Understanding the times

The short answer to why we are called Kairos is on the overview page. This is the long one, for whoever wants it.

The smallest number on the list

Around 1000 BC the tribes of Israel came to Hebron to put the crown on David, and somebody kept the record. First Chronicles 12 reads like a muster roll. Judah sent 6,800 bearing shield and spear. Ephraim sent 20,800. Zebulun sent 50,000 seasoned troops. From beyond the Jordan came 120,000 armed with every weapon of war.

Then, between Zebulun and Naphtali, one line is unlike every other line in the chapter.

Of Issachar, men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do, 200 chiefs, and all their kinsmen under their command. 1 Chronicles 12:32, ESV

Two hundred — the smallest contingent named in the chapter. And no weapons. No shields, no spears, no bows, no mention of battle formation or hardened veterans. Every other tribe is measured by what it could carry into a fight. Issachar is measured by what it could see.

What they had was not better information. Everyone in Israel knew Saul was dead, knew there was a civil war, knew Samuel had anointed David — Saul himself admitted it. What Issachar had was the ability to lay the facts of the moment down beside what God had said and see how the two fit together. And the verse does not end with what they understood. It ends with “and all their kinsmen under their command.” What they saw moved their households.

Two words for time

The Greek New Testament has a word for exactly the kind of time Issachar was reading, and it is not the ordinary one.

Notice what both testaments assume — that the times are readable. God does not blindfold His people and then hold them responsible for what they could not see. And notice what both require: the reading has to end in doing. In Hebrew, to know what Israel ought to do. In Greek, understand what the will of the Lord is, followed immediately by commands about singing, thanksgiving, marriage and children. Discernment lands in the ordinary obedience of ordinary Tuesdays.

There is also a warning built into the Greek. A kairos can be missed. Opportunity is not permanent. There are conversations with your children, invitations to your neighbors and reconciliations with your brothers that have a season, and the season closes.

Three ways to fail at this

Every one of them is comfortable, which is why they last.

Knowing the times but not the Word

The congregation that reads the culture accurately, sees exactly where the wind is blowing, and trims the sails of the gospel to catch it. It rarely announces itself as unbelief. It calls itself relevance. A congregation can be extremely skilled at reading the times and have nothing left worth saying to them.

This is why neither of our services touches the message. Research tells you about the field. It has no opinion about the seed.

Knowing the Word but not the times

The opposite ditch, and in churches like ours the likelier one. The man who can quote chapter and verse on the plan of salvation, defend a cappella singing and weekly communion from the text, who is doctrinally immovable — and who has not had a real conversation with a lost person in eleven years. He is not wrong about the Book. He does not know the field he was sent into. He speaks to his community as though it were 1958, and that community is gone. The person moving in next door may not know who Abraham was, or why there are two testaments.

Paul did not preach to Athens the sermon he preached in Antioch. Same Christ, same cross, same call to repentance — different door.

Knowing both, and doing nothing

The failure 1 Chronicles 12:32 specifically forbids, because the verse does not stop at “men who had understanding of the times.” Some of the most discerning people in any congregation are also the least use, precisely because discernment became a hobby. They have analysis for days. Ask what they did about any of it last month and the room gets quiet.

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. James 4:17, ESV

Where this leaves us

Both services exist against the second failure and end at the third. The community outreach work is about the field a congregation was actually sent into rather than the one it remembers. The maturity assessment is about the congregation itself, and it deliberately refuses to hand back a score — it ends in a priority, because a reading that does not arrive at therefore, here is what we do is not the thing Scripture is praising.

Neither one is discernment on your behalf. Two hundred men from Issachar still had to saddle up and ride to Hebron.

Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.