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Preacher: Ross Macdonald
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:9-11
Well, this morning we continue our time in Ecclesiastes and we're in chapter 3 as we just read the verses from 1 through 8 that we covered last week in this poem about times and these 14 pairs, these merisms that portray the full experience, the full dimensions of life under the sun, of our human experience, and within that, God's purpose for it all.
We had the equation that time, that is our experience of time, plus purpose, that is God's purpose in time, equals a season in life, that God works in seasons and every season has a purpose. And of course, we saw the contrast of perhaps how we live, especially modern life, where we want to have control over time and control over the change of seasons.
We want to shorten difficult seasons or retain and expand blessed seasons, but God is the one who controls and appoints the times of our life. He has a purpose, even if that purpose is veiled, to which our lives must correspond.
And this morning we're continuing now in verses 9 through 11, and our reading took us up to verse 13 because I wanted you to see that we're heading toward the second so-called carpe diem statement, the second, as it were, summary or resolution of the gift or the goodness that can be found under the sun.
So coming off the heels of the poem, beginning in verse 9, we're making our way toward this second summary, and it'll happen again in chapter 3 as well, that is holding together the first two chapters.
We'll spend a little bit of time showing how that's the case. We'll spend a little bit of time looking at verses 9 through 11 in detail, and then we'll look especially at perhaps one of the most profound elements in the whole book of Ecclesiastes, which is here in the first part of verse 11.
So Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verses 9 through 11. What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time.
Also, He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. Let's look at these verses in more detail. First, verse 9, what profit has the worker from that in which he labors?
We've seen from chapter 1, this word profit is a very important word. Sometimes it's translated as gain. It's the idea of fulfillment or meaning or satisfaction. What can I gain with all the work that I'm doing, all the toil that's breaking my back under the sun?
What profit can be found? And so coming off the heels of this poem about the times of human life and God's purpose for human life, we're brought all the way back to chapter 1, where the king in Jerusalem first began this quest and this survey to answer that programmatic question that headed out the whole book of Ecclesiastes.
Chapter 1, verse 3, what profit has a man for all the toil with which he toils under the sun? That's the programmatic question. It's essentially repeated here. What profit has the worker from that in which he labors?
The answer has not changed. There is no profit, no gain under the sun, not lasting gain, not the kind of gain that the king in Jerusalem was searching for. Despite all of the promise and all of the enjoyment that the differing seasons of verses 1 through 8 can bring, the answer has not changed.
There is no profit. There's nothing that can withstand the vapor-like reality of life under the sun. Truly, it is heavil, it is vanity, it is a wind, it is a vapor. There is no profit under the sun. But now we enter into slight changes.
So we have a repetition of the programmatic question, a return to the very origin of this whole quest and survey for profit under the sun, and he's repeating, no, still, there is this burning question that has not been sated.
What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? But in verse 10, we enter into slightly different territory, and that's because of the ending of chapter 2. And as we said there, at the end of chapter 2 in verses 24 through 26, we had the skeleton key, the beginning of the answer to that programmatic question, not the end of it, but the beginning of it.
And here, following this poem about times in the first eight verses of chapter 3, we come back to the king's recognition that now he can see things in a slightly different light. That's why he's going to repeat the second Carpe Diem statement about the goodness that can be found under the sun right after this little summary up to verses 13.
I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. That's verse 10. I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. Now, this is essentially echoing chapter 1, verse 13.
I set my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven, this burdensome task God has given to the sons of men. You see? I want to see this task that God has given to the sons of men, and what do we have in verse 10 here?
I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. Sons of men, sons of Adam, of humanity, people. I've seen what God has given them to do. I wanted to see it. It began that quest in chapter 1.
Here he comes to the resolution. I have seen it. I see it, but he's going to throw us off balance, as we'll see in a moment. I see what I can't see. I know that I can't know. That's sort of the paradox or the irony of this understanding.
It's a lack of understanding that he's come to understand. So the king had set out to see, set out to know in chapter 1, and in chapter 3 he concludes, I've done as best as I can, and I've come to see what I needed to see.
Notice there's a slight difference. In chapter 1, verse 14, he calls the fact that there's this repetition, that there's this vanity in the cycle of work under the sun, he calls that an evil. He says this is a great evil, that I have to be removed from my work, that I can't find the profit or the gain, or I can't be satisfied by it in some lasting way.
This is a great evil. Well, he's not saying that here. He's not saying that anymore. Remember the end of chapter 2, the first carpe diem statement. He began to acknowledge a gift to man's labor, even under the sun.
As we saw there, indeed, there's nothing better for a man than that he can eat and drink and enjoy his labor, even the labor under the sun. So now he's no longer calling this God-given work, this God-given task, even affected by the fall, a great evil under the sun.
In other words, he's starting to see things in a right perspective. He's starting to actually apply the wisdom he has sought out to the way he's looking at life under the sun, the way he's looking at labor, and as we'll see in the chapters that follow, the way he sees the world all around him, the way he looks at injustice in the world, the way he looks at human relationships or companionship, the way that he looks at the passage of time and the day of trouble.
He's now beginning to apply himself to wisdom. And so we began with this poem on times and the purpose of God in chapter 3, and again next week as we enter into this carpe diem, we're far from the evil task.
Now we see this God-given task is actually something that has goodness in it, a gift to be enjoyed within it, only when you recognize the hand of God. So God has entered into the frame, God has wrought this perspective, and the result of that, verse 11, he recognizes God is the one who's made everything beautiful in its time.
