Eternity on My Mind (Part 1 of 2)

The Bible teaches that the frustration and dissatisfaction we experience in this world is actually a God-given burden. But what purpose does that burden serve?

Doesn't God want us to be happy? We'll hear the answers today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg continues our study in the book of Ecclesiastes. I invite you to turn your Bible to Ecclesiastes chapter 3. Ecclesiastes 3, and we're going to read the first 15 verses. There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

What does the worker gain from his toil? I've seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He's also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live, that everyone may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all his toil. This is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever.

Nothing can be added to it, and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere him. Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before, and God will call the past to account. Amen. You might want to keep your Bible open. Father, we pray that as we study the Bible together, that you will help us, that the Spirit of God might be our teacher, that you will save us from error, from flights of fancy, that you will break the bread of life to us. And just as simply and as clearly as Christ broke the bread by the shores of Galilee to the physical benefit of those who were in attendance, may he do so again to the spiritual benefit of each of us. For in his name we pray.

Amen. Through the corridors of sleep, past the shadows dark and deep, my mind dances and leaps in confusion. I don't know what is real, I can't touch what I feel, and I hide behind the shield of my illusion. So I'll continue to continue to pretend that my life will never end and that flowers never bend with the rainfall. No matter if I'm born to play the to play the king or pawn, for the line is thinly drawn between joy and sorrow, and so my fantasy becomes reality, and I must be what I must be and face tomorrow.

And so I'll continue to continue to pretend that my life will never end and that flowers never bend with the rainfall. I don't know whether Paul Simon in the sixties had just finished reading the book of Ecclesiastes or whether in particular he had just finished reading Ecclesiastes chapter 3, but certainly his mind was going down very similar lines. And that song from the sixties, all these years ago now, still is representative of the kind of escapist nonsense that fills the minds of many people when they think about their lives before them today—one thing of which each of us can be certain is this, that although the person sitting next to us in this exact moment really has no concept whatsoever of what's going on inside us, God, who made us, knows exactly where we are, what we're thinking, how we're feeling, and how we are trying to make sense of life as it is presented to us. Not in a philosophical and abstract way, but in an intensely practical way—in a way that deals with the fact of our singleness or our marriage status, that deals with our employment or our unemployment, that deals with our fears about the future and our disappointments with the past. Our lives are an open book to the God who wrote this book. And to the open book of our lives, he brings this book in order that he might match his truth to our need. Now, this morning, in the time that we have, I want to draw my thoughts around three headings. And I want to give them to you, and that way you'll know that we're making progress. First of all, in verses 1–8, I'd like you to notice that what we have described for us here is what we might refer to as the same old routine.

The same old routine. It's the description of the cycle of life. Someone has cynically said that what you have here in these twenty-eight statements—fourteen pluses and fourteen minuses—adds up to nothing at all. And there is a way of looking at our lives which is exactly like that.

None of us have difficulty with these verses. We remember them, some of them, some of us, as a result of the birds making them famous. That's not the birds in the trees.

That's the birds with the guitars. To everything there is a purpose, turn, turn, turn. And many people that are familiar with these words didn't even know they were in the Bible at all—didn't know that God had actually written them.

You could actually say that God wrote a pop song, couldn't you, I suppose? We'll just leave that alone. But we know that there is a time to be born and a time to die. We weren't in control of our arrival, and we are not in control of our departure, and that's part of the problem.

That is an immediate nuisance to men and women, especially those of us who like to be in control of everything, especially those of us who have those daytimeers that we fill out with the little boxes and we tick everything. And it ticks us off that these things that are so crucial to us, we have really no control over them at all. Oh, we can plant, we can gather, we can rake leaves, we can do a number of things, but in actual fact, we have no control over when we rake the leaves. I suppose it would be possible for us to go and cut down leaves off the trees in the middle of the summer and lay them on the grass and then go and rake them.

I don't know why we would ever do that—some strange fascination with raking—but it would be possible to do. But in the scheme of things, there is a cycle over which we have no control. Springtime brings it, the summer sustains it, and the autumn watches it fall. There's a time for laughing, there's a time for mourning, and a time for dancing. There's a time to scatter stones, a time to gather them up, there's a time to embrace, there's a time to refrain, as your future father-in-law will tell you when you're over at the house. I think it's the time to refrain. Ecclesiastes 3.5. Take your hand off my daughter.

Thank you very much. There's a time to kill and a time to heal. The same farmer or the same shepherd that nurtures and cares for the sheep recognizes that there's going to be a day come when, often in the cycle of things, it will be the farmer again that takes the knife to the sheep to the lamb that he loves so much.

If you read James Herriot books, you know that's the case. And some of you would be prepared, along with me in an unembarrassed fashion, to admit that you weep when you read those stories. My children love it when I read them, especially because there are these long pauses when I'm reading, you know, about the old horse that was placed down in the end of the field and the affection of the farmer for it and so on, and eventually it has to go off, bye-bye. And I can still see my children looking along the line. They don't want to look directly at me, but they want to see he's crying again.

