The Weight of Glory (5) Times Three

“For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” 2 Corinthians 4:17

Eternal – Greek has three different words for temporal durations.  One is chronos.  Time lapse in measured intervals.  A clock is a chronometer – a time measuring device.  The second is kairos.  Eventful time.  The emphasis is not on how long but how important.  The time of the Lord’s coming.  The time of the harvest.  The third is aeon.  This is time as a span.  A long duration, either in the past of the future, of unspecified length.  We might used the word “age”.  The age of the dinosaurs.  The coming age of the new earth.

What word does Paul choose?  Is his vocabulary about clock time, significant time or a long duration?  Is “eternal” endless days and nights or is it momentous occasions or is it unspecified continuing?  Paul choose aeon.  Why?  Perhaps he wants to emphasize the contrast with “momentary”, a thought that is anchored in measured time.  Perhaps he wants to push us to think about the gentle flow of being in the presence of God always.  But certainly he wants us to see that the contrast is radical.  So radical that he can’t use the same conceptual framework for the two ideas.  Momentary measuring is not even quantitatively in the same ballpark.  How many moments do you have to count to get to eternity?

So, says Paul, nothing that attempts to crush now can compare with the circumstances later.  First because God intends it to be easy to bear, even if we keep trying to lift it ourselves, and secondly, because what we do with life now can become an honor, rewarded by knowing we are privileged to travel the road with His Son.  A little now can’t even be measured on the same scale of the eternal later.

Do you want to know the best part?  God still counts the moment by moment as if it had eternal consequence.  God honors our tiny fractions of light affliction time with eternal results.  There is no better return on effort than that!  Albert Einstein said that the greatest invention of mankind was compound interest.  He may have been right within the human frame, but he missed the greatest return of all creation.  Light moments producing eternal weight.