And some of your, I don't know what translation or even what arrangement your translation may have, sometimes you have the same translation with different arrangements, but sometimes verse 11 is included into this poem for this reason.
He's made everything beautiful in its time. I think it's better to keep verses 1 through 8 separate, but this is certainly a conclusion of the poem that occupied these first eight verses. There's a time for this and there's a time for that.
All these antinomies that ran through the full dimensions of human life, and what is the conclusion? Because God is the one who's given it, because God has a purpose for it, everything is beautiful in its time.
And there is a time for every purpose under the sun. There's a time that God has appointed. Another translation, and some translations prefer this, He has made every time fitted. There's a fittedness, that's the idea of beauty.
So sometimes it's translated in this way, the idea of something that belongs, something that's harmonious. Philosophers try to understand what is it that makes beauty beautiful, what is the goodness of beauty, and it's usually something along the lines of harmony, something along the lines of accord, something that belongs.
There's all sorts of ways that that can get thrown off, just because something is balanced rather than discordant does not necessarily make it beautiful, or vice versa, when something is sort of messy or discordant, there can actually be a beauty within that.
But the point is, God has allowed, whether it's hatred or love, whether peace or war, He's allowed it to be fitted for the time. There's a place that it belongs. In fact, it can be beautiful in its time.
We're thinking of this redemptive work of God as the king is beginning to understand that this curse that began as a result of man's fall into sin, nevertheless has the hand of God bringing forth redemption, and he recognizes even in that way there can be a beauty in ashes.
When you see God's hand, God's purpose for those ashes, everything can be beautiful in its time. The wounds of our Savior, the pierced hands, the pierced feet, the holes pressing down toward his skull from the crown of thorns that he bore for our sin, even these are elements of beauty.
I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but the Japanese have this fascinating cultural custom called kintsugi, where they'll take these heirloom ceramics that have been passed down generationally that are essentially priceless, because they belong to your ancestors and they've been cherished and passed down, and there's something that's irreplaceable.
And what happens when you drop it into your farmer's sink and you smash half of it? Well, you don't just hop down to Walmart and get a replacement. This was your great-great-grandmother's set. And so that's what this process of kintsugi involves.
You delicately take these pieces and you'll take them to a skilled artisan and he'll mend all these pieces back together, and then using lost wax casting and precious metals like gold or silver, he'll actually create veins and put it back into place.
And those very cracks now are actually gold or silver. And it's the broken pieces that are now the most beautiful part of that vessel. You've taken the break, the crack, the damage, and you've beautified it.
That's a good way to think about verse 11 here. It's not only half of these pairs that occupy the first eight verses. It's not only the laughter and the joy and the peace, but no, even the mourning, even the lament, even the violence, even the chaos, this too is beautiful in its time if the hand of God is working redemption upon it.
So far from an evil task, the king is now applying wisdom because God has entered the frame. He sees God's purpose. He sees God's control. He bows and blesses the hand of God that accords all thing to wisdom that is inscrutable, to knowledge that is unsearchable.
He recognizes the shifting sands of his life, the changing times of his experience are fitted together according to this wisdom of God and that in each of these seasons, according to each of these times, whether painful or blissful, there is a beautiful fittedness that accords to the one who sees God's hand.
And this flows right into perhaps the most profound and debated passages in the whole book of Ecclesiastes here in the first part of verse 11. He has put eternity in their hearts. He has put eternity in their hearts.
How we understand or conceptualize this word eternity is part of the problem. So this is debated on the one hand because the question is should we take this word? Olam is the assumption here for the Hebrew and should we, as it occasionally is translated, should we understand that as eternity?
Olam can be translated forever. It can certainly have a sense of an expanse of time. Not necessarily with the philosophical connotations of eternity that we bring to it, but it also can be translated in other ways.
In fact, there's some debate over whether this is a defective spelling for that and that we should rather understand a word more related to darkness or something hidden. Or another translation of olam would be the world.
He has put the world, maybe some of you have a translation that renders it that way. He's put the world in their heart. It seems that most translations and most interpreters take this to be olam in the sense of an expanse, an expanse of time.
We've just come off the heels of a poem about time and that's the sharp contrast. He's appointed times for our lives, seasons that include the changes of time in our life and we're conditioned by these times and we're subject to these times and here's the sharp twist.
He's put timelessness in our hearts. We're bound by time, we're captive to time, we resist and bite and kick against the changing of time and the lack of time because he's put timelessness in our heart.
Eternity is written in our heart. A sense of eternity is certainly there. Something of the significance of time perhaps is the best way we can understand it. He's put the significance, the expanse, the glory of time in the heart of mankind.
Some see this as simply, he's put a desire for the future. He's put the more of the time that's coming, a sense of desire for the future in man's heart but that also includes the expanse of time, the forever of time.
I want more, not less. I need more time, more of this season, more of this moment. Some of us as dads over the past couple of weeks have, as I've talked to different men in the congregation, we've all been sort of commiserating about how fast our little ones are growing up and trying to brainstorm about how we can slow time down and freeze frame these little ones to be eternally five years old but you can't.
You realize that as they approach double digits, you may have already had more time with them than you will have in the home and that's brutal, that's devastating. Want more time. Why do I want this relationship to continue?
Why do I want a forever? There's something about the constraints and the limitations of time under the sun that is in contrast with how I'm deeply wired as a human being. And so eternity, in this sense, eternity is not something that is a compartment added to your life when you become a believer.
We're all just living life and then I came to Christianity as a believer and now I really believe there is an eternal life. You know, now I'm actually adding something to my understanding of life, adding something to my experience of life, I actually believe that life is meant to go on, that there's an eternal life as if that was an add-on that began at Genesis 3.
