Chapter 15

Eternity in the Heart of the Dying

The Biblical Theology of Time and the Moment-of-Death Encounter

Full-Length Edition

There is a verse in the Hebrew Bible that stops you mid-sentence. You read it once and think you understand it. You read it again and realize you do not. It is one of those verses that grows deeper every time you return to it.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. 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, ESV).¹

Take it slowly. God has set eternity inside the human heart. Not outside it. Not above it. Inside it. The Hebrew word is olam (עוֹלָם) — a word that reaches in both directions. It can mean a long stretch of time, an age, or the hidden depths of the past and future that lie beyond human sight.² Whatever the precise shade of meaning, the claim is staggering. Something in us belongs to more than the clock. Something in us was made for more than the ticking seconds of a single life.

And yet we cannot fully grasp it. The verse says so plainly: God has set this olam in our hearts, “yet so that” we cannot find out the whole of what God has done. We carry eternity, but we cannot see it clearly. Not yet. Not from this side of the threshold.

This chapter asks a simple question: What happens to that eternity-shaped heart at the moment of death?

The previous two chapters built the case from philosophy and science. Chapter 13 argued that the God who meets the dying soul is a God who genuinely acts in time. Chapter 14 showed that subjective time and clock time are not the same thing — that a moment can hold far more than the clock reports. Now we turn to the Bible itself. And we find that the biblical writers already knew what the philosophers later confirmed. They had their own vocabulary for it. They had their own stories. They had their own way of saying that some moments hold more than time can measure.

The biblical theology of time does not merely permit the moment-of-death encounter. It positively expects it.

The word olam appears over four hundred times in the Hebrew Bible.³ In Genesis 6:4, it refers to “ancient times.” In Psalm 90:2, it reaches toward the infinite: “From everlasting to everlasting, you are God.” The range of the word is part of its point. Hebrew does not have a single, neat term for “eternity” the way Greek does. Instead, it has this elastic, stretching word. It bends toward the horizon in both directions. And in Ecclesiastes 3:11, God places that horizon-word inside the human chest.

What does that mean for the dying? Consider the trajectory. All through life, the olam in the heart is partially blocked. We are time-bound creatures. The body anchors us to the clock. Our senses lock us into the present second. We carry eternity, but we experience ticking, measured, sequential time.

Everyone has felt hints of it. A sunset stops you. A piece of music reaches past your chest and touches something you cannot name. A child is born, and for a moment the room holds more than the room should hold. These are flickers of the olam. The eternity in your heart is waving at you through a window that will not fully open. Not yet.

Then comes the moment of dying. The body begins to release its grip. The soul, if the substance-dualist picture developed in Chapter 8 is correct, begins to move toward its native freedom. The olam that was always there opens like a window thrown wide.

The dying soul does not enter eternity from outside. It awakens to the eternity it has always carried.⁴

The context of Ecclesiastes 3:11 deepens the picture. The verse sits inside the famous “time for everything” poem (Eccl 3:1–8). There is a time to be born and a time to die. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to keep and a time to let go. The Preacher sees the rhythms of life moving like tides. And then, at verse 11, he pulls back the curtain. Behind all those small, measured times, God has placed something bigger: the olam itself. The seasons come and go. The heart reaches beyond them all.

The Hebrew Vocabulary: Time as Rich and Flexible

Before we turn to the Greek terms that dominate the New Testament discussion, a word about the Hebrew Bible’s vocabulary of time is in order. Garrett DeWeese, in his careful study God and the Nature of Time, devotes a full chapter to the scriptural evidence. He works through the Hebrew and Greek word-studies with attention to their range and their limits.⁵ His caution is worth adopting here. Words are not arguments. A word’s meaning depends on context, not on etymology. But the vocabulary of a language does shape the conceptual world of its speakers. And the Hebrew vocabulary of time is strikingly flexible.

We have already met olam. Beside it stand other terms. Et (עֵת) means “appointed time” or “season” — the word that runs through Ecclesiastes 3:1–8: “a time to be born, a time to die.”⁶ Qedem points backward to ancient times, to what is primordial.⁷ And yom (יוֹם) — “day” — is one of the most elastic words in the Hebrew Bible. It can mean a single calendar day. It can mean an era. In Genesis 2:4, the entire creation week is called “the day” that the Lord made the heavens and the earth.

