| Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 – “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” |
We set up ways to measure time.
We slice it into days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
When time passes slowly, we complain. When time passes quickly, we regret.
That is what bothered Danny Hillis. He is not a clockmaker, but he wants to build a clock, a unique clock.
Our standard clock keep track of time in twelve hour increments. Two cycles equal a day.
Hillis is a computer engineer.
He has watched people who lived by looking only to the immediate. Businesses plan around quarterly profits. People pursue a daily to-do list just to have the thrill of checking off the box.
Hillis would like to change that. He wants to build a 10,000-year clock.
His point is that we need to live in a way to see past our lifetimes.
“I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years,” says Hillis.
The question is “Are we living in a way to see past our lifetimes?”
Solomon knew the tyranny of time misspent. He closes his musings on life in the book of Ecclesiastes with these words:
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
There is a clock that ticks for all mankind. God’s clock moves not in days or hours or seconds. It pulses to the tick of eternity.
We would do well not to measure what we do today but how today fits in with our eternal destiny. Perhaps then, we will know how to live our lives.
-Robert Taylor