Totally wrong view. He's speaking of mankind, he's speaking of humanity at a creational level. Mankind has forever in their heart. We were made to dwell with God forever. So it's hardwired, it's deep-wired in what it means to be human that we were to have an experience of time that was not subject to decay, corruption, and extinction.
Forever is in our hearts because of God's creation of mankind to dwell with Him in immortality. It's a result of sin, it's a result of the fall that death enters into the world. But now we become cursed and constrained by the time that we were meant to transcend.
But that transcendence is there, it's inescapable. We're going to talk about how this is manifest in lives around us and perhaps even in our lives but you simply must understand this point. This is not something that enters into a Christian's experience post-conversion.
This is just what it means to be human. You've never met a person who hasn't had forever in their heart. You've never crossed paths or been standing at a Walmart checkout next to someone who doesn't have eternity hardwired into their soul.
God has put it there. God has given us eternity in the heart. So there's been a shift at this point and in fact as Eric Ortland points out there's three claims that are made in these verses. The third is something we'll see more clearly next week.
God has first made everything beautiful in its time. Now there's a frailty because of the curse that exists in the changing of seasons. These seasons must give way to ultimate loss. Life under the sun is still therefore brief and futile and subject to all kinds of corruption and distortion.
But as we've seen this shift from the king's point of view is because he recognizes the hand and purpose of God and sees this eternal desire for what it is in his heart, he's actually able to receive life under the sun with all of its frailty, with all of its decay as something that can still be enjoyed from God's hand, a gift.
And this is again something we saw over the weeks that there's a bothness, there's a simultaneity to the way that we understand the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. We're not dismissing the vanity of life. Neither are we putting to the side or putting to the margins the good gift of life.
We're holding these things together. It's a gift of God to be enjoyed. We enjoy it in part because of this eternity that's within our hearts, but it's still under the sun. It still ultimately is a vapor that passes.
We hold these things together. God has put, secondly, God has put eternity in the heart. And so that bothness, that simultaneity runs in this way where our experience of time is meant to draw us to think beyond time, where the experience of the changes is meant to draw our hope beyond change.
And this holds together the times that God has appointed. Verse 1 through 8 is sort of drawing out our deepest hopes. All these times that we're subject to, that we don't know when they're coming or what season begins or where it ends, but we know it all has a beginning and end, and we're learning for, we're yearning for a beginning that has no end.
We don't want to be jostled back and forth between these extremes. We don't want war. We want everlasting peace. We don't want lament. We want everlasting joy. That's forever in the human heart. That's why we'll see, even as we head toward next week, the Carpe Diem is closely shadowed by how God frustrates that desire, that labor.
Whenever He gives the statement of clarity that things can be enjoyed under the sun, closely at the heels is this recognition, nevertheless, our labor is still vanity. So journeying through these different seasons of life, deep within us, we yearn for something that transcends the changes, the conditions of time.
We want something comprehensive. We want to be able to hold it all together. We want to see it as a whole. We want to prepare ourselves and be able to brace the changes as they come, but as He'll say in the rest of verse 11, we can't do it because we can't know it.
We can't understand it. So you begin with how God has created us. Again, this is a creational aspect of man, that eternity is in our hearts because of what human beings as image bearers were created for.
The fall has now corrupted our experience of time in the world and our relationship with God and each other and the world itself, which groans, awaiting redemption. There's been this radical corruption and now we're subject to frailty and even death as a result of God's curse upon sin, and yet the way that we were made has not changed.
Deep within us, we yearn for that timelessness, for that forever. We yearn for that transcendence. Where does this yearning come from? God, that's what He says. God has put eternity in their hearts. This yearning, brothers and sisters, is not a result of sin.
This yearning is a result of God's creation. The fact that we have to yearn and we can't realize it is a result of sin. But we begin with the reality, the yearning is there because God is our maker and to Him we must return.
The thirst for transcendence is because of who God is and therefore what His images must be. This desire to be above the frailty and conditions of time is a result of whose image we reflect. God is the one who's given us a yearning for transcendence.
This is Ortland again. We are haunted by that sweetly maddening sense of some vast significance just beyond our reach. We know that God is at work in everything, but we simply cannot see how. So this is not just a return to chapters one and two simply.
It's a resolution to the poem of verses one through eight. As we experience both the pain and the bliss of differing seasons in life, we have a God-given impulse, a God-created desire to transcend all of those seasons, to see them all and hold them all together, to unify and preserve them forever.
But God is appointed each in its time. He beautifies the passing seasons of our lives. We're never meant to settle down and inhabit any one season forever. And yet we desire to. We're seeking that good season, that good life, and we want to get it, capture it, seize it, and dwell in it forever.
That's how we were made. That's how every human being was made. Everyone's looking for the good life. There's that great insight from David Gibson in his book. Even the man that jumps off the building and takes his own life is actually doing that in search for the good life.
It's just too hard to keep going in this way. It would be better if I ended it. He's looking for the better life, the good life. You've never met anyone who's not in this quest because everyone is hardwired with eternity in their heart to seek after this transcendence.
God beautifies the passing seasons of our lives, but again, He will not let us settle down and seize and inhabit anything under the sun forever. And so this thirst, this desire, this yearning carries us forward through all the seasons.
We keep thinking it's just the season ahead. It's just that relationship or that career path or just this little blessing. If I can just accomplish this with my body or with my relationships or with my means or with my ends, I'll finally seize it.