This is ridiculous. He's crying about a horse. Why would he cry about a horse? Well, because it expresses something, doesn't it?

It appeals to us if we have any care, any affection, any interest at all. And when you look at the same old routine, you find that you say things that you hear other people saying too. You meet with an old friend, and you say to them, I haven't seen you in years. Who would ever have imagined that we would be here today?

Don't they say that? Who would ever imagine that we would be here today doing this? Or you meet a friend from university. Did you ever see yourself doing this? Did you ever think you would have a suit?

You scruffy rascal you? Did you ever think that you would suddenly be like other people? What is happening to us? It's the cycle of life. In the recent McCartney concert, which I attended in Chicago, there was one song in his set I think was noticeably missing.

You may have noticed it if you were here in Cleveland. And that was the song, When I'm Sixty-Four. He didn't say it. When you're twenty, he's saying, Hey, when I'm sixty-four. But now he's going to have to sing, When I'm ninety-four, or whatever else it is, in order to give it the punch that it had before.

What's happening to him? Ecclesiastes 3, 1 to 8, the same thing that is happening to every one of us. Now, the problem doesn't lie in the fact that life doesn't stay still. And we often say that, Oh, if I could only arrest time. As parents, we say, Oh, if only we could have this moment forever with our children.

If only we could take this moment now, our husband may say to his wife, on this particular anniversary, and just encapsulate it and just live in this for a moment. But we know that we can't. But that is not the ultimate problem. The ultimate problem is not that time doesn't stop for us. The real problem is that we can only see a fraction of the movement of time, and as we try to make sense of our tiny little part in the vastness of all that, we're aware that it really is tremendously insignificant. And that, when it dawns upon us, does something to the human psyche. That's why, incidentally, so much of our lives are filled up with noise and with music and with activities, in part to stop us from these poignant moments overcoming us when we look at the routine of life and we say, Is this a tyranny, or is this a wonderful rhythm? In the search for signs of intelligent life in the universe, the one woman play featuring Lily Tomlin—a play, incidentally, which should be avoided at all costs—in her opening monologue as Trudy the Bag Lady, she expresses all of the things she worries about.

It's a quite masterful piece of writing. And it builds and builds and builds until she finally says—and the pathos and strangeness of it is that you've got this lady who's essentially just out there in the middle of it all. And she looks up, and she says, I wonder about my place in the vast scheme of things. And then she says, I wonder if there is a vast scheme of things.

Now, you see, that is the great fundamental question, isn't it? When you realize, here we are. All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray. And I have been for a walk on a winter's day.

And when I dropped into a church, I passed along the way, you know. And California are dreaming. Why? Well, we gotta get out of here with these leaves and the chilly blast of winter, the way it somehow or another seeps in and settles on our souls. And it speaks of something about more than winter. What is it doing? It is confronting us with the cycle of life. It is confronting us with what is described here.

And the chilling impact of it comes into the hearts and minds of men and women, and purposefully so. The hymn writer addresses it, Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its suns away. The Queen Mary was built on the River Clyde, as was the Queen Elizabeth the Second, the QE 2. I was born on the Clyde. And this year, as I stood on one of the bridges and looked at it, I thought about how the Clyde has just been going and going and going, before me, all the time I've been gone, and then when I came back, just rolling along the same way, from high up in the foothills, a tiny stream builds into this vast, wide river that issues in the Firth of Clyde, gathering away eroded material and, by attrition, picking things up and taking them away. And the hymn writer says, and that's exactly what happens to us, Time picks us up like a rolling river and bears us all away, and we fly forgotten like a dream. You come to breakfast, and you say, Well, I dreamt last night, but I can't remember what I dreamt about. It says to the hymn writer, That's what it will be like for us. Everybody believes that they will be remembered forever, but the fact is, everyone will say, What was his name again?

Who was she? Why is it that, on our own, we're unable to make sense of these things? Why is it that in the jigsaw puzzle of life, when we go to it, it always appears as if there are bits missing from the box? You look at the picture, you look at the pieces, and you say, There are not enough pieces here to make that picture.

Why is that? Well, that brings me to my second heading. The same old routine, followed by a whole new perspective.

A whole new perspective. The question, incidentally, in verse 9, What does the worker gain from his toil? is not a question, a financial question. It's not about remuneration.

It's a far more foundational issue than that. He's essentially saying, What's the point of going to work? You work so you can get money to buy food so that you can stay alive so that you can go to work to get money to buy food so you can stay alive so you can go to work.

What does the worker gain from all his toil? Why am I doing this? I meet people who say that all the time.

Why do I even do this? Well, look at the perspective. Verse 10.

