God Gives - Part 3: Eternity in the Heart - Ecclesiastes 3:9-11

Ecclesiastes and the Search for Profit Under the Sun

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.