The point is not that Hebrew had no concept of measurable time. Of course it did. People kept calendars. Farmers watched the seasons. Priests counted the days to Passover. But the vocabulary resists any reduction of time to mere counting. Time in the Hebrew Bible is personal. It is appointed. It belongs to God. And certain moments within it carry a weight that ordinary moments do not.⁸

That insight — that some moments carry more weight than others — is exactly what the book has been building toward. The moment of death, this chapter will argue, is the weightiest moment of all.

Two Kinds of Time: Chronos and Kairos

When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, and when the New Testament authors wrote in Greek, they had two words for “time” that mapped roughly onto a distinction the Hebrew vocabulary had already implied.

The first is chronos (χρόνος). This is the time of clocks. It is sequential, measurable, and uniform. One hour of chronos is exactly like another. It ticks forward at the same pace whether you are asleep or awake, joyful or grieving. We get our English word “chronology” from it. It is the time of calendars, timetables, and stopwatches.⁹

The second is kairos (καιρός). This is the time of moments that matter. It is the right time, the ripe time, the decisive time. It is qualitative, not merely quantitative. A kairos-moment is not just a point on a timeline. It is a point where something breaks through — where history turns, where a decision must be made, where God acts.¹⁰

Consider a concrete example. A farmer watches the weather for weeks. That is chronos — day after day, no day more important than the last. Then one morning the soil is warm, the rains have stopped, and the window for planting is open. That morning is the kairos. Miss it, and the harvest is lost.

Or consider a different example — one closer to this book’s subject. A man is dying. The hours of his illness stretch out in chronos. His family counts the days. The nurses check the clock. But somewhere in those final hours, something shifts. The dying man opens his eyes. He sees something the others cannot see. He speaks a name. He makes a choice. That is the kairos. The clock kept ticking at the same pace. But the moment itself held something the clock could not measure.

The New Testament uses kairos in exactly this way. When Jesus begins his public ministry, he announces: “The time (kairos) is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15).¹¹ The kairos is fulfilled. Not the chronos. The clock did not change. The calendar did not reset. But the decisive moment arrived. God broke into ordinary time, and the world was never the same.

Paul uses the same word when he writes: “Behold, now is the favorable time (kairos); behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2).¹² The “now” of salvation is not a neutral moment. It is a loaded moment. It is a moment in which God’s saving action is present in a way it was not present a moment before. It is kairos in the fullest sense.

Other passages confirm the pattern. “You do not know how to interpret the present time (kairon)” (Luke 12:56). “We have an opportunity (kairon)” (Gal 6:10). “Making the best use of the time (ton kairon)” (Eph 5:16).¹³ In every case, the kairos is not just a slice of chronos. It is a moment charged with significance. It is the moment when eternity touches time.

Now apply this to the dying. If the moment of death is the occasion of a fully conscious and fully free encounter with Christ, then that moment is not chronos. It is kairos. It is the decisive moment, the loaded moment, the moment when God acts. It is the kairos above all others for the individual soul.¹⁴

Notice that the New Testament never suggests that a kairos can be measured by its length. Jesus’ announcement in Mark 1:15 did not last for years. It was a single sentence. Paul’s “now” of salvation is not a long period. It is a point. A flash. A moment in which the decisive thing happens. The kairos is not important because it lasts a long time. It is important because it holds the right thing at the right moment. Brief by the clock. Full by the content.

The dying person’s clock is running down. To the nurses and the family, the final seconds look like the emptiest seconds of all. But the biblical vocabulary suggests the opposite. Those seconds are not empty. They are the fullest seconds of the person’s life. They are the kairos for which the olam in the heart was planted.

The Age to Come Breaking In: Aiōn and Aiōnios

A third family of Greek time-words matters for this discussion, though the full treatment belongs to Appendix L.

The noun aiōn (αἰών) means “age” or “age-long duration.” The adjective aiōnios (αἰώνιος) means “pertaining to an age.” In the New Testament, these words most often point to the contrast between “this present age” and “the age to come.”¹⁵ This contrast matters. “Eternal life” (zōē aiōnios) is not just “life that goes on forever.” It is “life of the age to come.” Life with a different quality. A different texture. A different relationship to time altogether.

William Lane Craig observes that several scholars, including Alan Padgett, have concluded that the Bible itself knows nothing of a timeless divine eternity in the traditional philosophical sense.¹⁶ The biblical picture is not of a God frozen outside of time. It is of a God whose time is richer, deeper, and more capacious than ours. God’s eternity is not the absence of time. It is the fullness of time.

