The καιρός of the Second Coming, Not the Χρόνος of the Second Coming

I have been seeing a large number of posts and comments about the time of the second coming and whether it will happen in a few years or not. Hopefully this post can change the way we think about the second coming.

A famous American writer once told a story of two fish swimming along. Another fish swimming by nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" The two fish keep swimming until one looks at the other and says, "What the #$!& is water?”

We are surrounded by our own culture and many times it determines how we think and view the world without us realizing it. In our culture time is something that structures our world. If you have to go to work, you are expected to be there at a certain time. Church meetings are scheduled at a specific time (and not Mormon standard time). TV shows air at preset times. Your GPS can tell you down to the minute how long it will take you to get somewhere. You can track the progress of a package being delivered. What ever device you are using to read this on has a clock that is synchronized over the internet by an official clock somewhere.

Our concept of time is something we are so embedded in that we have a hard time realizing that our concept of time is unique in all of human history. Up until a few hundred years ago the smallest unit of time anyone really used was the hour, and even that was a little hard to measure. For most of human history time was measured by the position of the sun, moon, and stars. The extreme modern obsession we have with exact times did not exist until recently.

Time in the ancient world, the world of the Bible, was a very different thing. For us time is something that increments up. Events start at some time, other events follow, and then things happen after that. There is a specific order to events. We want to keep things in chronological order. If you study history you will probably study it in chronological order, or will study a specific time period according to the years on a calendar.

In the world of the Bible how people interacted with time was very different. There was no exactness. Meetings or events didn't start at exact times. No one was checking the clock to see if a meeting should start, because there were no clocks! (None in the sense that we know them.) A festival, or feast, or celebration, or meeting would start when the necessary people were there to start it.

In Hebrew the word for time is יום, or Yom. The concept of yom is simple, but for us it can be confusing. Yom can be translated, depending on context as "day", "year", "age", "epoch", "season", or just an undefined amount of time. In one way we use the word "day" in the same way when we say, "Back in my day...."

In Greek time is broken down into two separate concepts. Greeks used the word Χρόνος (chronos) to talk about time as we are familiar with it. When King Herod asked the wise men what time they saw the sign of Christ's birth (as recorded by Matthew, which was written in Greek), he was asking them about the chronos of the event. It was something that could be put on a calendar. Time, as it relates to chronos has a start and an end. Or it could be used to indicate the time "before" something happened. But chronos could be an undefined amount of time, but it was still something that could be put on a calendar.

The other Greek word that gets translated into English as "time" is καιρός (kairos). While you could put kairos down on a calendar, it doesn't refer to a specific time. It refers to the right or opportune time. A comedian telling a joke has to time it right to make people laugh. Comedic timing isn't a chronos, thing, it's a kairos. When growing food in a garden you don't follow an exact schedule. You plant the garden when the time and weather conditions are right, and you harvest the food when it is ripe. If it's not ripe, you just have to wait. It's not something you can sit down with the plants and work out a day when they will be ready. This is a case of kairos.

The Apostles who recorded the words of Jesus used the word kairos to talk about the time of the "harvest". There wasn't a chronos for the time of harvest, there was a kairos. The time wasn't set. It depended on the conditions of the wheat. At times the apostles would call the saints to action saying that now was the kairos to act, now was the right time. It wasn't because they had reached the correct date set in heaven for it. The conditions were right to preach and convert many people. They had to take advantage of that moment before it passed.

When it came to the second coming, Jesus and the apostles never spoke of the chronos of the second coming. They only spoke of the kairos, the unknown time that it would be the right moment for it to happen.

32 “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time (kairos) will come. (Mark 13:32-33)

Even speaking of the "time of the gentiles" it was not a specific set period of time. There would be a beginning and end to the time of the gentiles. But those times were not, and are not set.

And importantly some of the critical "times" used by people to try to predict the chronos of the second coming, are not chronos at all, but kairos.

14 But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she could fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to her place where she is nourished for a time (kairos), and times (kairos plural), and half a time (half a kairos). (Revelation 12:14)

These times are not set times (chronos). They are movable times (kairos) that depend on certain conditions.

With this view, God does not have a "millennial" planner that He keeps hidden so that no one will know when He has scheduled the second coming. God is waiting and watching for the correct moment of the second coming. It is not a set time, and Jesus warned us against those who thought they knew the chronos or even the kairos of the second coming. God is not bound by any timetable. There is only one who knows the correct conditions (kairos) for the second coming, and that is God, and he will act when the conditions are right.

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Additional materials/reading:

Here's all the times chronos appears in the Bible (New Testament). You can check out how it is used and how it is translated.

https://biblehub.com/str/greek/5550.htm

When you separate the two concepts some things in the Bible start making a lot more sense.