in them while setting them down. Although his "outer ear" perished, as it were, and he was to that extent physically deformed, his creative musical genius was in no way impaired. In somewhat the same manner the eternal God does not depend on what he has made, except that it is an expression of his mind. He gives law and order to all existence, but he himself is perfectly free and beyond the law he has given to his creatures. The law he gave to Moses was fulfilled in Christ. Because God is Lord, he is free to achieve his purpose in spite of what men may or may not do. It is in the consciousness of this divine freedom that the possibility of prophecy consists. No matter what betides, God will and can work and counterwork in the course of time so as to make even the wrath of man an instrument of his praise. One has only to think of the majestic supremacy of Christ who was free to use the worst that the world could do and make it God's best, to know what is meant by divine freedom. God is absolutely free and enabled thereby to both constitute and execute his purpose. The ground and spirit of prophecy is precisely this knowledge born of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. He has said, "I will show unto the children of men that I am able to do my own work," and backed up that statement in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and in innumerable historical incidents besides.

 God Is Beyond Time and the Temporal

Third, he dwells outside the time series, in a sphere which creates and sustains time. He dwells in eternity. A Characteristic prophetic phrase runs: "Thus saith the high and holy one who inhabiteth eternity," or "God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things." Eternity is beyond time and it is beyond space. Time and eternity are in different dimensions, one from the other. One may draw a straight line on a piece of paper. The line has a beginning and an end. But the paper encompasses both the beginning and the end, and wholly contains and transcends the line drawn upon it, because it is in different dimension. So does eternity encompass time. To God the future is as the past because he sees it eternally. It is in him. Time and space were made by him and they are his means by which we may be conditioned to perceive his purpose.

People who are conscious only of the passing moment atomize time; they are always in a hurry. They "have no time." Not conscious of eternity, they live as if each passing hour were the last. Man's fear of death issues in a race against time, which man always loses and knows he loses. So he vainly tries to wring out of each fleeting moment all he can, only to find, in the end, that for which he strives eludes him. He cannot live for ever, and in the end, death wins. Modern man is particularly susceptible to this error, and it grows out of his ignorance of the nature of God, which in turn results from his sin. "Time is money," we say. But it isn't. Time is our means of measuring eternity-of living now in the consciousness of eternity. When God created the world he gave it a "time and a season." He set a beginning; and from thence time moves toward its end when "time will be no longer." Between these two-the beginning and the end-there is human history, individual and collective history, into the midst of which God himself came down. He did the deeds which showed time for what it actually is-a period of human probation in which we may learn, if we care to, the eternal secret.

Time is related to God because he made it, but he made it to help us come to know how we may be related to him, and how we may be delivered from the tyranny of time, which is death. A truly creative spirit is always beyond time to some extent, especially in the act of creation. Handel composed the Messiah in twenty-four days, hardly sleeping and scarcely eating. That twenty-four days has been limitlessly expanded as the music has blessed man through the ages and brought a breath of eternity to them. Similarly, God is in eternity, eternally creating. This makes him Lord of time, to see all and do what is necessary to fulfill the purpose for which he made the world. He uses time, as musicians use Handel's Messiah, to testify of eternity.

 Time and Prophecy

To understand the nature of prophecy it is necessary to keep in mind each of the foregoing propositions. A lopsided emphasis or anxiety with respect to time, divorced from the fact of God's purpose and Lordship, is the cause of all manner of error. History of religion discloses a whole farrago of nonsense relating to the "time of the end." The two pilgrimages of the Millerites to the mountains in 1843 and 1844 to greet the Savior on his return illustrate this lopsided emphasis.