This matters for the dying. If aiōnios life is the life of God’s own age, then the dying soul who meets Christ at the threshold enters — even briefly — into that age. The soul participates, for a moment, in aiōnios time. God’s time. And God’s time is not thin. It does not rush. It holds what it needs to hold.¹⁷

The full lexical and theological discussion of aiōn and aiōnios is developed in Appendix L. That appendix addresses the important debate about whether aiōnios always means “everlasting” or sometimes means “age-long.” Here, the relevant point is narrower. The biblical vocabulary of eternity is not simply about duration. It is about quality. And the moment of death is the moment when that quality becomes available to the dying soul.

A Methodological Caution: Cullmann, Barr, and What Words Can Tell Us

Before we go further with the biblical vocabulary, a caution is needed. In 1946, the Swiss theologian Oscar Cullmann published Christ and Time, arguing that biblical “eternity” is fundamentally different from the Greek philosophical concept. For the Bible, Cullmann argued, eternity is not Platonic timelessness. It is endless time — time without beginning or end. The Christian understanding of history is linear and temporal, not cyclical or static.¹⁸

Cullmann’s thesis was influential. But it was also challenged. James Barr, in Biblical Words for Time (1962) and The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961), argued that Cullmann had overdrawn his case. You cannot move directly from word-frequency analysis to deep philosophical conclusions, Barr insisted. The fact that the New Testament uses kairos and chronos does not prove that the biblical writers had a developed “philosophy of time” or that they intended the sharp distinction later theologians have drawn.¹⁹

Barr’s caution is well taken. DeWeese engages both scholars in his chapter on the scriptural evidence and draws the appropriate lesson. We must not build too much on word-studies alone.²⁰ Words are tools, not proofs.

This chapter accepts Barr’s correction. The argument here does not rest on rigid lexical claims — on the bare fact that the New Testament uses two different words for “time.” It rests on the theological function of these words in their biblical contexts. When Jesus says “the kairos is fulfilled,” the point is not just that he chose one Greek word over another. The point is that something happened. God acted. The decisive moment arrived. And the consistent biblical pattern — across many texts, in many contexts — is that God loads certain moments with saving significance in ways that ordinary clock-time cannot capture.²¹

That pattern, not a word-study, is the foundation for what follows.

“Today” — The Saving Moment in Scripture

One of the most striking patterns in the Bible is the way the word “today” appears at moments of saving action. “Today” in these texts is not a calendar date. It is a kairos-word. It marks the moment when God’s saving presence becomes available to a particular person. And the pattern runs from the Psalms through the Gospels and into the Epistles.

Start with Psalm 95:7–8: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”²² The “today” here is not about the calendar. It is about the opportunity. God is speaking. The hearer’s heart is open or closed. The moment is now. The psalmist does not say “this year” or “sometime soon.” He says “today.” The urgency belongs to the moment, not to the timeline.

The writer of Hebrews picks up this psalm and repeats it three times, with increasing force. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Heb 3:7–8). Again: “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today’” (Heb 3:13). And again: “As it is said, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts’” (Heb 3:15; 4:7).²³ “Today” is repeated until the reader cannot miss it. The point is that God’s voice comes to the hearer in a particular moment — and that moment demands a response.

Now consider Luke 19:9. Jesus enters the house of Zacchaeus, the tax collector, and declares: “Today salvation has come to this house.”²⁴ Salvation came to Zacchaeus not at the end of a long process of self-improvement. It came today. In a single encounter. In the moment when Zacchaeus looked into the face of Christ and said yes.

But the text that matters most for this chapter is Luke 23:43. On the cross, a criminal turns to the dying Jesus and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replies: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”²⁵

Think about what Jesus is saying. The thief is dying. He has hours left, perhaps less. He has no time for catechism. He has no time for baptism. He has no time for a life of faithful service. All he has is this moment. This conversation. This encounter. This dying day. And Jesus says that this moment is enough. “Today.”