I'll finally inhabit it. I'll finally be satisfied. You see what Ecclesiastes is saying here in chapter 3? No, you will not. God has put eternity in your heart. You can't find eternity under this sun.
Therefore, everything under the sun, which the king in Jerusalem had sought out, I sought out everything under the sun. And everything, as the great title of Bobby Jameson's book on Ecclesiastes says, everything is never enough.
Everything is never enough. God won't let it be. Ever since the beginning of this king's quest, he sought something, anything lasting, enduring, permanent to answer the toil with which men toil under the sun.
But he's come now in wisdom to recognize this desire is something God given and something that was never meant to experience the corruption of the fall. And therefore, under the sun, because of this fallen condition, it can never be realized or satisfied.
It can only correspond to God's redemption beyond the fall. Remember the heart here. God put eternity in the heart. The heart in Hebrew is a Swiss Army word. It's not just in the affections. It's in the imagination.
It's in the daydreams. It's in our rationalization, our intellect. It's in our emotions. It's in our will and the concrete decisions we make and the things we react against or strive toward. All of this is describing the heart.
And eternity is stamped and wired through all of that. What do you daydream about? What do you imagine? What do you react to? And why do you react that way? What are you about? How do you present yourself?
How do you identify yourself? How would you explain yourself and who you are and what your life is and where your life is going to someone else? You start asking yourself these questions or if you want some perspective, start asking other people these questions.
You'll be scraping at the eternity that God has been putting in their heart. So we find this hopeful shift from the weary hopelessness of the curse to the fact that in God's hand, there's a purpose through it all.
And that purpose will arrive at full redemption and the answer to this predicament in total. In the meantime, this is what's going to hold together these carpe diem statements. There's really nothing better for us than just to enjoy what comes from God's hand.
If you can actually be satisfied with your labor and eat and drink from it, that's as good as it gets under the sun. Be satisfied with that. Bless and worship God in light of that. Use that to be a blessing to others.
That's as good as life under the sun can get. That's Ecclesiastes. That's the king's projection. Now, it's not the conclusion to the matter. That comes in chapter 12. And there's a lot more that speaks to our limitations and our faith as a result of this.
But he has these big tectonic plates of what human life is and therefore what human life can obtain. You remember this last week, I was talking about how we use technology. We go to grocery stores. We want all seasons to collapse into the next.
I want apples in January, butternut squash in early spring. I want to have it always accessible and available to me. I want to avoid limitations. I want to avoid unnecessary changes that come with time.
But as we move through these differing seasons of our lives, as was said, we get a hint of a far greater order of which individual seasons are only a small part. So the king recognizes this yearning for forever.
It's not just there. It's going somewhere for those who see the hand of God. For those, as we'll see at the conclusion, who fear him and keep his commandments. So we have these individual purposeful moments and the close of verse 11 challenges us in a different way.
He's put eternity in our hearts except no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. So beginning to end is another clue that we're speaking of forever here and that this earthly expanse has a beginning and an end and yet our hearts are wired and searching for an endless existence.
Something that has no end. Something that does not need to end. That's what our hearts are yearning for. God has put that there and yet in this frame, we're not able to find out the work that God is doing from beginning to end.
From the opening or close of our life or the opening or close of human history. Again, we can understand it in the ways that God has revealed it, but in the particularity of human existence, we cannot discern the way of God.
So here's the irony. I already pointed it out. God withholds the knowledge of seasons, the knowledge of days of trouble, the knowledge of which way the wind is blowing. We can look in his word and get a sense of what is promised and that promise is sure and it's an anchor to our soul.
We can think in sort of a meta-narrative about where everything's going, but hidden to us is the reality of our place, of our season, of our time in that plan and purpose of God's redemption. We know what he will do.
We know that he will do it. We do not know how we fit into it. What days of trouble or seasons will be a part of that for us? In fact, if you're strongly convinced you know which way the wind is blowing, you better hold your breath and get ready for it to shift on you.
Just live more life. No one ever calls it that far ahead. Well, you know, I had a three-month plan and a 10-year plan and a 20-year plan and everything went according to plan. Never met anyone. And so here's the irony.
This is wisdom literature and it wants to train us as believers in God to apply wisdom to our conditions and experience of life. And here's the wisdom that the king has discerned. The wise person, the one who lives wisely, recognizes his lack of wisdom.
The one who understands that God has a purpose understands he cannot know that purpose. It's veiled to his wisdom. This is, again, sort of a stunning paradoxical conclusion. I wanted to figure it all out and I did.
I've seen it all and here's what I figured out. I can't figure it out. I wanted to see it all and make sense of where it all goes so I can control it and contain it and secure an outcome. And here's the conclusion.
I can't control it and I can't obtain it. I want to because eternity is in my heart, but God is the one who's in control and no one can find out the work that He does. I was reading this book by a university professor and he was talking about theological ethics just from the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
There's this little section toward the beginning and it was just sort of a striking thought experiment where he said, you know, I'm a lecturer by day and the experience of my students, generally speaking, unless I run into them at a cafe or a pub, is that they only ever see me in the classroom as a lecturer.
That's the fullness of their experience of me, of my person, of my existence in a classroom setting with me giving them information that they're accountable for. And of course, that's their exposure. That's their relationship to me.
They leave and carry on their way. So do I. Maybe in a toddler's mind, a lecturer is just always there, just always in the classroom, only ever teaching, never leaving. He's like, of course, I go on. That's actually only part of my life and at that a very small part of my life.
