Chapter 15
The Biblical Theology of Time and the Moment of Death
Condensed Edition
There is a verse in Ecclesiastes that has never let me go. "He has made everything beautiful in its time," the Preacher writes. "Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end" (Eccl 3:11).1
Read that middle clause again. He has put eternity into man's heart. The Hebrew word is olam (עוֹלָם), a term for long duration, for the ages, for what stretches past the horizon of sight.2 God set that word, that reality, inside us. We carry eternity the way we carry a heartbeat. We don't always hear it. We can't always name it. But it is there, built in, a resonance with something beyond the clock.
I think that resonance becomes louder at the end.
This is the third chapter in our Part III sequence on time and the moment of death. In Chapter 13 we explored divine temporality and asked how God relates to time at the edge of dying. In Chapter 14 we drew on philosophy and NDE research to show that subjective time and clock time come apart. A moment that lasts seconds by the monitor can feel like hours or days from the inside. Now we turn to a different kind of evidence. If the dying moment can hold far more than the clock measures, the Bible has been telling us why for a very long time.
The biblical theology of time does not give us bare philosophy. It gives us God's own voice speaking about what time means, what moments can carry, and why the threshold of death might be the most loaded moment of all.
That is the claim of this chapter. The Bible's own vocabulary of time, its picture of divine time, and its imagery of "today" as a saving moment all converge on a single point. The dying moment is not just a philosophical puzzle. It is a kairos, a decisive opening. And the God who put eternity in our hearts meets us there.
The New Testament uses two Greek words for time, and they are not the same.
Note — Chronos and Kairos
Chronos (χρόνος) is clock time: sequential, measurable, one tick after another. We get the English word "chronology" from it. Kairos (καιρός) is something different. It is the right time, the ripe time, the moment loaded with meaning. A chronos question asks, "How long?" A kairos question asks, "Is this the moment?"
When Jesus opens his public ministry in Mark's Gospel, he reaches for kairos. "The time is fulfilled," he announces, "and the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark 1:15).3 He is not saying that a certain number of years have ticked by. He is saying that the decisive moment has arrived. The door is swinging open. The clock has nothing to do with it.
Paul uses the same word in the same way. "Behold, now is the favorable time (kairos); behold, now is the day of salvation" (2 Cor 6:2).4 The "now" here is not a date on a calendar. It is a quality of moment. Wherever God's saving action breaks through, that is the kairos.
I believe the moment of death is a kairos moment in exactly this sense. Not because of how many seconds it lasts on a hospital monitor. Because of what it carries. The dying person stands at a threshold where clock time gives way to something deeper, something the Bible has a word for.
Garrett DeWeese, in his careful study of the biblical evidence for God's relation to time, traces both the Hebrew and Greek vocabulary through their scriptural contexts. He notes that the Old Testament's time vocabulary is rich and flexible. The Hebrew et (עֵת) marks "appointed time" or "season," as in Ecclesiastes 3:1: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."5 The Hebrew yom (יוֹם) is elastic, stretching from a calendar day to an era. And olam itself can mean a human lifetime, a distant age, or the unending ages of God.6 None of these words reduce to the ticking of a clock. The biblical writers did not think of time that way.
The Greek word aiōn (αἰών) means "age." The present age is the world as we know it, with its clocks and calendars and counted years. The age to come is God's future, the era of resurrection and renewal. Its adjective, aiōnios (αἰώνιος), often translated "eternal," carries the flavor of "belonging to the age to come."7 When the New Testament speaks of "eternal life," it does not merely mean life that goes on forever. It means the quality of life in God's own age, life that tastes of the coming kingdom.
Jesus uses this very word to describe what he offers. "I give them eternal (aiōnios) life, and they will never perish" (John 10:28). The life he gives is not measured in years. It is measured by participation in God's own reality. It begins now, for those who receive it. But it reaches its fullness beyond the boundary of death.
