Appendix L
The Bible’s Own Language for the Moment That Holds Eternity
Condensed Edition
The writer of Ecclesiastes planted a seed three thousand years ago. Most readers walk past it. But for our question, it may be the most important verse in the Bible:
“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.” — Ecclesiastes 3:11 (ESV)
This verse gives us a starting place. It says human beings are built for more than ticking seconds. God placed an eternal resonance in us. The dying moment is when that resonance sounds most clearly.
To hear it, we need to listen to the Bible’s own vocabulary of time. That vocabulary is richer and stranger than any wristwatch suggests. It speaks of time that bends under the weight of meaning, moments that hold more than their seconds can contain, and a God whose “day” is a thousand years. All of this bears directly on the moment-of-death encounter.
The Hebrew Bible uses a small family of words for time. None of them maps neatly onto our modern clock-time concept.1
‘Olam (עוֹלָם) is the most important. It appears over four hundred times in the Hebrew Bible. Its basic meaning is not “timeless eternity” but “long duration” or “most distant times,” whether past or future.2 When the psalmist says God exists “from everlasting to everlasting” (mê‘olam ‘ad-‘olam, Psalm 90:2), the picture is of perpetual duration stretching in both directions. As R. T. Mullins observes, Psalm 90 gives “a deeply temporal portrayal of God” using this from/to formula to denote a span of time.3 The word does not in itself contain the notion of limitless, clock-free abstraction. When applied to God, it says: God endures without beginning and without end.
‘Et (עֵת) means “appointed time” or “season.” Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 uses it twenty-eight times: a time to be born, a time to die, a time to weep, a time to laugh. Each ‘et is a qualitatively distinct season, not an empty clock interval.4 Notice what the Preacher is saying. Time is not neutral. It has texture. Some moments are for mourning and some for dancing. The dying moment, too, has its own appointed quality. It is the ‘et of the final threshold.
Yom (יוֹם) means “day,” but its range is elastic. It can mean a calendar day (Gen 1:5), an era (“the day of the Lord”), or a turning point in history (“in that day”). Qedem (קֶדֶם) points to primordial, ancient times. Together, these words paint a striking picture. Hebrew time-language is rich and flexible. It resists rigid clock-time categories. The ancient Hebrews did not produce speculative philosophy about time. As DeWeese notes, they never developed special vocabulary for abstract temporal categories.5 But their language was not poor. It was concrete. It was built to mark meaning, not to measure seconds. And that matters for the dying moment, because the dying moment is bursting with meaning.
The New Testament adds its own vocabulary. Two Greek words matter most for our question: chronos (χρόνος) and kairos (καιρός). But a careful reading, grounded in the best available scholarship, shows that the distinction between them is less tidy than popular theology often claims.
Chronos appears fifty-three times in the New Testament. It generally refers to time as duration, as a stretch or interval.6 Kairos appears eighty-five times. It is often translated as “time” or “season” and frequently appears in contexts of decision, opportunity, or divine action.7
DeWeese’s careful survey confirms that the two words often overlap. In Acts 1:7, Jesus pairs them: “It is not for you to know the times (chronous) or seasons (kairous) the Father has set by his own authority.” The pairing suggests near-synonymy, not a sharp philosophical distinction.9
Still, the theological pattern is real even if the lexical distinction is blurred. When the New Testament speaks of God’s saving action, it uses language of decisive moments. The time is “fulfilled” (Mark 1:15). The day of salvation arrives “now” (2 Cor 6:2). The opportunity must be seized (Gal 6:10; Eph 5:16). Whatever word the writers chose, the concept is clear: some moments carry more weight than the clock assigns them. Some moments are pregnant with divine purpose.
The moment of death is precisely such a moment.