The function of prophecy is to see clearly and proclaim lovingly, in the flux and confusion of crowding events, the purpose of the eternal God and to disclose how it is being slowly but surely worked out. Prophecy is never merely the detailed chronicle of future successive events in their correct sequence. The prophet takes his stand on the fact of the eternal God as the immovable ground and guarantee that history is constituted by an invincible and a loving purpose. It is the prophet's business to proclaim this fact and permit the nature of God to fashion his utterance. If he strives merely to "dip into the future," either out of fear of the future or to justify himself, then woe be to him. The prophet knows above all that the foundation of God standeth sure. He sees in the coming of the kingdom of God the great master plan of the ages-sees how it fulfills itself by breaking up selfishness and spreading brotherhood, and he interprets past and present in light of this vision. The prophet knows that all the divine purpose will eventually prevail. He looks beneath the appearance of things, as Abraham looked at Ur of Chaldea, and he moves away from visible temporal deceptions to invisible eternal realities. He knows God is creator who in Christ is redeemer and in Spirit sanctifier of all the course of time, and out of this consciousness he speaks. All genuine prophecy conveys the nature of God.

It is not possible to discuss the eternal without preference to the temporal, and so it is not possible to talk about prophecy without relation to time. How we view time and our relationship to it is one essential factor determining the character of our history, both individually and collectively. Even our political reactions are based on our interpretation of social heritage. In the Orient time is viewed much differently than in the Occident. In the East time is looked on as an illusion against the background of eternity, and since all temporal existences change, they are therefore imperfect. True being for an Oriental cannot be subject to change and, unlike this world, true being is perfect. In India the changeful world is regarded as unreal.

Reality cannot change, it is "without" time-timeless. The deepest desire for Indian thinkers and mystics is to enter into this timeless, changeless eternal being-into Nirvana, where all desire for change based on dissatisfaction is negated and abolished. A similar conception prevailed in Plato's idealism. For him the true being in the realm of ideas was contrasted with its imperfect reflection in the world of sensation. This sensory world was incessantly changing into something else-change and decay marked its existence. It was contrasted with the changeless remote and eternal which seemed to be as an

 "Everlasting taciturnity-

The august, inhospitable, inhuman night

Glittering magnificently unperturbed."

 This early divorce of the eternal from the temporal, evident in ancient Greece, was not acceptable in the Middle Ages. Neoplatonism, which was a decisive factor in forming the spiritual outlook of the Middle Ages, tried to solve the problem by making a match between time and eternity, using the idea that the temporal was an emanation from the eternal. This meant, in fact, what modern evolutionism means in reverse. In the process of emanation each step from above was a deteriorative step downward to the abyss of nothingness. For Plato time was the moving image of eternity, and history, while proceeding from and in some sense an expression of the eternal, made no essential difference to the eternal. It was unaffected by time. What meaning history has, it has in itself, but has no meaning for God. For the Neoplatonists, history and time constitute the eternal who is its integrated totality. This view identifies God with history completely and wholly, but it is pantheistic. God is in this, showing the sum total of events and nothing more.

Both the Oriental and the Greek ideas have something worth while in them, because they provide a step toward understanding this wild and irregular scene men call history. But they are not Christian ideas in the true sense. Both are far removed from the teaching of the nineteenth century prophet. For him and for us there is no question about the divine transcendence. We have iterated and reiterated that point of view. God, we believe, who created the universe created time to go with it, but he remains free from the limitations of time. While he himself is over and above time, yet he entered into it because it was his. It behooved him thus to enact his own life in history that history might be filled with the measure of his life.

Christianity is not primarily a system of morals or of ideas communicated from God. It is a revelation of God's own self, so that the course of time is, we know, in God's own being. In the course of time sin entered the world, and death through sin, and this mattered sufficiently to the eternal God that he took sacrificial action in time to enable the world to be redeemed from sin and death. So the moral law that Christ taught in time, and which has uplifted and blessed humanity in so many ways, is seen as the character of God. Its importance is registered in the fact that by the Spirit this moral law may be applied to passing and changing circumstances.

Any man who persists in himself and tries to adhere to the mind of Christ, which is the moral law of the universe, finds himself blessed with an intimate fellowship with God. Men who have found the completest fellowship with him are those who have led a life of continued obedience to his law. God created time. All its values he prizes. He draws to himself out of time all that resembles him. So in Jesus Christ, eternity came into time. The essential character of God is changeless and eternal. Nothing happens in history to change that. But he is certainly affected by what men do, and the character of our historical existence makes a difference to him. How it affects him is seen in the life and ministry of Jesus. In Christ Jesus the perfect man has already come to dwell among us. That is why we call him "Immanuel." In him history has reached its climax, and this mode of revelation will never be surpassed. "Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, and today, and forever."