This matters for the dying moment. If aiōnios marks the quality of God's time, then a moment in which God's saving presence breaks through is a moment that participates in that time. The dying person, met by the risen Christ, enters something bigger than chronos can measure. Clock time keeps ticking at the bedside. But the soul has crossed into a moment colored by the age to come.8
I do not want to overstate the lexical case here. The great mid-twentieth-century debate between Oscar Cullmann and James Barr taught scholars a useful caution. Cullmann argued, in his landmark Christ and Time (1946), that the biblical concept of eternity is fundamentally temporal, not Platonic. Biblical eternity, he said, is endless time, not timelessness.9 Barr pushed back hard. You cannot build a philosophy of time from word frequencies, he insisted. Lexical analysis is one thing; theological conclusions are another.10
Barr was right about method. But the broader point survives. The argument of this chapter does not rest on rigid lexical claims. It rests on the way these words actually function in their biblical contexts. And in context, the Bible speaks repeatedly of moments that hold more than the clock can measure.
Of all the time-words in Scripture, one of the most striking for our question is the simplest: "today."
The word appears at some of the most dramatic turning points in the Bible. In Psalm 95, God speaks through the psalmist with an urgency that spans the centuries: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts" (Ps 95:7–8).11 The writer of Hebrews picks up that same line and presses it. "Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today'" (Heb 3:13). Again: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts" (Heb 3:15; 4:7).12
"Today" in these passages is not a calendar date. It is the open window of God's voice. Wherever God's call meets a human ear, that is "today." The word carries the weight of kairos. It marks the decisive moment of response.
Notice the pattern. Each "today" is a moment charged with divine presence. Each one contains more than the clock would suggest. And each one opens a door that will not stay open forever. The Hebrews passages assume that "today" can be missed if the heart hardens. The urgency is real. But so is the opportunity.
Two other "today" passages press even closer to our subject.
When Jesus enters the home of Zacchaeus, the despised tax collector, he announces: "Today salvation has come to this house" (Luke 19:9).13 The "today" is the moment of Christ's personal presence. Zacchaeus did not go looking for salvation. Salvation walked into his dining room. Where Christ is, the saving kairos is already present.
Primary Source — The Thief's "Today"
And then there is Luke 23:43. The thief on the cross asks Jesus to remember him. Jesus answers: "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."14 The thief is dying. He has hours left, perhaps less. And Jesus gives him "today." The thief's "today" includes his dying day. It is not a future date. It is the kairos of his death, the moment when Christ's presence and the threshold of dying coincide.
I think this verse is one of the most important in the Bible for the question this book addresses. If "today" is the kairos of God's saving action, and if the thief's dying day is included in that "today," then the dying moment is part of the saving "today." The biblical theology of time supports the moment-of-death thesis directly.15
Peter gives us another piece of the picture. Writing to believers who wonder why the Lord seems slow in fulfilling his promise, Peter says: "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Pet 3:8).16
Insight — God's Day and Ours
Peter's point is about divine patience. God is "not slow" but "patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Pet 3:9). Yet the verse carries an implication about the structure of time itself. God's time is not identical to our clock time. A single day on God's side can hold what we would call a millennium. A millennium can pass like a single afternoon.
The Psalmist said the same thing centuries earlier: "For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night" (Ps 90:4).17 This is Moses's psalm, the oldest in the Psalter. The claim predates Greek philosophy by centuries. Long before any philosopher asked about the nature of time, the biblical writers knew that God's experience of time is not ours.
Now apply this to the dying moment. If a day with the Lord can hold what we call a thousand years, then a moment of dying, on God's side, can hold what the soul experiences as weeks or months of pursuit and encounter. The clock at the bedside measures seconds. The soul, entering the presence of the God for whom time is elastic, may live an entire encounter that chronos cannot contain.18
And note the context. Peter is writing about why the Lord seems slow. God is "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Pet 3:9). The God whose day holds a thousand years is the God who waits because he loves. That patience does not evaporate at the deathbed. It is precisely the character of a God who would use the moment of dying to pursue one last soul.
William Lane Craig, surveying the biblical data on divine eternity, notes that the scriptural evidence consistently presents God as engaged in time rather than frozen outside it. Craig cites Alan Padgett's verdict that the Bible "knows nothing of a timeless divine eternity in the traditional sense."19 Whether or not one agrees with Padgett in every detail, the direction is clear. The God of the Bible acts in moments. He speaks in a "today." His time is not ours, but it is real time, and he meets us in it.