The grammar reinforces the point. In Greek, the word “today” (sēmeron) comes right after the introductory formula. Jesus places it first for emphasis. Not “you will be with me in Paradise someday.” Not “after a period of waiting.” Today. The word falls like a hammer on the nail. It pins the promise to this dying day.⁶⁵

The thief’s “today” was his dying day. His kairos came at the threshold of death, not before it. The saving encounter happened not in the middle of his life but at its end. And if that was true for the thief, then every dying day can be a “today” of salvation.²⁶

This does not mean the thief’s case is the same as every other case. He had the rare advantage of dying beside Jesus in the flesh. The book’s argument is that what was visible on Calvary — a dying person meeting Christ — is what happens invisibly at every deathbed. The pattern is the same. The “today” is the same. Only the visibility is different.²⁷

There is a pastoral weight here that should not be passed over. Parents who have lost a child, spouses who watched a loved one slip away before the pastor could arrive, missionaries who wonder about the people they never reached — all of them can hear in Luke 23:43 a word of hope. The dying day is not a dead zone. It is a “today.” And “today” in the Bible is always a word loaded with the possibility of meeting God.²⁸

A Thousand Years as One Day: God’s Time and Ours

The second major biblical text for this chapter is 2 Peter 3:8: “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.”²⁹

This verse is sometimes treated as a throwaway — a vague statement that God experiences time differently from us, without any clear application. But that reading sells the text short. The context of 2 Peter 3 is about God’s patience. Scoffers are asking: “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Pet 3:4). The delay seems to disprove the promise. Peter’s reply is that God’s timing is not our timing. What looks like delay to us is patience on God’s side: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet 3:9).³⁰

The verse is echoing Psalm 90:4: “For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.”³¹ The psalm is a prayer of Moses. It contrasts God’s eternity with human brevity. A millennium on God’s side is like a single day that has already passed. Time on God’s side is not structured the way time on our side is.

Now, the honest reader will note that 2 Peter 3:8 is making a specific point in a specific context. The letter addresses scoffers who mock the delay of Christ’s return. “Where is the promise of his coming?” they ask. “For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Pet 3:4). Peter’s answer is that the scoffers are measuring God’s timeline with human clocks. And human clocks do not apply to God. That context must be respected.³²

Some readers will press the point: if the verse is about the delay of the Second Coming, then it should not be used to support a different doctrine. That is a fair concern. This chapter does not claim that 2 Peter 3:8 was written to teach a theory of the moment-of-death encounter. It was not. But the principle the verse states is broader than its immediate application.

But the principle the verse states is broader than its immediate application. God’s experience of time is not identical to ours. A day on God’s side can hold what a thousand years hold on ours. And a thousand years on our side can be compressed into a single divine “day.” The relationship between God’s time and human time is asymmetric. It does not run at the same ratio in both directions.³³

Apply this directly to the moment of death. The clinical dying process may last seconds or minutes by the bedside clock. The nurses see a brief interval. The monitors show a flatline. But on God’s side — and on the soul’s side, if the soul is now participating in God’s kind of time — those seconds are not thin. They are thick. They can hold an encounter, a life review, a pursuit, a response, a decision. They can hold what the clock says they cannot hold, because God’s time is not the clock’s time.³⁴

This is not a proof. No single verse proves a theological model. But it is a strong warrant. The Bible itself says that God’s time and ours do not run at the same pace. And it connects that asymmetry to God’s patience — his “not wishing that any should perish.” The very verse that establishes the time-asymmetry also names God’s saving purpose as its motive.³⁵

The Fullness of Time: When Chronos Is Filled with Meaning

Paul introduces another time-concept that bears on the moment of death. In Galatians 4:4, he writes: “But when the fullness of time (to plērōma tou chronou) had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law.”³⁶

The phrase is striking. Plērōma means “fullness” or “completion.” And here it modifies chronos — the ordinary word for time. What Paul is saying is that at a particular moment in ordinary, measurable time, that time became full. It was filled with meaning, with purpose, with God’s saving action. The Incarnation was a plērōma-event — a moment in which chronos was loaded with redemptive content it had never carried before.³⁷

If the Incarnation was the cosmic plērōma — the moment when God’s saving purpose filled all of human time — then the moment of death is the personal plērōma. It is the moment when the fullness of God’s saving purpose fills the individual soul’s time. The entire history of God’s pursuit of this one person comes to its culmination. The clock-time is brief. But it is full.³⁸

This pattern — ordinary time becoming extraordinary when God fills it — runs through the whole Bible. The burning bush was an ordinary bush until God showed up. The Jordan River was an ordinary river until Israel crossed it. The bread and wine at the Last Supper were ordinary bread and wine until Christ filled them with himself. And the dying moment is an ordinary moment — until God fills it with the encounter for which the soul was made.³⁹

The Door and the Sleep: Biblical Pictures of Dying

The Bible does not only give us a vocabulary for time. It also gives us images for the moment of death. Two of these images are especially relevant.