 Time and Progress

In our world the idea of progress prevails. It is promulgated that our advance from primitive to civilized status indicates some unalterable law in the heart of things and eventually the human story will end when men reach perfection. Many philosophers held this view, and such men as Herder, Hegel, Rousseau, and Lessing felt that the eternal was somehow involved or "involuted" in the temporal, and that history moved toward a divine telos, howbeit through the involved powers man possessed. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection gave further impetus to this idea of progress, while destroying the teleology of the philosophers. To him the process was complete in itself and carried all the necessary conditions for development, without any divine guidance; the process was itself divine. No goal could be discerned in all this; eternity as the origin and end was cast out as an evil, and the reign of automatic progress was thought to have been discovered. Men think they can keep the values which the divine ordering of history conferred in the past and still do away with the divine! In this idea of progress there is no clear distinction between mechanical and cultural improvement on the one hand, and moral evil, seen as human willfulness, on the other.

It is a century since the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species. Fifty years ago the doctrine of automatic progress was enjoying its heyday and spreading confusion among those who believed in the idea that history would come to a sudden cataclysmic end. The war of 1914-18 delivered a severe blow, however, to the doctrine of automatic progress. The depression and World War II inflicted further damage. Men are not so sure today about progress. But the idea still survives in modified form. Now it is widely held that checkered progress prevails. The graph does not go up continuously, but evidences severe dips. However, the general trend is still upward and onward.

The idea of universal progress based upon a natural development of man upward cannot be squared with the deliverances of Christian faith. Of course, man's lot has been vastly improved since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In every field of human endeavor the angel of enlightenment has blessed men. The sciences of geology, paleontology, and anthropology have expanded our horizons to limitless dimensions. But the difficulty with the modern doctrine of progress lies in the identification of evil or sin with the primitive. The Christian point of view rejects this as a falsification of the facts. Our advance in technical skill and cultural art does not necessarily make us more truly human as Jesus was human. Our age has simply given us instruments which enable us to get at one another, and these can be used for either good or evil. In fact these instruments are totally ambiguous. We teeter on the knife edge, one side of which is world brotherhood and on the other total oblivion. Our highly developed minds are not controlled by righteous purposes, and it is quite probable that we have now come to the point where we shall destroy the cultural gains of previous generations in one hour of diabolical madness. The present existence has no meaning to the average man who believes in this doctrine of progress. The doctrine itself envisages aeons of future time which must pass before progress has achieved its purpose and renders meaningless the brief life of individuals. No one knows quite what the purpose is. Each man's life is like the flicker of a candle in the night. Men talk about progress. But when questioned closely as to what goal the measurement of progress is indicated by, the answer is likely to be very indefinite.

 The Prophetic Idea of Progress

The prophetic faith repudiates this idea of universal progress. It promulgates the doctrine of creation from eternity, and that involves time as a phase of creation, a means which is temporal and therefore terminable. Time will end. It will end when the eternal enters fully into the temporal, and the kingdom of God will finally break as the dawn breaks, to bring in a new day which our present night can never fully comprehend. This is the prophetic message: not a reaching up by man from below, but a reaching down by God from above. The so-called kingdom of God which the nineteenth century initiated, a kingdom which develops by forces resident in men by the fact of their own nature, slowly, inevitably, inexorably, is a cunningly devised fable, which can only be exposed by "a more sure knowledge of the word of prophecy." Such knowledge of prophecy is based on the transcendent vision of the immanent Christ, as the transfiguration illustrates. Evolutionism has no kingdom to offer. It is an illegitimate child born from the New Testament and Charles Darwin and the philosophers of the enlightenment.