I have a totally different way of inhabiting relationships and time and existence. And so he's applying this as an analogy to God. He says, if we think about our experience of God, of His presence, of His relationship to us, so much of that is bent toward us, toward our needs, toward our purpose.
Can you imagine that God has existed eternally in the trinity of His persons having perfect communion and that He has an existence and a life and a relationship within Himself that is eternally blessed and that what we take as the everything of our experience is actually just perhaps a very, very small facet of the existence and experience of God in His trinity and eternality.
Is that not a mind-blowing thought? What is man to you, O God? He's put this capacity, this yearning for eternity in our hearts and with that we recognize when I actually start to think about eternity, I realize how minute and how limited I am like an ant trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
How can I possibly wrap my limited mortal experience around God's eternality? So how do I actually wrestle with the reality of what's in my heart? Eternity is in my heart. Where does it seep out? How is it displayed?
Where does this thirst for transcendence glimmer in my life? Where does this restlessness that comes from this yearning for forever begin to run like a vein through all of the changing seasons of my life?
Can I see it? Can I identify it? How do you show the eternity that's within your heart? It's there. It's showing. God has put it there. This is not something that animals experience. My beloved cat Ralphie, R-I-P, seemed quite content to eat the same food around the same times every single day.
He had a spotty curled up and he did that until he died. He didn't seem to go about with some restless need for more. There seemed to be limits and bounds to what he was capable of and what he was exposed to and he was quite content to exist within those parameters.
Animals are not dissatisfied so long as their immediate physical needs are met. When a dog's stomach is full, he just sleeps. That's it. It's like as long as my belly's full, I'm satisfied. That's not how human beings are.
You can meet every physical need of a human being in what's deeper still. A hunger that no food can reach. A thirst that no water can quench. A desire that nothing under the sun can satisfy. It's a restlessness.
There's something beyond that the human soul cries out for and under the sun occupies this endless search to find with lies and deceptions of the world and the flesh and the evil one. This will finally be it.
I can finally obtain and seize. This is where my fruit will endure forever. And that's just showing that as Augustine famously prayed in his confessions, we're restless until we find rest in him. That was his biographical reflection on his labyrinthine life of chasing after fame and intellectual grandeur as an orator in Rome and chasing after women and all of the prowess and pride of his young life.
He looks back on it all with this wisdom like the king in Jerusalem has and sees all of that was restlessness. I was restless and would ever be restless until I found my rest in you. Until like a winged child, you sat me as it were on your lap and told me that I had to wait for something beyond this sun.
This is what it means to seek the face of God. It corresponds to eternity within our hearts. Everyone is on this quest that the king has been on since chapter one. But few, very few, enter this narrow path and see this glorious truth that the restlessness, the search can only be answered in God and in God alone.
C .S. Lewis said, our heavenly father has provided many delightful inns along our journey, but he takes great care to see that we do not mistake any of them for home. There's a longing for home. For place, for permanence, for forever.
There's this expression that the French have and probably going to butcher it. The hungry heart feeds the body or when the heart is hungry, the body eats. We have hungry hearts as human beings. Hungry hearts.
What do you do with hunger? You feed, you try to fill it. The hungry heart wants to eat. Herman Bovink put it this way. The human heart is so huge that all of the world is too small to satisfy it. If you put forever in a heart, conditions of temporality cannot fulfill that heart.
If you put eternity into a heart, something that is temporal cannot fulfill that heart. All the world is too small to fill it. No wonder the Lord Jesus says, if you bargain to have the whole world, but you lose your own soul, you're a fool.
What gain is it to you? What profit is to you to gain the whole world, but lose your own soul? Because the world cannot even satisfy your soul, even if you could obtain it. As Bovink says, the redemption that human beings seek and need is one in which they're lifted above its entire world into communion with God.
That's hardwired into our hearts. Bobby Jameson, in his book, he points to Blaise Pascal, who diagnoses this disorder about our experience of time and our yearning for timelessness. And Pascal puts it this way.
Let each of us examine his thoughts. This is great advice. I'm going to ask the questions again. How is the eternity within your heart displayed in your life? What is the source of restlessness? And what are you daydreaming is the answer to that restlessness.
What is your note tab on your iPhone? What are the post-it notes scattered in your desk drawer? If I can just work this out, if I can just get here. I make that mistake almost every Christmas. As the hours are getting closer and closer to that midnight, I'm like driving to Walgreens to get a few more stockings.
If I can just get a few more PEZ dispensers, a few more candy canes, this will be the best Christmas ever. And then always on December 26, I'm like, what a waste. Why did I do that? Now we just have diabetes and nothing to show for it.
Let each of us examine his thoughts. He will find them wholly concerned with either the past or the future. This is so brilliant. Listen again. Let each of us examine his thoughts. Is this not true? You will find that you're wholly concerned with either the past or the future.
We almost never think of the present. And if we do think of the present, it's only because we're trying to see how the present is directing our future. We're actually still preoccupied by the future. The present is never our end.
The past and the present are our means. The future alone is our end. Thus, we never actually live, but our hope to live. In other words, our hope for good, our hope to answer that yearning in our hearts is what's driving all of our thoughts and preoccupying all of our energy.
And since we're always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so. That's so brilliant. Since we're always planning how we can be happy, inevitably, we're never happy. You get to the place that you thought you'd be happy, and you're back to the drawing board about what else you need to be happy.
That is eternity pulsing within your life, within your intellect, within your schematization. Within your relationships, within your means, within your circumstances, within your valleys of trial, within your hilltops of blessing.
