Time Enough

and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”  Mark 1:15 NASB

Time is fulfilled – peplerotai kairos.  “Filled up time.”  Mark loves this theme.  Everything is aligned for something crucial to happen.  Yeshua’s baptism occurs at precisely the right moment.  He is driven into the wilderness just when he’s supposed to be driven.  He returns to begin his prophetic mission at the perfect point.  And what is his message?  “Everything is ready.  Now is the fulfillment of time (kairos).”  Is it any wonder that people think Yeshua was apocalyptic?

But maybe we need to pay more attention to the actual Greek vocabulary (and the Hebrew, of course) before we decide that Yeshua thought the world age was coming to an end.

First, we should notice the verb, plēróō (in our text, a perfect, passive indicative).  The verb clearly means “to fill,” and is used in the LXX in that sense.  It is the  Greek translation of the Hebrew מָלֵא (mālēʾ ) “be full, to fill .”  But figuratively, it means “to completely understand, to be satisfied,” or “to make or become something intended.”  “In Hebrew, ‘This term is also used of God’s ability to finish a work begun or accomplish a word promised. The Piel form of mlʾ seems to emphasize the fulfillment of utterances.’”^[1]  Notice  Kaiser’s comments:

The Piel form of mālēʾ is also used to denote a period of time, i.e. number of days (Gen 29:27–28), years (II Chr 36:21) or length of gestation (Job 39:2) which must be completed. Consequently, the emphasis is not to be placed solely on the predicted word, but also on the faithful God who will achieve, perfect, and do what was said: The time between the prediction and its fulfillment contains significant happenings which evidence this same powerful and faithful God who continues to fill chronological time (chronos) with opportune moments (kairoi).  This belongs generically to that final achievement of all that the word promised (cf. Nv pleroun, Heb. kālâ, Gr. teleō, Heb. tāman, Gr. teleō). ^[2]

In the Greek New Testament, the word is used in much the same way, i.e., to be filled with content, with knowing, or with life.  It does not necessarily mean that some event is about to occur.  It could mean that true understanding has come.  The Greek perfect tense implies that there is some action in the past which now has continuing results.  That seems to suggest that this statement isn’t about a future occurrence but rather about fully understanding now some past occurrence.  Or perhaps Yeshua is saying that God’s development of intention, long-awaited, is now coming to its fulfillment.

Of course, the direction we take with this verb depends on the word for “time.”  Here it is kairos, a concept basically untranslatable into English.  Ordinary clock time is chronos.  That’s the time we measure every day.  Greek’s other word for time is aeon, usually translated “age,” that is, a determined length of chronos.  The age of the dinosaurs is an example.  But there is no word in English for kairos.  Perhaps we can come close with “serendipitous.”  Kairos is that moment when everything that was preparing for something to happen perfectly aligns so that a slice of non-chronos experience occurs sandwiched into chronos time.  In other words, kairos is the “exactly perfect moment” not measurable or predictable by the clock.

You will have noticed that Kaiser mentions kairos along with Hebrew kālâ, Hebrew tāman, and Greek teleō.  What he doesn’t say is that Hebrew has no word for the abstract notion of “time.”  So when Mark translates Yeshua’s Hebrew expression into Greek, and chooses kairós as the appropriate Greek term, he is not reflecting a precisely equivalent Hebrew word from Yeshua.  He is using a Greek idea, an idea that comes as close as possible to some Hebrew concrete temporal term.  Therefore, we should avoid thinking that Yeshua had a temporal abstract in mind.

What, then, is “time fulfilled”?  Kaiser’s remark helps us decide: “. . . the emphasis is not to be placed solely on the predicted word, but also on the faithful God who will achieve, perfect, and do what was said . . .”  Time fulfilled is the manifestation of God’s faithfulness.  It is not a day, an hour or a minute.  It’s not on the calendar.  It’s the dawning awareness that God does what He says He will do.

And, by the way, we can dispense with all the predictions of the “end times” in precisely the same way.

Topical Index: time, fulfill, kairós, plēróō, chronos, mālēʾ, prophecy, prediction, Mark 1:15

^[1] Kaiser, W. C. (1999). 1195 מָלֵא. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 505). Chicago: Moody Press.

^[2] Kaiser, W. C. (1999). 1195 מָלֵא. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 505). Chicago: Moody Press.