“Eternity In Our Hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-15)

Kris Kristofferson (who died last year at the age of 88) was one of the greatest performers of the twentieth century. He achieved the distinction of having written a number one hit that made it into the Billboard Hot 100 and that was also inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. But Kris Kristofferson was not the only one to achieve that amazing success. There was another. And that leads me to my question for you this morning: Who was that other one?

The answer may surprise you. It was none other than King Solomon. And the hit that made it to the top of the charts is the Bible passage we have read in this morning’s service, as it is found in the old King James Version: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven…”

Those words became the lyrics of a song composed in 1959 by Pete Seeger and that became popularly known as “Turn, turn, turn”. The initial release was sung by Seeger himself, later to be followed successively by the Limeliters, the Byrds, and Judy Collins—and each one a top hit in its own right. There was even a German translation sung by film legend Marlene Dietrich and accompanied by Burt Bacharach.

It seemed to me that this passage, with its repeated references to time, is one that we might do well to read this morning, as we stand on the cusp of another year. This is a point where many of us are especially aware of the passage of time, as we look back over the past twelve months and attempt to peer ahead into the next.

What were some of the high points of this past year for you? Some of its lows? What did you do that was different? What remained pretty much unchanged? From a world point of view, here are some of the events that have dominated the headlines this year:

·  Donald Trump radiates chaos and turmoil in the first year of his second presidency in the United States

·  A new Liberal minority government under Mark Carney is elected in our own country of Canada

·  Civil war continues in Sudan, with over twelve million people forced to abandon their homes—the largest and fastest displacement crisis in the world

·  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has now claimed more than a million lives

·  In Burma’s civil war, more than 400,000 people have been displaced, with more than a million in need of humanitarian assistance

·  The Roman Catholic Church appoints its first American pope in the person of Leo XIV

·  The Toronto Bluejays come within a hair’s breadth of winning the World Series

·  A ceasefire is proclaimed in Gaza, but only after claiming more than 70,000 lives, mainly of innocent people

·  Over $100 million worth in jewels are stolen from the Louvre in Paris

·  Sixteen people are shot dead on Bondi Beach while celebrating Hannukah, including a Holocaust survivor and a ten year-old child

Day by day

Now all of those events I’ve listed are on a national or international scale. But Solomon’s interests in the verses we have before us are on a very different level. They are not headline-grabbing affairs. They have a much more personal, human focus. By and large they are all events that you and I can relate to in the course of daily life—the kind of things some might think about posting on their Facebook page: birth and death, planting and uprooting, building and taking down, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, finding and losing, seeking and giving up, tearing and mending, speaking and keeping silent…

And while it may all seem very ordinary and unspectacular, there is a beauty to this rhythm of life, to this predictability that makes so much of everyday living possible. Even though winter has hardly begun, I look forward to the coming of spring, when the bulbs I planted in the fall will poke through the earth and come into bloom. I look forward to celebrating birthdays with members of my family. I look forward to next Christmas, even though the current Christmas season won’t be officially over for another eight days!

At the same time there is also a sadness. We are forced to recognize that it is an unavoidable part of life in this world that good things will come to an end. And, as much as we might want to, it is beyond your power or mine to extend them. In a few days’ time we’ll be dragging our Christmas trees out to the side of the road and our neighbour’s inflatable reindeer will lie collapsed on the frozen ground. More seriously, Solomon reminds us that there is a time to weep and a time to mourn—that family and friends who are with us this Christmas may not be here to gather around our table when Christmas rolls around next year.

Now I don’t want to put you on a downer during this festive season or ruin your Christmas by making you think about sad things. So let me ask you, what are some positive lessons we can glean from these verses? Allow me to offer a couple of suggestions: We can seek to embrace each of the seasons of life in faith, with the assurance that somehow—and as often as not mysteriously—God has a purpose behind them all. Moreover we can trust that through all of life’s ups and downs, our gracious Lord holds each of us firmly in his all-powerful hand.