The first is the image of the door or threshold. In John 10:9, Jesus says: “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.”⁴⁰ The immediate context is the shepherd-and-sheep imagery. But the theological echo runs deeper. Christ is the threshold through which the soul passes. He is not waiting somewhere beyond the door. He is the door. The dying person does not pass through some neutral space and then happen to meet Christ on the other side. The passage itself is Christ. The threshold is Christ. To cross from life to death is to walk through him.⁴¹

The Bible also uses “gates” and “doors” in connection with death. “The gates of death” (Ps 9:13; Job 38:17). “The gates of Hades” (Matt 16:18). The imagery is consistent: death has a threshold, and that threshold is not merely a gap in reality. It is a place where something happens. In the Bible, gates are where decisions are made, where justice is rendered, where the king meets the people. The “gates of death” are not passive. They are active. Something meets you there.⁴²

The second image is sleep. The New Testament consistently describes the death of believers as “falling asleep.” Paul writes to the Thessalonians about “those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thess 4:13–15). He speaks of those who “have fallen asleep in Christ” (1 Cor 15:18, 20). Jesus himself uses the language: “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him” (John 11:11).⁴³

The “sleep” language has sometimes been taken as evidence for soul sleep — the view that the soul is unconscious between death and resurrection. But the majority view in the Christian tradition, and the view defended in Chapter 9, is that the sleep language describes the body, not the soul. The body sleeps. It looks like rest. But the soul is not sleeping. It is awake — more awake than it has ever been. The sleep of the body is the awakening of the soul.⁴⁴

Put the two images together. Death has a threshold, and that threshold is Christ. The body falls asleep, and the soul wakes up. The biblical imagery, taken on its own terms, points toward exactly the picture this book has been building. A dying person whose body goes quiet while the soul opens to an encounter that the clock cannot measure and the bystanders cannot see.

There is a third image worth mentioning briefly: the valley. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (Ps 23:4).⁶⁶ The psalmist does not say “I walk to the valley” or “I stop at the valley.” He says “I walk through the valley.” Death is a passage, not a destination. And the passage is not walked alone. “You are with me.” The shepherd walks beside the dying. The threshold is not empty. The valley is not silent. Christ is there.

Boros and the Boundary of the Pilgrim State

The biblical vocabulary we have traced — kairos, aiōn, “today,” “fullness of time,” the threshold, the sleep-that-is-waking — converges on a picture that a mid-twentieth-century Jesuit theologian saw with startling clarity, even without the vocabulary being laid out for him in this way.

Ladislaus Boros, in Part III of The Mystery of Death, uses a phrase from Catholic theology to describe the moment of death. He calls it the ending of the status viae — the “state of pilgrimage.” The soul in earthly life is a pilgrim. It is on the way. It has not arrived.⁴⁵ At death, the pilgrim reaches the status termini — the “final state.” The language comes from Thomas Aquinas, who argued that the soul cannot change its basic direction after death, because death ends the pilgrim state.

But Boros does something creative with the tradition. He argues that the moment of death is not simply the end of the pilgrimage. It is the summit of the pilgrimage. It is the moment when everything the pilgrim has been walking toward comes rushing into view. Death is not just a stop. It is the arrival.⁴⁶

Boros presses the metaphysics further. Drawing on Aquinas’s analysis of instantaneous change, he argues that the last moment of the pilgrim state and the first moment of the final state are not two separate moments. They overlap. They form what Boros calls “a single composite and temporal entity.”⁴⁷ The soul is still on the road and yet already at the gate. It is still able to choose and yet already touching the destination. The doorway is both passage and arrival at once.

This is the terminus viae — the boundary point. And at that boundary, something enormous happens. The soul sees clearly for the first time. It meets Christ. It makes its final decision. The whole weight of the pilgrimage presses into a single moment. Not because the moment is long. Because the moment is full.

What Boros saw intuitively, the biblical vocabulary confirms. The dying moment is not a gap between two states. It is a loaded moment in which the pilgrim meets the God who has been walking with her all along. The terminus viae is the personal kairos. It is the personal “today.” It is the personal plērōma. The Catholic theological category and the biblical time-vocabulary converge on the same point: the moment of death holds more than the clock can measure, because it is the moment when the soul arrives at the encounter for which it was made.⁴⁸

Boros will receive a much fuller treatment in the next chapter. Here, the point is simply this: his theological category of the terminus viae is not a foreign import into the biblical material. It is a natural outgrowth of it. The Bible already speaks of dying as a threshold, of Christ as the door, of “today” as the saving moment. Boros gathers these threads and names the pattern.⁴⁹

Objection: Don’t the Urgency Passages Demand Decision Before Dying?