This appendix carries the book’s full treatment of aiōn (αἰών) and aiōnios (αἰώνιος), per the Argument Ownership Map.10
Aiōn means “age” or “age-long duration.” It can refer to this present world-age, the age to come, or the entirety of time. The New Testament speaks of “this age” and “the age to come” as two great epochs in God’s plan (Matt 12:32; Eph 1:21).11 God is called “the eternal God” (tou aiōniou theou, Rom 16:26). But as DeWeese observes, concluding from such uses that aiōn means “timeless eternity” would beg the question. There is no clear instance of the Platonic meaning in the New Testament.12
Aiōnios is the adjective form. It is often translated “eternal” or “everlasting,” but its root sense is “pertaining to an age.” “Eternal life” (zōê aiōnios) is the life of the age to come. “Eternal punishment” (kolasin aiōnion, Matt 25:46) is punishment belonging to that same coming age.13 The word does not settle, on its own, whether the duration it describes is unending or age-long. That question depends on context, theology, and the nature of the age to which it points.14
What matters here is not the lexical debate about duration. What matters is the qualitative point. The age to come is God’s age. Its time has God’s quality. When the dying soul meets Christ at the moment of death, that meeting participates in aiōnios time. The soul enters God’s age, even while clock-time still ticks at the bedside.15
Think of it this way. The age to come is not merely longer than this age. It is different in kind. The life of the age to come is not just unending biological existence. It is the quality of life that belongs to God’s own age. When Jesus says he came to give “eternal life” (zōên aiōnion, John 10:28), he is offering something that belongs to the coming age, breaking into the present. And if it can break into the present during earthly life, it can certainly break into the dying moment.
Craig’s survey of the biblical data confirms the complexity. Several New Testament passages speak of God existing or acting “before the ages” (pro tōn aiōnōn, 1 Cor 2:7). Others speak of events happening “before age-long time” (pro chronōn aiōniōn, Titus 1:2; 2 Tim 1:9). The Septuagint renders the Hebrew mê‘olam in Proverbs 8:23 as pro tou aiōnos, meaning “before time.”16 These passages suggest that the biblical writers saw God’s existence as transcending the created time-order. Yet as both Craig and Barr conclude, the data remain underdetermined. A satisfactory doctrine of God and time must be developed in philosophical theology, not extracted from word counts alone.17
If the lexical distinction between chronos and kairos is less sharp than Cullmann imagined, the theological pattern is still vivid. The New Testament is full of moments that carry more than their clock-seconds can hold. Consider the evidence.
“The time (kairos) is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Jesus announced a kairos that had arrived. A new age was breaking into the present.18
“Behold, now is the favorable time (kairos); behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). Paul was quoting Isaiah 49:8 and pressing it into the present tense. The kairos is not a future hope. It is a “now.”19
“You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time (kairon)?” (Luke 12:56). The crowds could read weather signs but missed the decisive moment standing in front of them.20
“As we have opportunity (kairon), let us do good to everyone” (Gal 6:10). “Making the best use of the time (ton kairon)” (Eph 5:16). These are calls to seize the moment because the moment carries weight.21
The theological function is clear. Some moments are qualitatively loaded. They carry more significance than their duration warrants. And the moment of death is the most loaded of all. It is the soul’s final threshold. If any moment in a human life deserves to be called a kairos, this one does.
The most powerful biblical evidence for the moment-of-death encounter comes from a single word: today.
The writer of Hebrews quotes Psalm 95 three times: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Heb 3:7–8, 15; 4:7).22 The “today” is the kairos of God’s voice. It is not a calendar date. It is the moment when God speaks and the hearer must respond. Every “today” is a new opportunity. Every “today” is decisive. The writer’s purpose in Hebrews 3–4 is precisely to show that the “today” of Psalm 95 is not locked in the past. It keeps arriving. It is always “today” when God’s voice sounds.
Jesus said to Zacchaeus, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9). Salvation arrived at a specific “today” in a specific life. It was not a general principle. It was a particular event in a particular moment.23
And then the verse that matters most for our thesis.
The logic runs like this. If “today” is the kairos of God’s saving action, and if the thief’s dying day was included in that “today,” then the moment of death is part of the saving “today.” The biblical theology supports the moment-of-death thesis directly.24
Paul presses the same point from a different angle: “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). The word “now” is not abstract. It is indexed to the hearer’s present moment. For the dying person, “now” means the dying moment.25
Perhaps the most direct biblical warrant for the time-structure of the moment-of-death encounter comes from Peter.
“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). The verse echoes 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.”27
The context is significant. Peter is addressing the problem of the delayed return of Christ. Scoffers ask, “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Pet 3:4). Peter’s reply has two layers. The first is about patience: “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).29
The second layer is about the structure of divine time itself. God’s time is not human clock-time. A day on God’s side can contain what we measure as ages. Mullins is right to say that 2 Peter 3:8 alludes to Psalm 90, and that both passages give a “profoundly temporal” picture of God who “patiently waits” for a purpose.30 The everlasting God does not count slowness the way the scoffers do. A thousand years feels long to us. It does not feel long to the God of Psalm 90.