But far more importantly we need to recognize that, as stirringly eloquent and timeless as Solomon’s words may be, they do not tell the whole story. Ecclesiastes opens with the doleful cry, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity…” And repeatedly Solomon confesses that he is looking at life from a perspective “under the sun”. Over the course of the eleven chapters of Ecclesiastes we are confronted by this expression no fewer than twenty-seven times. And so we need to take warning: that what Solomon is giving us in these verses is only a partial picture. It offers us only a purely earthly perspective. And for the full story we need to look elsewhere in Scripture…

The day everything changed

So let me read to you now from those famous opening words of John’s gospel, words often read at this time of year:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

I cannot read those words without a sense of amazement, without feeling chills tingling down my spine. John invites us to gaze not just around us like Solomon, but upwards into the vast and limitless expanse of the heavens—and with awe and amazement to ponder the God who created it all. And then to realize that God, who holds the universe in the palm of his hand, whom the Psalms describe as riding across the highest heavens and thundering with a mighty voice, has set his love on the likes of you and me.

This love is nothing like Solomon’s cool observation, musing on his subjects from the lofty security of his throne. While Solomon looks downwards from the aloofness of his palace to observe the everyday affairs of his kingdom, the Son of God fully embraces our human experience. He takes upon himself our very flesh—becomes a helpless fetus in a mother’s womb, experiences hunger and thirst, temptation and sorrow, misunderstanding, betrayal, suffering, abandonment and finally even death itself.

Years before, on the bank of the Jordan River, John the Baptist had pointed to Jesus with the words, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Those words may have seemed puzzling at the time. But it would be on the cross that Jesus would experience even death itself. Indeed he would experience not only our physical death, but he would take upon himself our spiritual deadness, our deadness to God.

And so it was, that a generation later, looking back on the cross the apostle Paul could write, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20) What Paul recognized was that, when Jesus hung dying on the cross, he was not dying for any sin that he had committed, but for your sins and for mine and for those of all who turn to him in faith. He was taking upon himself our death, so that you and I might share fully in his life.

The day we await

All of which brings me to a third passage of Scripture, this time from the vision that the Lord gave to John in the Book of Revelation:

Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling-place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’

He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!’ Then he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’

He said to me: ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children…’ (Revelation 21:1-7)

When Jesus died on the cross and rose again, he broke the endless cycle of birth and death, planting and uprooting, searching and giving up, keeping and throwing away. The eternity that God has set in our hearts has become for us a reality, a real and ever-present hope as we open our lives to him.

I’m no prophet and I don’t dare predict what we’ll have to look back on a year from now. On the other hand, I have little doubt that, much as Solomon has described it, over the course of this coming year of 2026, we will see its share of births and deaths, planting and uprooting, killing and healing. Yet I want to challenge you to put it into its larger context, the full picture of God’s eternal and glorious purpose for this world. May your goal for 2026 be that of the apostle Paul:

I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in^[ Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:8-16)

So amid all the round of life allow me to challenge you keep your eyes fixed on our glorious Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit to press on in the unshakeable hope that God has placed before us in him!

“The Lord our Dwelling Place” (Psalm 90)

Here we are, standing at the cusp of yet another year. It’s an annual opportunity to stop and think for a moment about the passage of time, and not just about time in general, but our time, the time that has flown past (for many of us all too quickly and for some not quickly enough) and the time that stretches ahead of us, for some filled with opportunities and new adventures, for others perhaps bringing a sense of apprehension about what may lie ahead. To help ourselves put all of that in perspective, I don’t think there are many more appropriate passages of Scripture than the psalm we have just read—Psalm 90.

We tend to think of the psalms as the work of King David. In fact, of the one hundred fifty psalms in the Old Testament, seventy-five are ascribed to him. However, the psalm we read together a few moments ago is unique in all the Old Testament in that it is attributed not to David but to Moses. If you turn to it in your Bible you will see it has the superscription, “A prayer of Moses the man of God”.

Some scholars question this attribution, but as I have read this psalm over and over and meditated upon it during the last couple of weeks, it makes a lot of sense. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations…” It is not difficult for me to imagine that these are the words of a man who has spent the better part of forty years wandering through the wilderness with his people, with no home to call their own. Yet throughout that time the Lord has been with them, visibly witnessed through the cloud that led them by day and the pillar of fire at night. But he had been with them long before that, as they toiled as slaves under the searing Egyptian sun, with Joseph and Jacob and Isaac, and going back to Abraham as he answered the call to journey from the banks of the Euphrates to the land that God had said would belong to him and his descendants.