It's eternity yearning and searching and crying out to be fed. C .S. Lewis put it this way in God on the Dock, men look on the starry heavens with reverence, monkeys don't. The silence of the eternal spaces is what terrified Pascal, but it was the greatness of Pascal that enabled them to do so.
We're frightened by the greatness of the universe. We're almost literally frightened by our own shadows. For all of these light years and centuries are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker, falls upon them.
All of these things are just numbers, concepts, until God's shadow falls upon them. Eternity in our hearts. How do you show it? How do you display it? Where is it seeping out in your life? Where is it flashing?
Where is it glimmering? Where does restlessness run through the changing seasons of your life like a continuous vein? However much the seasons have changed, that restlessness, that itch, that hunger, it's still there, alive and well as it's ever been.
Do you recognize that eternity for what it is? Do you label it rightly? Do you know that that's eternity? Do you know that God has put it there so that He alone will be the answer to it? Are we presumptuous about time instead?
Are we like the ones that James warns against? Come now you who say today, tomorrow, we'll go into such and such a town, spend a year there, trade, make a profit. You don't know what tomorrow will bring.
That's the same bent. I just have these travels and these plans and this year I'll finally get the profit, the gain under the sun. And he's saying you've lost concept of time and control. And it's not just you ought to rubber stamp that with the Lord will, that's more devotional, that's more orthodox.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying you're living very dangerously if you're searching for a profit that you think you can obtain and control, that you think you can secure it. In other words, he's confronting not worldliness so much as presumption.
You think you're going to be able to do this effortlessly as if you were God when you're ordering your life, as if you control the changing of time, if you can secure or obtain a certain outcome, you really are pretending that you're as God.
God does whatever he wants. He's in the heavens. When we try to approximate that God-like power, it always turns into a catastrophe in our lives. And sometimes people actually do get the thing that they were hunting for, but usually at great cost, at great casualty, they lost almost everything along the way.
As Gibson said in his book so well, they finally were able to buy the restaurant, but now they have no one to eat with. And so James is engaging this kind of presumption, this kind of arrogance, and he cuts it off at the heart.
You don't know what tomorrow will bring. Isn't that the conclusion of verse 11? What God is doing, what God's purpose is cannot be found out. So you better be in tune with God's control, God's sovereignty.
It's better to say, if the Lord wills. And what comes with thinking if the Lord wills? He's in control. I have a fear for him. I want to do things that will be pleasing to him, glorifying to him. I want to walk in obedience to him.
Only if the Lord wills. I'm not resting away things from his hand to try to secure and obtain in this life. I've already learned that I can't do that. I've already recognized. I would have lost hope unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
I don't see it now. I couldn't see it now. I couldn't secure it now. That's something that doesn't happen under the sun. I've already found the good life. The good life is there's nothing better than to eat and to drink and to enjoy what comes from God's hand.
Thomas Manton, the Puritan, said carnal hearts are for carnal projects. Where is that eternity pulsing in your life that a carnal heart is for a carnal project? And James collapses that kind of presumption, that kind of arrogance like the Tower of Siloam.
You don't know what tomorrow will bring. You don't control the time. You don't control the seasons. It is not your purpose that prevails. What are some indicators that we're presumptuous in this way? I can think of several.
The first is I can see this in my own life. I'm very presumptuous about time when I'm having plans or desires or ambitions that are not soaked in prayer. I'm presumptuous about time when I'm seeking things apart from prayer.
I don't have time to pray. I'm too busy to pray. Well, we'll just see how this all works out. That says a lot about my arrogance, my presumption, my lack of reverence to not only God's control but God's purpose for my life.
And certainly just flowing out of that, I'm more likely to seek my own will rather than the will of God. What does Jesus say in the Sermon on the Mount? Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.
All the other things will be added. We start at the bottom and hope to land at the top. No, I'm going to seek everything that I need and if I have any time or energy left, then I will seek his kingdom and his righteousness.
Isn't that our problem? And then perhaps with that and what feeds into it is I'm presumptuous about time when I assume repentance can wait. Tomorrow will come and even next year will come and it will go in this way.
I've got time. And James cuts that off. What's your life? What is your, you seem to think you understand and control life. What is your life? He casts it against eternity. He doesn't say your life is like, he says you are like a vapor.
You don't live that way. You're not thinking that way. You're not casting experience of life under the sun against the forever that's within your heart. And that's why as we think of a passage like Psalm 39 or Psalm 90, as we'll close with, oh, Lord, make me to know my end.
What's the measure of my days? Lord, I want to live life as a vapor because I know the eternity that's in my heart cannot actually be fulfilled in this life. So then help me to number my days. Help me to know the measure of my days.
Let me know how fleeting I really am. I'm not acting. I'm not daydreaming. I'm not planning like I'm fleeting. Lord, I need your wisdom. I need your power to show me just how fleeting I am. Remember that Ben Sass quote from that interview I mentioned last month where he said, now that I'm terminal and there's really no cure in sight, I finally am lying to myself a lot less.
Who doesn't admit that they're dying, that they're going to die? And yet we actually straddle this lie like somehow it's not going to happen to us. How many of us pray in this way? Lord, eternity is in my heart.
And that causes me to seek wrong things in wrong ways for wrong reasons. Help me to know how fleeting my life is. Help me to count my days. Help me to bless and celebrate everything that comes from your hand because everything that comes from the hand of the father of lights is good.
It's a perfect gift. Forgive me, Lord, for pretending that it's not a vapor, that I'm not fleeting, that this forever can be secured in this temporal frame of a world whose present form is passing away.
