Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Eternity in Their Hearts

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“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecc. 3:11).

The human heart has a deep-seated longing to transcend our finite, earthly existence and to know the eternal God. The God-shaped vacuum at the core of our being demands to be filled. We have an itch for eternity that can only be scratched by the Divine. As Augustine said, “God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.”

The phrase “eternity in their hearts” means God has placed a big question mark deep in every man’s soul. This is proven by the fact that anthropological evidence suggests that every culture has an innate sense of the eternal—that this world is not all there is. The Egyptians erected the pyramids, Native Americans labored over sacred burial mounds and the Romans built huge mausoleums. Why? They each were in their own darkened way grappling to work out the eternal longing imbedded in their heart. Their mythology told them that time was merely a dress rehearsal for eternity.   

Don Richardson wrote a fascinating book entitled, Eternity in their Hearts based on Ecclesiastes 3:11. In this survey he presents more than twenty-five examples of missionaries all over the world who discovered cultures completely cut-off from Christianity. Yet all these tribal groups which were detached from civilization worshipped some kind of transcendent being. In an eerie way, these primitive people had deep longing for God, even if their religious rituals were misguided.

For example, Richardson tells about his experiences with the Sawi tribes of Dutch New Guinea—the headhunters whom Richardson went to evangelize in the 1950s. Though the bloodthirsty Sawi people prized war and violence, they also had a sacred ritual for reconciling two warring tribes. The chief’s own son would be offered to the other tribe as a “peace child.” Richardson saw this ritual as a parable of the Gospel, in which the Chief of all chieftains made peace with the lost tribe of humanity by offering up His only Son. Richardson’s thesis contended that, “Every human being has eternity in their heart and that winning people to Christ is a matter of discovering what piece or part of eternity they are familiar with and then helping them connect the dots to Christ.”[1]

According to Solomon, humanity is caught between time and eternity, thus the best way to spend our time is to live it in light of eternity.  As finite creatures we cannot understand the times and the seasons, the beginning from the end, until we have a personal relationship with the Creator of time. The great mystery is that God accomplishes His purposes in time, but it will not be until we enter eternity that we will begin to comprehend His total plan.  As Vance Havner has said, “The things we don’t understand about life—God puts a note on them that says, ‘I’ll explain later.’” 

The New Testament counterpart to Ecclesiastes 3:11, is Romans 8:28, “For we know that God works all things together for good to those that love Him and are called according to his purpose.” In other words, from the Divine perspective there is no ugliness in the events of our lives, only light and dark brushstrokes from the paintbrush of the Master.

I once heard Dr. Erwin Lutzer, of Chicago’s historic Moody Bible Church, tell the story about a trip that he took to an art museum.  He said that as he was looking at a painting by the master artist Rembrandt he noticed an ant crawling across the surface of the canvas.  He thought to himself, “How did that ant get up there on the painting?” Then he said, “There was no way the ant had any idea that he was walking on a priceless piece of art, to him it just looked like a muddled splotches of brown and grey.”  Lutzer commented that that’s what life is like when you have a narrow perspective.  We are like the ant unknowingly walking across a masterpiece. However, God’s sees the total picture. When we see a muddled composition it’s because we are too close to put things into perspective. Eternity is the only correct vantage point to judge time. 

-DM





[1] Don Richardson, Eternity in Their Hearts (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1981). 

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