So picture Moses, if you will, late one night lying back and looking up into the clear desert sky. My son Simon and I had the opportunity to do this in Libya on the edge of the Sahara several years ago and it was a memorable experience. Gazing into a sky uncluttered by pollution and the glow of city lights, he knew that behind all those innumerable stars that paraded across night after night, mightier than the mountains that surrounded him, reaching back past the ages beyond the dawn of time, there was God. “In the beginning, God …” And in this morning’s psalm: “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” 

 

God’s Eternity

If you take a few moments to go online and visit the NASA website, you can see an amazing photograph with Saturn’s rings in the foreground. Not far below them you can discern a tiny, almost insignificant, softly glowing dot. That dot is our planet earth, as seen from a distance of nearly one and a half billion kilometers[1]. The image gives us a picture of the vastness of our solar system, which itself is only a tiny dot within the Milky Way, which in turn is another tiny dot in the seeming limitlessness of the created order.

Moses certainly did not have access to any of the kinds of sophisticated astronomical data that are available to us today. But he didn’t need them in order to find himself overwhelmed by the limitlessness of God. The Bible tells us that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20). And we could spend all morning just considering the wonder of God’s eternal nature. We find it sprinkled throughout the Bible, in Psalm 104, for example:

Lord my God, you are very great;
     you are clothed with splendour and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
     he stretches out the heavens like a tent…
He makes the clouds his chariot
     and rides on the wings of the wind. (Psalm 104:1-3)

Or again, in one of the most exalted pieces of poetry in all of Scripture, from the prophet Isaiah:

Do you not know?
     Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
     Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
     and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
     and spreads them out like a tent to live in…
‘To whom will you compare me?
     Or who is my equal?’ says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
     who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
     and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
     not one of them is missing. (Isaiah 40:21-22,25-26)

And how about that unforgettable catalogue of questions with which the Lord peppered poor Job?

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
     Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
     Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
     or who laid its cornerstone –
while the morning stars sang together
     and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors
     when it burst forth from the womb, …
when I said, “This far you may come and no farther;
     here is where your proud waves halt”?
Have you ever given orders to the morning,
     or shown the dawn its place … ?
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
     or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
     Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
     Tell me, if you know all this. (Job 38:4-18)

In Psalm 8 his consideration of God’s creative power and eternal majesty leads the psalmist to ask a question:

Lord, our Lord,
     how majestic is your name in all the earth! …
When I consider your heavens,
     the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
     which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
     human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:1,3-4)

And that is precisely the question that burns through the middle section of our psalm this morning.

Human Mortality

The main preoccupation of the psalm is not much with God’s eternal nature as it is with its contrast to our human mortality.

A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

But Moses was not the only one to recognize this. Poor old Job cried aloud to his friends,

My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,
     and they come to an end without hope.
Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath… (Job 7:6-7)

And Solomon mused,

Everyone comes naked from their mother’s womb,
     and as everyone comes, so they depart.
They take nothing from their toil
     that they can carry in their hands. (Ecclesiastes 5:15)

Nearing the end of his life, the apostle Paul wrote to his young friend Timothy, “We brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it” (1 Timothy 6:7). And Jesus exemplified that truth in his parable of the rich fool. Many of you will remember his story of the man who kept having to build bigger barns to store his surplus grain. But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you” (Luke 12:13-21).

Isaac Watts put poetic expression to this morning’s psalm in the hymn we’ll be singing in a few minutes’ time:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
     Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
     Dies at the opening day.

Now isn’t all this a cheerful way to look ahead to the New Year? I hope I haven’t thoroughly demoralized you! But before you sink too far into depression, there’s something else we need to see in this psalm—and that is that it recognizes, indeed it laments, that none of this is the way things should be. You know those puzzles that ask you to spot what’s wrong with this picture? This psalm has something like that in it. The hints come out in verses like these: “You turn people back to dust…” “You sweep people away in the sleep of death…” “We are consumed by your anger…” “All our days pass under your wrath…”

The psalmist is painfully aware that things don’t have to be the way they are—that the power of life and death lies in God’s hands. All of this leads to the desperate cry in verse 13: “Relent, Lord, how long will it be?” The verb in Hebrew is shub. It means to turn around. It is as though God has his back towards us.