Apply this directly to the moment of death. The God who waits patiently across centuries for all to reach repentance can also compress an entire encounter into what bystanders see as a few dying seconds. The principle is the same. God’s time holds more than the clock can measure. From the bedside, the dying person slips away in moments. But on God’s side, and in the dying soul’s own experience, those moments may hold an entire dialogue of love, conviction, and response.
The philosophical case for this time-asymmetry is developed in the earlier appendices. Appendix F argues for dynamic divine temporality. Appendix I develops the philosophy of subjective time. Appendix J presents the empirical NDE evidence for time-dilation. What 2 Peter 3:8 adds is the biblical warrant. God’s own word tells us that time on God’s side does not match the clock.31
“When the fullness of time (to plêrōma tou chronou) had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4).32
This is a remarkable phrase. Paul says chronos itself can be “filled.” Clock-time can become pregnant with redemptive meaning. The Incarnation was not just one moment among millions. It was the moment when time itself reached its fullness, its plêrōma. The whole sweep of history converged on a single birth in Bethlehem.
The moment of death, for the dying soul, is its personal plêrōma. It is the fullness of the soul’s time. Just as the history of Israel reached its climax in Christ’s arrival, the history of each individual life reaches its climax in the moment it meets Christ at the threshold.33 Every life has been building toward something. Every joy, every heartbreak, every choice has been leading somewhere. The dying moment is where it all arrives. The time is full. The christological precedent for this meeting is developed at length in Appendix M.
Jesus said, “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved” (John 10:9). The metaphor is spatial, but its implication is temporal. Christ is the threshold between this age and the next. The dying person crosses that threshold at the moment of death. The door is a person, not an abstraction. The encounter happens at the crossing.34
The New Testament also uses the language of “sleep” for death. Paul says believers “have fallen asleep” (1 Thess 4:13–15; 1 Cor 15:6, 18, 20, 51). Jesus says of Lazarus, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him” (John 11:11).35 The image is gentle: the body sleeps while the soul awakens. The dying person’s body goes still. But the soul does not go dark. It wakes up. It opens its eyes to the encounter for which it was made.
Ladislaus Boros called the moment of death the terminus viae, the end of the pilgrim road. It is the boundary between the journey and the destination. At that boundary, Boros argued, the whole person reaches a state of total self-possession for the first time, and meets God in a fully conscious, fully free encounter.36 For the development of Boros’s hypothesis, see Chapter 16.
Boros’s category fits the biblical vocabulary like a key in a lock. The terminus viae is the personal kairos, the personal “today,” the personal plêrōma. It is the moment when all the biblical time-categories converge on a single soul. The appointed time arrives. The eternity in the heart opens. The threshold appears. The door, who is a person, stands waiting.
What Boros intuited in 1959, decades before NDE research confirmed the temporal architecture of the dying moment, was exactly what the Bible’s vocabulary of time had always implied. Time at the threshold is not ordinary time. It is not empty duration ticking toward silence. It is loaded with divine purpose. It is the hour for which the soul was made. It is the ‘et appointed since creation, the kairos that arrives exactly when the pilgrim reaches the end of the road.
Step back and see the pattern. Three independent lines of inquiry point to the same conclusion: the dying moment holds more than the clock can measure.
The first line is empirical. Near-death experiencers consistently report that seconds of clinical time contained what felt like extended experience. The life review unfolds in panoramic completeness. Encounters occur that seem to last minutes or hours. The NDE evidence for time-dilation, developed in Appendix J and its companion Appendix K, is robust.37
The second line is philosophical. The philosophy of psychological time, developed in Appendix I, shows that subjective time can diverge dramatically from clock-time. The A-theory of time, defended in Appendix H, preserves the reality of the dynamic present. And Appendix F argues that God himself is temporally engaged, able to meet the soul in its expanded subjective time.38
The third line is biblical. This appendix has traced it. The Hebrew vocabulary of time is rich and flexible. The Greek vocabulary, used carefully, points to moments loaded with disproportionate meaning. The “today” passages index salvation to the hearer’s present moment. Second Peter 3:8 tells us God’s time does not match the clock. The “fullness of time” shows that chronos itself can be filled with redemptive content. The threshold imagery places Christ at the crossing point. And Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God put eternity in the human heart from the beginning.
Three lines. One conclusion. The dying moment is a moment that holds eternity.
