Time Enough

Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. Romans 13:11 NASB

To awaken – Today is my birthday. In just twelve more years I might be ready to lead people out of Egypt. But I won’t be like Moses, unfortunately. He was the most humble man on earth and enjoyed face-to-face conversation with the Lord. That doesn’t describe me. All my life I have fought the battle with ego. I doubt I will ever be counted worthy enough to converse openly with my God. So I’ll wait the next twelve years until I am at least the right age for something to happen.

Sha’ul uses the Greek kairos in this verse. It’s not just anytime that he has in mind. It is the precisely right moment of perfect alignment of all circumstances, when God manifests Himself and we receive a slice of eternity in the midst of our temporal trivia. What time is it today? Well, for me it is a reminder of awakening. Unconscious, I rested in the peace of the Lord until that moment, just a few minutes before midnight on this day many decades ago, when I was awakened to the world of trouble as the sparks fly upward (cf. Job 5:7). Sha’ul uses the Greek egeiro (to wake) in the passive, aorist. It is something done to the subject completed in the past. A finished act. You and I were awakened. We didn’t cross the boundary from unconscious to conscious through our own efforts. Something or someone forced this upon us. Now we are stuck with the result. It’s simply too late to wish we could have stayed blissfully asleep. That time is past. Now we are in the midst of the perfect arrangement for accomplishing what needs to be done while we are awake, namely, to recognize that the day of salvation is nearer than before.

Interestingly, the same verb, egeiro, is also used for raising the dead. Perhaps the Jewish Greek of the LXX left its mark. Death is like sleep. Life is like waking. “Let the dead bury the dead” might even be Socratic. But now is not that time, the time of the dead. Now is the time of salvation. And what does “the day of salvation” mean? Can it mean the day that I elected to trust Yeshua as my personal savior? I doubt it. How could Paul have meant this if he suggests that the day of salvation is nearer than before? If the day of salvation is the day I said, “Yes” to Jesus, then that day is long gone. It is further away every day. Paul must have had something else in mind.

Paul is once again thinking cosmically. The “day of salvation” is the day of the full restoration of the kingdom of God, the final day of the defeat of death, the last day in the plan of reconciliation. Because that day is approaching we must wake up, not to a personal-Savior reality but to the shift in the entire cosmos that is foreshadowed in the resurrection of Yeshua. The great hope of followers of YHVH is not personal rescue (although that is certainly entailed) but rather the re-establishment of the government of God and the cosmic recognition of His unsurpassed glory. Awake, we see that all creation is speeding toward a return to the beginning. We anxiously exhort others to open their eyes to this shattering truth. “The sleeper must awaken” is more than a line from Dune. It is the heartfelt cry for those sleeping through the end.

Topical Index: awake, egeiro, sleep, death, birth, salvation, Romans 13:11