The prophetic faith views history as moving to a climax. From below, from humanity, comes the treasures and riches gained by men in the course of the generations; but these of themselves are perishable. The ideal and motive comes from above. It is a gift of God. All human history is flesh, and the flesh withers and the intelligence thereof passes away. Only one thing endures and that is the divine word. That divine word is sown into the soil of humanity, and it begins to demand from humanity all the best of which humanity is capable. This is taken into the life of the seed, which grows by the powers inherent within it, and the total action of the world above it from whence it came. It is this total action, the action of the Eternal, which gives significance to those values and those bodies which are taken up into it. The eternal reaches down into the temporal, and acquires, uses, and transforms the temporal and leads it toward the day when, in the simile of Jesus the "birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof."

All the pomp and glitter of this present life, all its art and culture, its technology and science exist only to give significance to the purpose of God which works in the midst of it, and moves toward the day when all shall dwell in love, "and sorrow and mourning shall flee away."

While this is the faith of the church, the question of man's place in the universe and his destiny is receiving of late more and more attention. In an age of revolution such as ours, people are insistently asking, "Where are we going? What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? What, if anything, can we do about the future?"

The emphasis given by Darwin to biological evolution as a more or less "automatic" process is slowly giving way to the idea that man can direct his own evolution in harmony with his own value-judgments. Whether he will, in fact, do so is an open question. According to Sir Julian Huxley the time has come for man to undertake a "scientific exploration of his destiny." This is a "grave and frightening" responsibility. Natural selection has no goal-although it can determine the "direction of change," according to him. Now, natural selection must give way to psychosocial selection which "pulls the process" of evolution "forward from the front," and does not, like natural selection, push it "blindly from behind."

Sir Charles Darwin is pessimistic about the future. The cardinal problem is, he thinks, population control. For two millenniums prior to A.D. 1700, population figures were constant, at 500 million. (The mystery here is who kept the records.) Between 1700 and 1959 the figures had jumped to 2,500 million. If this rate of increase continues until A.D. 2000 there will be 5,000 million people on this earth. For this rapid increase, the scientific evolution of our times is mainly responsible. Man has exploited great areas of thinly populated land; he has subdued his environment, conquering time and space; he has found out how to increase enormously the quantities of food he produced and transport it to all parts of the earth. Through the science of medicine he has to a large extent overcome the ravages of devastating plagues. In fact, over much of the world, natural selection has ceased to operate. Unless man finds some sort of world control which will result in limitation of his numbers, the penalties of his geometrical increase will be plainly evident, and natural selection will again be operative as it was three centuries ago.

Lord Adrian asserts that if men had brains twice the size they now have, problems seemingly insoluble might easily be solved in a moment, "in the twinkling of an eye" so to speak. So he looks to medicine and biology to help out, but asks, quite rightly, what it is we ought to want.

People who talk bout human destiny always introduce into their discussions, sooner or later, this word "ought." "Ought" it seems, is somehow related to this question. And, of course, with all our science and art-Malthus into the bargain-human destiny is a moral question involving moral problems. Discipline comes into the equation and cannot be avoided. Motivation of conduct is also a cardinal consideration. Power has been concentrated and controlled. For what purposes should it be released? We grow five times the food now on a given acreage that we did three hundred years ago. Yet 70 per cent of the world's population is underfed. Why? We cannot blame the laws of supply and demand because the supply is ample and the demand is pressing. Nor can we put it down to inadequate means of distribution since these means are lying idle in harbors all over the world. The fact is that the 30 per cent who are satisfied and full do not care enough about the 70 per cent who are hungry and starving. The 30 per cent are selfish. Selfishness is a moral and spiritual problem.

Population will have to be limited sooner or later. But how? Man lives and procreates-which means that he is a procreator-he stands in the stead of the creator to preside over the reproduction of his kind. As soon as the word "creator" is thought of, "creation" comes to mind, and the relation between creator and creature is always a moral and spiritual one. Man's destiny is dependent upon his relation to the creator. Man's relation to his maker is determined by his notion of how he is related to what is made. Man's ideas of the creation will largely determine his thought of God, or his lack of it. And, finally, man's own moral condition, the quality of his life, will constitute the ground of his view of creation and other men as a part of it.