Paul uses a phrase in Galatians that captures the idea beautifully. "When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son" (Gal 4:4).20 The Greek is to plērōma tou chronou. Chronos itself can be "filled." The Incarnation was a moment in sequential time that was loaded to bursting with redemptive meaning. Clock time continued. But that moment held what no measurement could capture.
I believe the dying moment is the soul's personal plērōma. It is the fullness of that soul's time. Everything the life has been, everything the soul has carried, comes to its point of ripeness. The scattered threads of a lifetime gather into one moment. And the God who sent his Son into one great plērōma meets each soul in its own.21
The threshold imagery of the Bible points in the same direction. Jesus calls himself "the door" (John 10:9). He does not say, "I am the wall." He says, "If anyone enters by me, he will be saved." Christ is the threshold, the gate, the passage.22 And death is the door the soul walks through. The one who stands in that door is the one who said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6).
The New Testament's language of "sleep" fits here too. Paul says believers who have died "have fallen asleep" (1 Thess 4:13–15; 1 Cor 15:6, 18, 20, 51). Jesus himself used the same image: "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him" (John 11:11).23 The word is chosen carefully. "Sleep" describes what the body does, what the watchers see. But the soul does not sleep. The soul, freed from the body's constraint, wakes into the sharpest awareness it has ever known. It awakens into the encounter for which it was made.
Ladislaus Boros, whose work we will engage at length in the next chapter, used a Latin phrase for what happens at the moment of death. He called it the terminus viae, the "end of the way," the boundary of the pilgrim state.24 The traditional Catholic teaching held that with death, the time of probation ends and the soul's fundamental direction can no longer change.
Boros's great innovation was to argue that this boundary is not a wall but a threshold. The pilgrim state ends, yes. But it ends with a climax, not a cutoff. Boros believed that in the moment of death, the soul is freed from its "ontological indigence," a technical phrase meaning the lifelong inability to fully possess itself. For the first time, the soul sees itself whole. And in that clear, unclouded moment, it meets Christ and makes its real and final decision.
What strikes me is how well Boros's philosophical category fits the biblical vocabulary we have been tracing. His terminus viae is the personal kairos. It is the personal "today." It is the soul's own plērōma. Boros built his case from philosophy and from the writings of Karl Rahner. He did not develop the chronos/kairos distinction himself. But the Bible had already provided the vocabulary for what he was seeing. The fit is too close to ignore.25
The full engagement with Boros comes in Chapter 16. Here the point is simply this. The book's thesis is not a philosophical theory dressed in biblical clothes. The biblical theology of time already has the categories that the thesis requires.
I want to hear two objections that a careful reader will raise, because they deserve honest answers.
Common Objection — Don't the Urgency Passages Demand Decision Before Dying?
The first objection points to passages like Hebrews 3:13 ("exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today'") and 2 Corinthians 6:2 ("now is the day of salvation"). These are urgency passages. They press the reader to respond now, not later. Doesn't a moment-of-death encounter dissolve that urgency?
I don't think so. "Today" in these passages is indexed to the hearer's present opportunity. The writer of Hebrews is not naming a deadline; he is naming an open door. For the person hearing the gospel in a house church in Rome, "today" is that evening. For the dying person, "today" includes the dying day. The urgency call is not softened by extending "today" to the threshold of death. It is fulfilled in it. The door stays open as long as God's voice can be heard. And I believe God's voice can be heard at the very threshold.26 (For a fuller treatment of the kairos passages in their lexical and theological context, see Appendix L.)
The second objection is pastoral. If God meets every dying person with a moment-of-death encounter, doesn't that make evangelism pointless? Why share the gospel now if the person will hear it at death anyway?
The short answer: because hearing the gospel now prepares the heart for then. Antemortem faith, lived out in community, worship, and discipleship, is the normal pattern God has established. The moment-of-death encounter is God's safety net for those who never had an adequate opportunity in this life. It does not replace the church's mission. It ensures that God's saving love reaches even where our witness cannot. We will return to this question at length in the chapter on the unevangelized.27
Key Argument — Three Lines, One Point
The biblical theology of time, the philosophy of time, and the empirical NDE data all converge on a single conclusion: the dying moment holds more than the clock can measure. The Bible speaks of a God whose day can hold a thousand years, whose "today" is the kairos of saving encounter, and who put olam in the human heart. Philosophy shows that subjective and objective time come apart. NDE research shows that dying persons routinely report time stretching far beyond what the monitor records. Three independent lines of inquiry. One conclusion.