This is good news. I have seen the burden God has laid on men. In other words, the frustration that men and women experience is actually the result of a God-given burden. A God-given burden.

How could this be? Read on. He's made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they can't fathom what God has done from the beginning to the end. In other words, God has created the world. He's made a beautiful world in all of its pristine, absolute perfection.

He sets it in time and space. He makes man, male and female, to know him, to commune with him, to walk with him in the garden, to enjoy all the benefits of his companionship. Death is not designed into that system.

Frustration is not designed into that system. It is all beauty, it is all purity, it is all harmony, it is all perfection. And in that experience of communion, God establishes all that will one day be the reality when he completes the picture.

But man has turned his back on all that the designer had to say. And as a result of that, the notion of eternity that is in a man or a woman's mind is something that actually tyrannizes, tests. Because not only here in Ecclesiastes but throughout the whole Bible—for example, in Romans chapter 1, you may like to turn to it—but Romans chapter 1 affirms what the rest of the Bible says, namely, that men and women are made with a knowledge of God. There's no escaping from the knowledge of God. So, for example, in Romans 1, what may be known about God is plain to them—that is, to men and women.

Why? Because God made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power, his divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but they became futile and foolish, and although they strutted around and said a lot of things about science and their vast wisdom of cosmology, they really became very foolish.

And giving up on worshiping the God who had made them, they began to worship gods that they made themselves. Now, if you're here this morning as an atheist, I want to tell you that the Bible knows something about you that you're not prepared to acknowledge about yourself. You may seek to repress a knowledge of God, but you know that you can't escape a knowledge of God.

There are no ultimate atheists. There are only those who argue against what, in the deepest recesses of their being, they know to be the case—namely, that God is. And it is the very is-ness of God which creates the dilemma in the heart and mind of an individual.

Think it through. God has created us for a purpose. And unless we discover and fulfill that divine purpose, we will never be fully satisfied with anything else that is offered along the journey of life and within the realm of vanity fare. And this, says the pundit, is the burden that God has laid on men, having made us for his pleasure, having created us in his image. We have to be forever dissatisfied until we come to know him and until we come to live in fellowship with him.

What the Bible says is that you and I, creatures of time, were actually made for eternity. That you and I, who live out the life that is ours, were actually made for his presence. Therefore, it's no surprise that our lives would be marked by frustration and by confusion when we turn away from him. It shouldn't surprise us that if we choose to live in the dark, we can't see. People say, Well, why doesn't God make himself known to me? Listen, God is under no obligation to satisfy your intellectual curiosity.

He will cater to the genuine, humble expression of a longing, seeking heart, but he doesn't do tricks for the arrogant. And when a man or a woman begins to think for a moment about their finitude, I was not in charge of my birth, I will not be in charge of my death. I can't make the leaves fall, and I can't make the green shoots grow. I'm really actually in a process here over which I have very, very little control. In fact, I'm not sure how the double circulatory system really functions. I really have no concept of what would bring about renal failure. I don't know why it is that my eyes don't stick shut in the night and why they're awake, why when I waken up there's still enough fluid in them.

I don't know why it is that there is synovial fluid in my joints that prevent me from becoming an arthritic basket case. I can't explain why I even have breath to breathe to shout in search triumph for these Ohio State games and so on. What is it all? What is it all, you see? And man in all of his pride says, You know, I'm in charge of this. I am in charge of this. You're in charge of nothing.

Anything you think you're in charge of is an illusion. You think you pull a string and make God dance for you. He who has magnified himself in the beauty and order of creation. He who has spoken in the person of his Son.

He who comes to us through the pages of a book that understands us. Once we begin to develop a new perspective on our same old routine, our experience of life is totally revolutionized. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. We're learning today from the book of Ecclesiastes, a book that is full of wisdom.

While Alistair is working through a quick survey of this book, we think you'll find it well worth your time to dig into the important lessons in this portion of scripture. And to help you with that, we want to recommend to you the book called Living Life Backward. Many of us try to avoid thinking about the reality of death.

It's easier to distract ourselves with the pressing issues of the day. But Living Life Backward explains that death is a light God shines on the present to radically change our perspective. When death is in full view, we no longer seek to control life.

Instead, we begin to see life as a gift. Request your copy of Living Life Backward when you donate today. To give, simply tap the book image you see in the mobile app or visit us online at truthforlife.org slash donate. We love sharing the gospel message here at Truth for Life. That's our mission, to teach the Bible every day on this program, knowing that when God's word is heard, God's Spirit will work in the lives of many who are listening to convert unbelievers, to establish believers in their faith, and to strengthen local churches. When you support financially and pray for Truth for Life, that's what you're investing in. So if you are one of our financial partners, thank you. I'm Bob Lapine. We hope you enjoy your weekend and are able to worship with your local church. Then join us Monday when we'll find out how God, who is sometimes our burden maker, becomes God the burden taker. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.