Have you ever thought about time much…especially earthly time? I was thinking about it a while back and how we have all become such slaves to it. Where did earthly time come from, and how did we get in such a chronological society?

For those of us who believe in creation, Genesis says that earthly time was created on the first day. To quote Genesis 1: 3-5: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.”

Pretty simple, huh? When man first showed up on the earth, his days were divided into light and darkness. The sun came up, day…the sun went down, night. Not a lot of stress and pressure in the beginning. Man led an agrarian life, and that division was enough.

Eventually, man moved into communities and cities, and the need for a little more structured time came into existence. Blame it on the Sumerians, the Babylonians or the Egyptians, but between 4000 and 3500 B.C., man decided to divide the day into 24 periods. He created sundials and obelisks to track the Earth’s shadow.  Once the sun went down, the sundial was useless, and so water clocks were invented.

Those worked well but Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer, and his contemporary, Ptolemy, a Greek mathematician living in Egypt, divided the 24 hour day into smaller pieces, called minutes and seconds.  Great thinking and excellent work, but at the time, society didn’t need to be so exact with its concept of time.

As the centuries moved on and clock makers strove to make more accurate timepieces, tower clocks, spring-driven clocks, and pendulum clocks were developed during the 14th and 17th centuries. Man kept getting more and more accurate in his desire to measure the hours in a day.

We then come to the 20th century, and we celebrated the inventions of the electric and quartz clocks. And if those weren’t accurate enough, atomic clocks were invented that can measure time to the millisecond.

So here we are, victims of our own making. We now have clocks everywhere. Every time we pick up our phones, the first thing we see is the time. Sure, we have to be on time for work, school, and medical appointments, but do we have to personally keep dividing our day down to the nanosecond? Can we just take a few steps back and begin to enjoy the days we are given?

I mean, let’s think about it. Do you want to be a slave to time, or do you want it to be your servant? Can you take a few extra minutes to enjoy your lunch or dinner instead of bolting down your food and then moving on to the next thing in your day planner? Modern man has surrendered his very existence to his timepieces and planners, and I don’t believe he is the happier for it.

I saw an article the other day talking about how the universe measures time. News flash: the universe doesn’t measure time. We do, on Earth. Time is an earthly construct. Once you get off Earth, there is just existence. The moon exists, the planets exist, but apparently no one is up there measuring time the way we do. And when we do use time as the fourth dimension, when we are measuring space, it is still related to earthly time. 

Just saying, let’s enjoy the time we do have.