This book’s thesis is not a philosophical novelty grafted onto the biblical material from outside. It is the natural reading of what the biblical theology of time has always implied. The Bible already speaks of moments that contain what clock-time cannot. It already teaches that God’s time is qualitatively different from ours. It already gives us a dying thief whose “today” included the moment of meeting Christ. It already places eternity in the human heart.
The only thing this book adds is the explicit connection: the moment of death is where all these biblical intuitions converge. God’s kairos meets the soul in a moment that clock-time cannot exhaust.40
When the thief on the cross heard “today,” he heard a word indexed to his dying day. Your loved one’s dying day is also a “today.” It is the today of meeting Christ. The eternity that God placed in her heart is opening now. The kairos has come. And the One who said “I am the door” is standing in it.
↑ 1. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, “The Evidence from Scripture,” section “Philology: Hebrew and Greek Words for Time and Eternity.” DeWeese’s survey of the Hebrew and Greek vocabulary is the primary philological anchor for this appendix.
↑ 2. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, section on ‘olam. The word appears over 440 times in Hebrew and another 20 in the Aramaic portions of the Tanakh. Its basic meaning is “most distant times,” either past or future, with a range extending from “perpetuity” to “remote, distant times.”
↑ 3. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 2, “What is Time?” The “from/to” formula in Ps 90:2 uses ‘olam twice to denote the span of God’s life. See also Gershom Brin, The Concept of Time in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
↑ 4. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, section on ‘et. The word means “time, point of time, occasion.”
↑ 5. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4. The Hebrew vocabulary stock includes yom, qedem, ‘ad, and zeman, each contributing a distinct shade to the Hebrew understanding of time as experienced rather than merely measured.
↑ 6. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, section “Greek Words,” sub-section on chronos. DeWeese notes the word is “virtually indistinguishable from kairos in usage.”
↑ 7. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, section on kairos. Gerhard Delling claims the sense of “decisive moment” is clear in classical Greek from the time of Sophocles (TDNT, vol. 3, pp. 455–59), but, as DeWeese notes, that the word is used of times that turn out to be decisive does not mean the word itself means “decisive times.”
↑ 8. Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans. Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950), 39–44. James Barr, Biblical Words for Time, rev. ed. (Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, 1969), 50–85. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, engages both at length. See also Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).
↑ 9. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, section on chronos: “In Acts 1:7 … the pairing of kairos and chronos is probably due to the use of parallelism in spoken Aramaic; nevertheless, it is clear that the two terms are interchangeable.”
↑ 10. The Argument Ownership Map assigns the full treatment of the aiōn / aiōnios word-group to this appendix. Chapter 29 owns the eschatological-neutrality framing of the final-state passages (Matt 25:46; 2 Thess 1:9; Rev 14:11), which depend on how aiōnios is read, but defers the lexical question here.
↑ 11. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, section on aiōn. The word is used to indicate the duration of the world, and also to speak of God’s being. In Rom 16:26 God is called tou aiōniou theou, “the eternal God.”
↑ 12. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, section on aiōn. DeWeese notes that Plato distinguished aiōn as timeless, ideal eternity from chronos as the time of the created world (Timaeus 37d), but this Platonic usage does not appear in the New Testament.
↑ 13. See Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, trans. and ed. W. F. Arndt and F. W. Gingrich, s.v. “aiōnios.” Craig, Time and Eternity, p 19, notes Barr’s caution on the word.
↑ 14. The eschatological implications of this lexical observation are explored in Chapter 29. This book maintains eschatological neutrality on the question of whether aiōnios in the final-judgment passages means “unending” or “age-long.”
↑ 15. The philosophical account of how this is possible is given in Appendix F (God’s temporal engagement), Appendix I (subjective time-dilation), and Appendix H (A-theory of time).
↑ 16. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp 17–19. Craig notes that the Septuagint renders the Hebrew mê‘olam in Prov 8:23 as pro tou aiōnos (“before time”). In Tit 1:2–3 the expression pro chronōn aiōniōn is rendered by Arndt and Gingrich as “before time began.” Craig observes that Padgett himself acknowledges the Bible does not clearly teach a timeless divine eternity in the traditional sense.
↑ 17. Craig, Time and Eternity, p 20, concurs with Barr’s conclusion: “If such a thing as a Christian doctrine of time has to be developed, the work of discussing it and developing it must belong not to biblical but to philosophical theology.” DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 4, “Conclusion,” arrives at the same assessment.