This convergence is not a coincidence. I believe it is a window into how God actually works. The dying moment, so brief to the watching family, is the soul's great opening. It is the kairos for which every other kairos in that person's life was preparation. God has put eternity in the human heart (Eccl 3:11). And at the moment of death, that eternity opens.28
The philosophical case for subjective time dilation was developed in Chapter 14. The theological case for divine temporality, for God's real engagement in time, is developed in Appendix F. The full lexical treatment of chronos, kairos, and aiōnios belongs to Appendix L. This chapter has done what only the biblical theology of time can do. It has shown that Scripture itself has the resources to make sense of what the dying may experience.
The next chapter turns to the man who saw all of this before anyone else did. In 1959, a young Jesuit named Ladislaus Boros wrote at breakneck speed about a vision of the moment of death that had seized his imagination. His Mystery of Death remains the most philosophically sustained account of the moment-of-death encounter in the Christian tradition. We owe him a careful hearing. That is where we go next, in Chapter 16.
But before we leave this chapter, I want to say one thing to the reader who picked up this book because someone they love has died.
The Bible tells us that God put eternity in the human heart. Your loved one carried that eternity every day, even if they never knew its name. On the day they died, what looked to you like a slipping away may have been an opening up. A "today" spoken by Christ. A kairos loaded with more love and more light than the clock at the bedside could ever record.
The thief on the cross had no church membership. He had no catechism. He had no time left at all. And Jesus said to him, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." The God who spoke that word to a dying criminal on a Friday afternoon is the same God who meets your loved one. And he is a God who keeps his word.29
↑ 1. Ecclesiastes 3:11 (ESV). Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations in this chapter are from the English Standard Version.
↑ 2. The Hebrew olam (עוֹלָם) appears over 400 times in the Old Testament, with a semantic range from "long duration" (Gen 6:4, "the mighty men who were of old") to "eternity" (Ps 90:2, "from everlasting to everlasting, you are God"). See DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4 ("The Evidence from Scripture"), for the philological treatment.
↑ 3. Mark 1:15 (ESV). The Greek reads peplērōtai ho kairos, literally "the kairos has been fulfilled." On the significance of kairos in the Synoptic proclamation of the kingdom, see Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time (London: SCM Press, 1951), ch. 2, as mediated by DeWeese, ch. 4.
↑ 4. 2 Corinthians 6:2 (ESV), quoting Isaiah 49:8. Paul's kairos euprosdektos ("favorable time") intensifies Isaiah's image: the acceptable moment is now.
↑ 5. Ecclesiastes 3:1 (ESV). DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, traces the Hebrew vocabulary of time through its major terms: olam (age, long duration, eternity), et (appointed time), yom (day, era), and mo'ed (appointed season).
↑ 6. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4. DeWeese notes that the Hebrew time vocabulary resists rigid categories and is far more flexible than the Greek philosophical tradition that shaped later Christian theology.
↑ 7. The lexical range of aiōn and aiōnios is a significant topic in biblical scholarship. This chapter treats it briefly; a fuller treatment is provided in Appendix L. For a concise survey, see BDAG, s.v. aiōn and aiōnios.
↑ 8. The claim is not that the dying person leaves clock time entirely. The claim is that the soul, at the threshold of death, enters a moment in which God's time and creaturely time overlap. See Appendix F on divine temporality and the reality of the encounter.
↑ 9. Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans. Floyd V. Filson (London: SCM Press, 1951). Cullmann's thesis that biblical eternity is fundamentally temporal, not Platonic, was enormously influential in mid-twentieth-century biblical theology. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, engages Cullmann directly.
↑ 10. James Barr, Biblical Words for Time, Studies in Biblical Theology 33 (London: SCM Press, 1962); see also Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). Barr showed that Cullmann overloaded word-study evidence with philosophical weight it could not bear. DeWeese, ch. 4, presents both Cullmann and Barr and draws a measured conclusion: the lexical evidence does not by itself settle the philosophical question, but the theological function of the biblical time-vocabulary supports a temporal, not atemporal, understanding of God's engagement with creation.