A careful reader will have noticed a possible tension. Several of the very passages cited above — Hebrews 3:13, 2 Corinthians 6:2 — are urgency passages. They call for a decision now. “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today.’” “Now is the day of salvation.” If “today” is the moment of God’s saving action, doesn’t the emphasis on “now” mean that the decision must be made during this earthly life — before dying, not in the dying?⁵⁰

The objection deserves a real answer. It is, in fact, one of the strongest biblical objections to the moment-of-death model, and it comes not from the proof-text tradition (which tends to cite Hebrews 9:27, treated in Chapter 24) but from the broader pattern of New Testament urgency.

Here is the answer. The objection assumes that “today” has a fixed referent — that it means “today while you are healthy” or “today while you can still hear a sermon.” But that is not how “today” works in these texts. “Today” is indexed to the hearer’s present opportunity. It means: “right now, at this moment, in whatever circumstances you find yourself, God is speaking, and you must respond.” For the person sitting in a pew, “today” is the Sunday morning. For the person reading a letter from Paul, “today” is the moment of reading. And for the dying person, “today” is the dying day.⁵¹

The thief on the cross proves the point. His “today” was his dying day. Jesus did not say, “You should have come to me sooner.” He said, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” The urgency call is not falsified by extending “today” to the dying day. It is fulfilled in it. The dying person hears God’s voice. The dying person must not harden her heart. The kairos has come, even at the very end.⁵²

Notice what the book is not saying. It is not saying that the urgency passages are wrong. It is not saying that people should postpone their response to God until they are dying. It is not saying that antemortem faith does not matter. Of course it matters. The normal pattern of salvation in the New Testament is hearing the gospel, believing, and being baptized during one’s earthly life. The book fully affirms this. What the book is saying is that the normal pattern is not the only pattern — and that the Bible itself provides the warrant for saying so. “Today” is bigger than any one sermon. It includes the dying day.⁵³

Objection: Doesn’t This Dissolve Evangelistic Urgency?

A second objection follows naturally from the first. If the dying person has a “today” of encounter with Christ, then why evangelize? Why send missionaries? Why preach at all, if everyone gets a chance at the end?

This objection is understandable. It is also addressed at length in Chapter 32. Here, a summary answer will suffice.

The moment-of-death encounter is not a replacement for evangelism. It is a safety net. Antemortem salvation is the normal pattern. God sends preachers. God sends missionaries. God sends friends, parents, neighbors, and strangers with the gospel on their lips. The whole New Testament is built on the assumption that the gospel should be preached to every creature. Nothing in this book undermines that.⁵⁴

But some people never hear. Some people hear a distorted version. Some people hear the words but never encounter the reality behind them. Some people die as infants, or with cognitive disabilities that prevent them from processing a verbal message. What happens to them? The moment-of-death model answers: God’s love does not stop at the boundary of human failure. If the preacher never came, the Christ still comes — at the threshold, in the kairos, at the “today” that is the dying day.⁵⁵

The analogy is a safety net, not a replacement for the tightrope. The fact that a net exists beneath an acrobat does not make the tightrope pointless. The performance is the point. The net is there for what the performance cannot cover. Similarly, evangelism is the point. The moment-of-death encounter is there for what evangelism cannot cover. The existence of the net does not reduce the urgency of the walk. It increases our confidence in the love of the God who put the net there.⁵⁶

There is a deeper point here. The objection assumes that urgency comes from scarcity. If the only chance is in this life, then we must be urgent. If there is a second chance, then urgency dissolves. But biblical urgency does not come from scarcity. It comes from love. The reason to preach the gospel is not that God will abandon those who never hear it. The reason to preach the gospel is that the gospel is good news, and good news deserves to be told. The moment-of-death model does not remove the reason for evangelism. It removes the terror that has sometimes been mistaken for the reason.

Three Lines Converge: Philosophy, Science, and the Bible

Step back and see the larger picture. This chapter has traced a single thread through the biblical material: the Bible speaks of time in ways that make the moment-of-death encounter not only possible but expected.