 Morality and Time

In human destiny then, the most important consideration is the quality of the manhood in which the future rests. This is a moral problem, and involves questions having to do with how people "ought" to treat each other. If we should ever reach another planet with a space ship, and find it inhabited, the question would be "What kind of beings are here?" If we should consider them superior to us, then our first question would be "What is their attitude to us?" If we should feel them inferior, we should ask "What should our attitude be toward them?" Attitudes toward others are determined primarily by our view of them in the scheme of things. If, to us, things are more valuable than people, or if people are used as things are used to gain selfish ends, then there is no future worth considering. Value comes into the problem of destiny, then, whenever we think about what men live for. Either they live for themselves as center-or they live for selfless ends; that is, to glorify just that aspect of the divine nature which they have apprehended as supremely worth while.

According to Huxley, natural selection which pushed creation "blindly" form "behind" is slowly giving way to psychosocial selection which "pulls it forward from the front." He does not have any idea where we are going, but asserts that it is up to us to find out. Other great minds evince doubt as to the future, or as to whether there is a future or not. All agree that this is a frightening age, fraught with tremendous problems, problems which cry out for immediate solution on pain of certain extinction of the human race. This language has a familiar sound to every believing Christian. The end of the age-the destruction of the wicked-always has been in the thinking of those who listen to the Master. The gospel of God envisages a destiny for humanity but trusts neither in a "blind force pushing from behind" nor in any kind of selection "pulling forward from the front." It asserts that the destiny of humanity rests in an intelligent spirit working from within humanity, toward a perfect humanity already revealed in Jesus Christ. It has already in him been achieved. In that achievement, the future is shown forth embodied in a human being, and reinterpreted faithfully to each through the same power which articulated it in Jesus in the first place. While already in him human life has found its destiny, for us it has still to be achieved. Already past, it is still to be. That which was done in him and has its prophecy in us is even now above us, drawing us to him. That is why we call Jesus "Lord," because he is above us.

 Faith and Destiny

There is no logic nor strict system of scientific procedure which can show him to be this. Revelation of his place as Lord and of his function as the harbinger and guarantor of the destiny of man is a matter of faith. In Jesus we have a clue to the meaning of this whole apparently fantastic existence of ours, which in our time has issued in problems of unprecedented magnitude and urgency. In light of this clue to the meaning of the whole, "natural selection" must for us be modified to include his life. This means that in order to "account" for him, nature must be subordinated to him. How otherwise than by falsification of the record can he be truly seen? The "mutation" (forgive the use of the word) enabling man to adapt and survive has already made its appearance. It consists not in a larger brain but in a different spirit. We see this "mutation" not as an evolution from within, but as a gift from above, from without. And it is this divine gift which working from within seeks its own which is above, and lifts humanity toward the perfect day.

The spirit was totally and completely identified with creation in Jesus and was seen in him to be the author of that creation. The past tense, "was seen," used in this connection is only partly true. What "was seen" is even now clearly visible to those who, by faith, "understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God." Our faith cannot stand in the wisdom of men, because the wisdom of men is not "of faith." The wisdom of men is based on observation of nature by the five senses, on the classification of observed instances into general laws or probabilities, and it issues in the speculation erected from such process.

Faith, on the other hand, while not opposed to procedures which issue in knowledge of the truth, is more than a strictly human activity. Faith is of the Spirit, and cannot disclose its secrets or manifest the divine mystery to those who discredit the existence of a Supreme Being-a creator who "made the world and all things therein." Faith is not opposed to science, but to unbelief. The unbelieving scientist cannot discern the ways of God fully because, like Haeckel of old, he sweeps the heavens with his telescope and sees no sign of God. Faith, observing the same heavens with or without a telescope, sees "God moving in his majesty and power."

It is unbelief which is antithetical to revelation of human destiny. Human destiny then is not primarily in the hands or under the control of us humans. We have our part to play, but it is a minor role, strictly subordinate to the indwelling spirit of the Creator. That is the Christian view of the matter.