![]() ![]() Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). Jesus’ first recorded sermon was simple: “The time has come. Unbelievers have the responsibility to respond to opportunities to believe the gospel. The Bible warns that we should take full advantage of the opportunities God gives us. Each of these uses of kairos denotes a unique time in which something special was to happen. Jesus predicts that Israel will be judged “because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you” (Luke 19:44, emphasis added). The Lord promises to reward His servants at “the proper time” (Luke 12:42). There was “an appointed time” for John the Baptist to be born (Luke 1:20). By using kairos here, Jesus emphasizes the fact that Judgment Day is an appointed time, and at that time will occur certain things appropriate for the day. In Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, the Lord refers to the coming judgment as a harvest: “At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn” (Matthew 13:30). A kairos is a time when things “come to a head,” requiring decisive action. Kairos is related to the Greek word kara (“head”). When we “seize the day,” we are taking advantage of the kairos given to us. The word often includes the idea of an opportunity or a suitable time for an action to take place. The Bible uses the word kairos and its cognates 86 times in the New Testament (e.g., in Matthew 8:29 Luke 19:44 and Acts 24:25). Thus, chronos was more linear and quantitative, and kairos was more nonlinear and qualitative. A sequence of moments was expressed as chronos, emphasizing the duration of the time an appointed time was expressed as kairos, with no regard for the length of the time. The word kairos was an ancient Greek word meaning “opportunity,” “season,” or “fitting time.” Another Greek word for “time” was chronos.
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