Time bears all away.  Isaac Watts, the great hymnwriter, tells us the situation,  “O God, Our Help in Ages past.”

Time, like an ever-flowing stream,

Soon bears us all away:

We fly forgotten as a dream

Dies at the op’ning day.  (Lutheran Book of Worship, 320)

The Forum in Rome had been the center of a great empire that lasted for centuries (the official year of its fall in the west is 476).  All that is left are ruins.  Where human activity reigned, now the ruins of a civilization remain like a skeleton without flesh.  Eternal Rome,  a name coined by the poet Albius Tibullus as Urbs Aeterna in Latin, and honored with a temple by Hadrian to indicate the eternal nature of Rome, is not eternal.  Today, the temple is in ruins like the Forum and the Colosseum.  Only human hubris would believe that what we build will last forever.

Yes, Rome still exists; yet, the glory the temple represents died long ago.  It is another symbol of the ephemeral nature of human beings and their projects.  We are mortal; the universe will end.  Our civilization will someday also crumble.  And, we will die.

Dio Chrysostom, an essayist and public speaker of the first century A.D.,  wrote these words, ” . . .I shall now on my own behalf and in behalf of my statue use a phrase which Anaxagoras used when he had lost a son:  “I knew I had begotten a mortal.”  However, I did not know that my progeny was as mortal as that;  For though each statue is erected as if it were to last forever, still they perish by this fate or by that, the most common and fitting fate and the one ordained for all things being the fate of time.”  (Dio Chrysostom, The Thirty Seventh Discourse, translated by H. Lamar Crosby, The Loeb Classics, Volume 376, page 35).

Indeed, all things and people are ephemeral (meaning short-lived).  Only God is eternal.  Eternity is outside of the flow of time.  God, who is immortal, intersects with time in the creation of the world and our redemption in Jesus and in many other ways.  We are immersed in the flow of time.  With time is ageing;  with ageing comes death.  The prophet Isaiah writes, ‘All flesh is grass and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.  The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass.  The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of the Lord will stand forever.”  (Isaiah 40: 6b-8 ESV)

If this were the end of the story, our condition and disposition would be no better than the nihilists of which I have spoken.  But, it is not.  The eternal God through Christ gives us what we can not gain for ourselves.  The apostle writes, “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

Death is swallowed up in victory,

O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?

I Corinthians 15: 53-55 ESV)

Through His resurrection, Christ has gained for us eternal life. Our task as apologists is to defend the teaching that Christ will give us life out of death.  Our task as witnesses is to invite people to share our belief so that they may live.  Our mission is nothing less.

 

Michael G. Tavella

October 25, 2024

Dorcas, Lydia, and Phoebe, Faithful Women