↑ 11. Psalm 95:7–8 (ESV).
↑ 12. Hebrews 3:13, 15; 4:7 (ESV). The writer of Hebrews quotes Psalm 95 three times in this section, pressing the urgency of "today." On the kairos-quality of the "today" passages, see the fuller treatment in Appendix L.
↑ 13. Luke 19:9 (ESV).
↑ 14. Luke 23:43 (ESV). On the punctuation question (does "today" modify "I say to you" or "you will be with me"?), the weight of patristic and modern commentary favors taking "today" with "you will be with me in Paradise." See further discussion at Chapter 9.
↑ 15. The argument here is not that Luke 23:43 proves the moment-of-death encounter. The argument is that the verse opens a biblical trajectory in which "today" functions as the kairos of dying. The thief's story is the clearest case: a man who had no prior faith, no catechesis, no time left, hears the voice of Christ and responds in the moment of his death.
↑ 16. 2 Peter 3:8 (ESV), echoing Psalm 90:4.
↑ 17. Psalm 90:4 (ESV). This is Moses's psalm, the oldest in the Psalter. Its claim about God's relation to time precedes the Greek philosophical tradition by centuries.
↑ 18. I want to be clear about what I am and am not claiming. I am not claiming that 2 Peter 3:8 is a physics lesson about time dilation. I am claiming that the verse reflects a deep biblical intuition: God's time and our time are not the same measurement, and a moment on God's side can hold what we would never fit into ours. That intuition, grounded in the character of a temporal God who is not bound by our clocks, is exactly what the moment-of-death thesis requires.
↑ 19. Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 15. Craig cites Alan Padgett's verdict in the course of surveying the biblical evidence for divine eternity (ch. 1, sec. II). Craig's own hybrid view—that God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation—is developed in subsequent chapters; the point here is that the biblical data, as Craig reads them, present a God who acts in time.
↑ 20. Galatians 4:4 (ESV). The phrase to plērōma tou chronou ("the fullness of time") is unique in Paul and signals the unrepeatable moment when God's plan reaches its appointed ripeness. See G. K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), for the eschatological significance of plērōma language.
↑ 21. The parallel is not exact, of course. The Incarnation is a unique, unrepeatable event in cosmic history. The dying person's encounter is personal and particular. But the shape is the same: chronos is "filled" with what chronos alone could never contain.
↑ 22. John 10:9 (ESV): "I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved." John 14:6 (ESV). The threshold imagery here is Christological: the passage through death is a passage through Christ.
↑ 23. John 11:11 (ESV); cf. 1 Thessalonians 4:13–15; 1 Corinthians 15:6, 18, 20, 51. The "sleep" language in the New Testament is rich and deliberate. It does not mean unconsciousness. It describes the body's condition from the perspective of those watching. The soul, as the next chapter will develop from Boros's argument, is anything but asleep.
↑ 24. Boros, The Mystery of Death (Monkfish, 2020), III.1 ("The Ending of Our State of Pilgrimage"). The terminus viae ("end of the way") is a standard term in Catholic eschatology for the moment at which the pilgrim state ends and the soul's orientation becomes irreversible. Boros accepts the tradition's claim that the terminus viae is real but reinterprets what happens at that boundary.
↑ 25. Boros does not develop the chronos/kairos distinction himself. The connection between his philosophical categories and the biblical time-vocabulary is my own contribution. But the fit is too close to ignore. The full engagement with Boros's argument follows in Chapter 16.
↑ 26. For the full lexical and theological treatment of the urgency passages in their relation to kairos and the moment of death, see Appendix L. See also Chapter 24, which addresses the Hebrews 9:27 question directly.
↑ 27. See Chapter 32 for the full treatment of the unevangelized and the evangelistic-urgency objection.
↑ 28. The three-line convergence argument is developed more fully in the conclusion (Chapter 35), where the philosophical, empirical, and biblical streams are drawn together into a single case. Here the point is simply to mark the convergence and note its significance.
↑ 29. Cf. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008), ch. 11, on the intermediate state and the hope of resurrection. Wright's framework supports the claim that what happens immediately after death is a conscious encounter with Christ, not a blank interval.