↑ 18. Mark 1:15 (ESV). The verb peplêrōtai (has been fulfilled) is in the perfect tense, indicating a completed action with ongoing relevance. The kairos is not just approaching; it has arrived.
↑ 19. 2 Cor 6:2 (ESV), quoting Isa 49:8.
↑ 20. Luke 12:56 (ESV). Jesus uses kairon for the present time that demands interpretation and response.
↑ 21. Gal 6:10; Eph 5:16 (ESV). The participle exagorazomenoi in Eph 5:16 (lit. “buying up” or “redeeming” the time) intensifies the urgency: the kairos is a commodity to be seized before it passes.
↑ 22. Heb 3:7–8, 15; 4:7 (ESV), quoting Ps 95:7–8. The writer of Hebrews applies the psalm three times to emphasize the repeatability and present-tense force of “today.”
↑ 23. Luke 19:9 (ESV). The pronoun sêmeron (“today”) indexes salvation to a specific day and a specific encounter.
↑ 24. For the exegesis of Luke 23:43 in the context of the thief’s dying moment as an encounter with Christ, see Chapter 15. The thief’s “today” is discussed briefly in Chapter 5 as well.
↑ 25. 2 Cor 6:2. The double “behold, now” (idou nyn) drives the point home with prophetic force.
↑ 26. Heb 3:13 (ESV). The phrase “as long as it is called ‘today’” (achris hou to sêmeron kaleitai) indicates that “today” is a window, not a wall. The window remains open as long as there is a “today.” For the dying person, that window has not yet closed. For the full treatment of the Heb 9:27 “deadline” question, see Chapter 24.
↑ 27. 2 Pet 3:8; Ps 90:4 (ESV).
↑ 28. The NDE evidence for this claim is surveyed in Appendix J. The philosophical account of how subjective time can exceed clock-time is developed in Appendix I.
↑ 29. 2 Pet 3:9 (ESV). This verse is discussed in Chapter 2 on the universal salvific will.
↑ 30. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, ch. 8, “Eschatology and the Timeless God.” Mullins observes that reading 2 Pet 3:8 in terms of divine timelessness “completely obscures the message of the passage,” which is about God’s patience. The everlasting God does not count slowness as the scoffers do.
↑ 31. On the asymmetry of divine and creaturely time, see also Appendix F, which develops the philosophical case for divine temporality and its implications for the encounter.
↑ 32. Gal 4:4 (ESV). The expression to plêrōma tou chronou (“the fullness of the time”) is unique to this verse. The concept of chronos being “filled” with redemptive purpose is striking: it means quantitative time can be qualitatively saturated.
↑ 33. For the christological precedent, see Appendix M. The Incarnation establishes that the eternal Son entered creaturely time; the dying encounter is the individual application of that same principle.
↑ 34. John 10:9 (ESV). For the full development of the Christ-at-the-threshold motif, see Chapter 18.
↑ 35. 1 Thess 4:13–15; 1 Cor 15:6, 18, 20, 51; John 11:11–14 (ESV). The sleep language is discussed in Chapter 15. The metaphor does not imply unconsciousness (see Chapter 9 on the intermediate-state question).
↑ 36. Boros, The Mystery of Death, III.1 and II.8. In III.1, Boros treats death as the boundary of the pilgrim state: “Death, therefore, is the dawn of finality. In it man receives his definite shape.” In II.8, he draws together his philosophical case: the dying soul enters a state of ontological indigence and total self-encounter—what Boros calls “the moment above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for freedom, for the encounter with God, for the final decision about his eternal destiny.” The terminus viae is thus the threshold where the pilgrim state ends and the soul stands before God in full self-possession. The concept is developed in Chapter 16.
↑ 37. See Appendix J for the case-by-case empirical evidence and Appendix K for the life review as the cleanest empirical window into time-dilation at death.
↑ 38. The philosophical arguments are distributed across Appendix F (divine temporality), Appendix H (A-theory vs. B-theory), and Appendix I (psychology of time). Appendix N addresses the relativity-and-block-universe objection.
↑ 39. On the methodological value of convergent evidence from independent disciplines, see Craig, Time and Eternity, pp 13–14, on the need for philosophical theology to draw on both biblical and metaphysical data. The three-line convergence pattern parallels the book’s overall structure: NDE evidence (Part II), philosophy of time (Part III), biblical foundations (Part V).
↑ 40. The synthetic working model that draws together all the threads of Parts Two through Five, including this appendix’s contribution, is presented in Appendix O.