Isn't that what Paul says to the Corinthians in this like chapter 15 where he's giving this display of the foolishness of their desire to think that they've already had the resurrection? And he's just like, what?
You think you've actually arrived? You think this is the Christian hope? And he says in verse 19, if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we're of all men most pitiable. Unless you're living life with the reality of how fleeting it is, unless you're walking in the wisdom of what God knows and controls that you can't know and can't control, you'll probably be living as if in this life only you have hope for Christ.
You just have hope that he'll get you to that greener grass or secure this outcome or bring about this thing that's finally going to fulfill you. Paul had recognized, no, my hope in Christ is not in this life only.
Do I hope for things in this life? Yes. Do I pray for things, yearn for things in this life? Yes. But it's not in this life only that I have hope in Christ. The restlessness that's in my heart has a hope in Christ that goes beyond this life.
It's in the life to come. You're in this chapter of resurrection, and the whole answer is this life involves carrying a cross, and you will realize how fleeting your life is if you're carrying a cross.
You don't have a lot of time to daydream about greener grass if a cross is on your shoulder and you're walking toward Calvary. And so Christ was not looking for a joy that was going to be secured between Jerusalem and Golgotha.
He was looking at the joy that was set before him. That joy that is set before us corresponds to the forever God has put in our hearts. That's the joy. I just want to show you this from Psalm 90. Psalm 90, beginning in verse 4.
A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it's passed, like a watch in the night. We celebrated yesterday 250 years as a nation. You go to Concord. You go to the colonial areas of our little state.
You go to see some of the artifacts. If they're not in the Concord Museum, they're in the antique shop across the way here. And you hold something. You realize, wow, this is 200 years old. That's amazing.
Can you imagine what it was like for these people? No electricity. Can you imagine what their worldview was like? Just horses and carts and just all of the changes that have happened since that time. And now I can get across the country in a handful of hours or communicate instantly with anyone around the world, things that they could not even fathom.
And that's just in the past 100 years. And our nation is only 250 years old. And what is Psalm 90 saying? Well, stretch that out times four, even a millennium. It's just like a nine to five for God. It's just a workday.
A thousand years in His sight, something that we can't possibly stretch out our experience toward, things that are a thousand years behind us seem so alien, so far out of reach. There's so much that we can't understand about it, even with the help of superpowered AI will never fully exhaust what it was to live back then.
And all that happened and went into it. But all of that is present before God, timeful. And it's just like a day. It's nothing to Him. A thousand years is like a day to Him. A day to Him is like a day to us is like nothing.
That's a millennium for God. I do this sometimes where I'll use Google Maps and I'll go to satellite and I'll start out at my address. Last time I did it was interesting because it was my old Buick that I loved so much.
I'm like, oh, that was a Buick. I could see the little sunroof. And I'm just imagining here's this split second image that a satellite took passing far out of view, unaware. I was wondering, I imagine what was going on under the roof in that second, in that moment, in that moment.
It's gone. It's lost to me in that moment. And then you start to span out and you zoom out and you see the neighborhood and you see the town and you see the state and you start to see the contours of the Atlantic coast.
And you keep stretching out and imagine in every dwelling place in that second, all of it under the sovereign control according to the sovereign purpose of God, just in that moment. Upholding, arranging.
Purposing it all toward his eternal end. And to think that somehow I could control my life or arrange my time. We finish our years like a sigh. Isn't that what Psalm 90 goes on to say? The days of our lives are 70 years if by reason of strength, if we get the bite of medicine, 80 years.
Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow. It's soon cut off. We fly away. Who knows the power of your anger? For as the fear of you, so is your wrath. So teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
It's the same thing Psalm 39 is saying. The same thing James is saying. The same thing the King of Jerusalem is saying. When you number your days to recognize that this life under the sun is fleeting and the forever in your heart does not correspond to the curse of the fall.
It must be in the redemption that God is bringing about at the end. Numbering your days in this way is the beginning of wisdom. It's the heart of wisdom. And that's what eternity in the heart should bear out.
How will you know if you have eternity in your heart pulsing and orienting your life in the right way? It's the conclusion of Psalm 90. What does eternity in the heart of a believer who's looking at their life and looking at the Lord rightly look like?
It looks like the voice of Psalm 90, verse 12. Number days, a heart of wisdom in that heart now coming into my voice and saying, return, O Lord. When I'm thinking the greener grass is just ahead, I'm usually praying without using these words, delay, O Lord, if I'm even aware.
When I recognize how fleeting I am, how unknowable and uncontrollable the seasons of my life are, when I have that kind of wisdom surging with the forever in my heart, it cries out, return, O Lord. How long?
And what comes with that return? You see it in verses 13 and following. Return, O Lord. How long? This seems like a length for me, but I'm just a little spin. A thousand years of humanity is just a day to you.
How long? I know for you it's nothing, but for me it's forever. Lord, how long? And what happens with the return? Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us early with your mercy that we may rejoice and be glad.
All our days make us glad according to the days in which you've afflicted us, the years in which we've seen evil. Let your work appear to your servants, your glory to their children. Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands for us.
Yes, establish the work of our hands. Does that not sound downright eschatological to you? It better. Look at what comes with this return. Compassion, mercy, satisfaction, rejoicing, enjoyment, gladness.
God's work, the thing that's been hidden through our changing seasons, through our limited perspective, God's work now finally being visible, apparent. Let your work appear to your servants, your glory to their children, no longer veiled in the cleft of the rock so we can only discern the afterglow of his glory, but rather a glory that's so open and visible we're transformed by it.
