Ecclesiastes 3:11
[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Great saints of God have beautifully, if feebly, attempted to capture the height and depth and weight of such a majestic verse as this. In his Confessions, Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” Pascal’s oft-quoted words that people have a God-shaped vacuum in their hearts that only God can fill strike a similar note.
We do have a longing in our heart for eternity – or better – the God of eternity. Perhaps C.S. Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, best expressed this great desire of our hearts. He wrote:
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness… I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each of one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence… We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.
…The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire, but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing in itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Eternity has been placed in our hearts by the King of eternity. Our longing is a homesickness of sorts. For though this is our Father’s world and was created good, it is now fallen. And when touched by the Holy Spirit we can no longer be content with the things of this world alone… things that are temporal and destined to fade away.
Perhaps some do not experience such a longing for their true homeland because their hearts and minds are not yet set on things above where Christ our King is seated. Perhaps the ravages of sin have so inflicted their hearts and minds that a shadow has veiled their sight. We can only pray that the same sovereign Spirit who touched us and re-created us will do the same for others.
In the end, there is no end, for we were created for eternity. We are pilgrims and aliens in a foreign land who long for the City of God, not built with human hands, but eternal in the heavens.
May the longing of our hearts for things unseen serve as our true north, that we might one day return Home.
Grace and Truth,
Dale
As we work and travel, and see the beauty our God has created … we are stunned into silence awaiting what He has prepared. Oh my, how can we do anything except as He has described in verses 12 and 13.
Amen! Well said.
Thanks so much for sharing that.
Dale