The Hebrew vocabulary (olam, et, yom) treats time as personal, appointed, and elastic. The Greek vocabulary (chronos, kairos, aiōn) distinguishes between measured time and decisive time. The “today” passages show God loading particular moments with saving significance. 2 Peter 3:8 establishes that God’s time and ours do not run at the same pace. Galatians 4:4 shows ordinary chronos being filled with redemptive content. The threshold and sleep imagery pictures death as a passage through Christ himself, in which the body rests and the soul wakes. And Boros’s terminus viae gathers it all into a single concept: the moment of death is the boundary where pilgrimage becomes arrival.

Now recall what the previous chapters showed. Chapter 13 established that the God who meets the soul at death is a God who truly acts in time — who pursues, responds, waits, and decides.⁵⁷ Chapter 14 showed that subjective time and clock time are genuinely distinct, and that the dying brain’s phenomenology is not illusion but a deeper register of temporal experience.⁵⁸ The NDE data from Chapter 10 documented that dying people consistently report radical time-alteration — time stopping, stretching, compressing, or operating on a different plane altogether.⁵⁹

Three independent lines of inquiry — philosophy of time, empirical NDE research, and biblical theology — all converge on the same conclusion. The dying moment holds more than the clock can measure.⁶⁰

Philosophy says: subjective time and objective time are genuinely distinct; there is no reason to privilege the clock over consciousness.

The NDE data says: dying people consistently report extended experiences compressed into brief clinical intervals.

And the Bible says: God loads particular moments with saving content that ordinary time cannot exhaust, and God’s time is not measured by our clocks.

No single line of evidence proves the model. But the convergence of all three is striking. The book is not grafting a philosophical novelty onto the biblical material. It is reading the biblical material in light of what philosophy and science have confirmed: that time is richer, deeper, and more flexible than the bedside clock suggests.⁶¹

Think of it as three witnesses in a courtroom. Each witness saw the event from a different angle. Their accounts are independent. They did not confer. Yet they agree on the central point. The philosopher says: subjective time is not reducible to clock time. The NDE researcher says: dying people report extended experiences in brief clinical intervals. The biblical writer says: God loads certain moments with content that clock time cannot exhaust. Three witnesses. Three disciplines. One conclusion.

The further details of this convergence are developed in the Part Two appendices. Appendix F presents the philosophical case for divine temporality. Appendix L gives the full lexical-theological treatment of the biblical vocabulary of time. Appendix I develops the philosophy of psychological time. Appendix J examines the empirical NDE evidence case by case. Appendix O synthesizes all of this into a working model of the encounter. The reader who wants the full treatment should follow those threads. Here, the point is simply the convergence itself.⁶²

At the Threshold

We began with Ecclesiastes 3:11. God has put eternity into the human heart. All through life, that eternity is carried like a seed — present but not yet bloomed. The body anchors us. The clock ticks. The seconds are counted. And the olam in the heart waits.

Then comes the dying. The body loosens its hold. The clock’s authority fades. And the olam — the eternity that was always there — opens.

The biblical vocabulary gives us the words for what happens next. The dying moment is a kairos — a moment loaded with the saving action of God. It is a “today” — the day on which the dying soul hears the voice and must not harden its heart. It is a plērōma — the fullness of the soul’s time, the moment when all of God’s patient pursuit comes to its climax. It is the terminus viae — the boundary of the pilgrimage, where the pilgrim meets the God who has been walking beside her all along.⁶³

And it is enough. A thief on a cross had nothing but a dying day, and Jesus said it was enough. A moment that looks empty to the bystanders is full to the brim on God’s side. The clock ticks its last ticks. The nurses note the time. But the soul — the soul is in a “today” that the clock knows nothing about.

If your loved one died before the pastor could arrive, the Christ was already there. He was the door. If your child never heard a sermon, the kairos still came. If your father slipped away in the night, the “today” still sounded. God put eternity into his heart, too. And at the moment of death, that heart opened to the encounter for which it was made.⁶⁴

The next chapter introduces the theologian who saw this most clearly. Ladislaus Boros, a Hungarian Jesuit, built the most philosophically developed account of the moment-of-death encounter in the twentieth century. Chapter 16 is a sustained engagement with his work. But the foundation for that engagement is what this chapter has laid: the biblical theology of time, which says that the dying moment is not the soul’s abandonment. It is the soul’s kairos.

He has put eternity in your heart. At the threshold, it opens.