Now we see his work from beginning to end. Now we fathom all that he has done and worship him in light of eternity. And what does that look like? Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us. It's his work, his beauty now displayed as a result of his return.
And what does that do for us? It's the problem that Ecclesiastes has been chasing. It establishes the work of our hands. We finally can establish the answer to the question of verse 3. What profit, what gain is there for the work that we're doing under the sun?
There is no gain under the sun because you have eternity in your hearts and you're going to die under the sun. But if you know the Lord and you live this life according to his ways, you'll be risen from that ground to see the goodness and the glory of the Lord and then all of that work will be established forever.
Everything your restless heart has been yearning and thirsting for will be fulfilled. Not with a heavily wind, not with labored vapors, but established. So let's close. And again, I just close with this question.
How is your life showing the eternity that God has put in your heart? We all have it. We're all showing it somewhere, somehow. Do you know your restlessness? Do you know the lies and the deceptions that you keep telling yourself are going to answer that restlessness under the sun?
What are your daydreams? What are your imaginations? What are your ambitions? What do you think is the ticket to the good life under the sun? What's preventing you from being content now? What's filling your heart with fears and anxieties now?
What profit are you finding in your labor? Are you able to eat and drink and enjoy your labor? How do you discern the hand of God? What season do you think you're in? And why are you in that season? Are you trying to find a purpose for yourself within it?
Or are you bending and praying your way to discern God's purpose? The answer is not our work. It's God's work is what appears at the end of Psalm 90. Let your work appear. Let your purpose be revealed.
Let the thing that was veiled finally be unveiled. Let all of these seasons that we had no control over now flash in glory to see the wisdom and the sovereignty of God. You truly made all things beautiful in their time.
I never would have arranged my life in this way. I'm amazed to see what your hand has done. It's the entree into eternal worship and the joy of communion, the beauty of God's will being established in and through our lives.
That doesn't get revealed under the sun. It gets revealed at the end. Do you believe that? You will lose heart unless you believe you will see that goodness in that land at the end. You will lose heart.
And I know a man who seemed to have found the good life at the best season of his life. As a young husband, he introduced to us the reason that we ought to homeschool, started transforming the ways we understood marriage and how Christian discipleship should not be just toward a generic individual, but toward the individual in their role and season as God had given it.
And we could see fruitfulness coming out of their home, of their relationship, of their marriage. It was a poster to us, a clarion call of the good life that we should be aiming toward. And there were a couple of glimpses as years went by, as they moved to a different place where I had occasion to be around.
And you could see something was subtly very different in that marriage, in that home, in that man's life. Something was preoccupying his mind and his desire and his restless heart. He had it. He thought he had obtained it.
He thought he had secured it. I've got it in the marriage. I've got it with the kids. Everything's going well. And now I can pursue the better life, that thing that I'm really looking for. Maybe it was just a bigger house or more toys, but eventually you start putting the question marks on a lot of other things that you thought were the good life.
And you question, maybe this isn't the marriage for me. And so you go through two more. That is a man who lost hope because he stopped believing in the goodness that doesn't come under the sun. Goodness under the sun is a gift that's to be enjoyed, but it doesn't answer eternity in the heart.
Last week, we talked about instant gratification. We're constantly torn between the two. A society that wants to live according to instant gratification without thought for trajectory or consequence, just meet that need now.
And by faith, we recognize the alternative, the fork in the road to instant gratification is deferred glory. The world is not enough for my hungry heart. Nothing under the sun is, nothing. Do I really believe that?
Do I live as if that were true? Do others see that in my life? Or do they see me chomping at and clawing at all the things I'm trying to feed my soul with? Do I see that in others? Do I see them clawing at and trying to feed upon things that will never fulfill them?
Lying to themselves, deluding themselves, entering into the mirages of life, thinking I'm so close to finally finding the answer and finding rest. As Christians, we recognize the rest is yet to come. Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest, but that rest is not yet.
There's good gifts. As Lewis says, there's good ends along the way. But I have eternity in my heart. This world could never be enough for me. Do you have eternity in your heart? Of course you do. Are you trying to live as if the world will be enough for it?
What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He's made everything beautiful in its time, but he's put eternity in their hearts.
And no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. So let your work appear to your servants, your glory to their children. Return, O Lord, and make it so. Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands for us.
We can't do it. Yes, establish the work of our hands. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. Lord, I pray we would ask these questions not only to one another, but Lord, to ourselves. Lord, in the quiet time we have with you, that you would search us and know us and try us, our God.
That we would learn how to feed our hungry hearts with bread from heaven until we enter into that land that flows with milk and honey and dwell with you forever. And that we would not lose hope, but live for that glory that only comes when you return.
And that our whole life would be lived in numbered days and self-recognized fleeting steps that must give way to an eternal weight of glory. Lord, forgive me for trying to feed upon the husks of this world's empty promises, to bring some measure of satisfaction or rest to my hungry heart, to my thirsty soul.
May I know it only comes in communion with you as a gift. And then as Christ himself, may I just desire to eat of the fruit when your kingdom comes in full. Lord, I pray for us as a church that we would recognize that restlessness within us, Lord.
And importantly, that we would see it in others around us, see it in family members and coworkers and strangers. We would recognize, Lord, this is the way that we are to witness to people, that you have put eternity in their hearts and they're trying to feed it, trying to satisfy it in all the ways they never can.
And Lord, we have testimonies. May we use them. May we not be ashamed of your name. May we speak boldly for the hope that can only be found in Christ, in whose name we pray, amen.