So you see there is something deep within the psalmist’s heart—something in all our hearts—that protests, that cries out this is not the way it’s supposed to be. As we read in Ecclesiastes, “He has set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). So it is that C.S. Lewis reflected,

We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal…[2]

Eternal Habitations

Turn with me now to the second-last chapter of the Bible, where the seer John gives us a picture that is so breathtaking that it cannot be compared with the sky even on the most glorious starlit night. There, John is given a vision of the new heaven and the new earth. He looks on with awe as the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, descends from the skies, “prepared,” as he describes it, “like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband”. Then a loud voice booms from God’s throne with the words, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:1-4).

Now shift the scene to the night before his crucifixion, as Jesus gathered with his disciples in the upper room. There he gave them the promise, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3).

And now in this Christmas season we remember how the Lord of time and eternity, he who has been our dwelling place throughout all generations, the eternal Word, became flesh and made his dwelling among us. “We have seen his glory,” John declares, “the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). It is in Jesus that we see life as God truly intends it to be. It is in Jesus that we find our eternal dwelling place in the heart of God.

Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
     Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
     Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heav’n, stoops heav’n to earth…[3]

---

[1]     https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17171

[2]     Reflections on the Psalms, 114,115

[3]     Richard Crashaw (1612-1649), “An Hymne of the Nativity”

Some thoughts on heaven from Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

Award-winning Christian author Madeleine L’Engle died earlier this year. I came across this quotation as I was preparing for All Saints’ Day.

The Churches have tended to be too literal about heaven and hell, defining what no mortal can possibly know, because only God knows. A young woman came to me, deeply disturbed, because her minister had told her that immortality is not a Christian concept. It is left over from Greek thinking, he said, and Christians are not supposed to believe in it.

This was not what she needed to hear. She had lost a beloved sister, and she needed affirmation, not a lecture. “If there is no immortality, then what about my sister?” she asked the minister.

“We believe in the resurrection of the body,” he said. “What body?” Her sister had died, very slowly, of cancer, looking like a victim from Belsen. Her sister would not want to be resurrected in that emaciated, dying body. Her minister did not have an answer, at least not one that she could remember and tell me.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that the word immortality involves time, involves our going on and on in time, human time. But resurrection is in eternity, and that’s a tough concept for us to understand.”

“Do you understand it?”

“No, but I believe it. I don’t understand it because I am in time right now. I get glimpses of eternity, of kairos, God’s time, which is far more wonderful than ordinary chronos, clock time.”

“What about my sister? She was so alive, so vibrant, until those last months.”

All I could do was repeat my affirmation that God does not create us and then drop us into nothingness. I don’t think her sister is in either the old-fashioned heaven or hell; but I think she is, somehow, somewhere, more truly alive than she was on earth. I don’t know what the resurrection body will be like.

Tommy, my evangelist friend, quoted something to the effect that many Christians are more interested in resuscitation than resurrection.

Ouch.

My grandfather would not have wished to be resuscitated at 101.

But when a child is suddenly killed, don’t we intuitively wish for resuscitation? We want that child back, exactly as before—the same deep gray eyes, the fair hair, the dimples that came and went.

But Jesus was never recognized by sight after the resurrection. So what on earth do we mean by resurrection?

When the people asked St Paul what the resurrection body was going to be like, he snapped out, “Don’t be silly,” one of my favorites of all the sayings of Paul. Don’t be silly. We can’t have back what we have lost. I can’t have my tall, lean husband with his amazing blue eyes, larger and bluer than any other eyes I have seen.
I want him back, and there’s no evading that I want him.

So what do I mean, what do we all mean when we say that “we believe in the resurrection of the dead”?

A friend said to me, “When I die and see Jack again I will recognize him.”
If we didn’t recognize Jesus, can we count on that? Not unless we, too, have been resurrected, not resuscitated.

Once again we are in mystery, outside the realm of provable fact. We are, I believe, given glimpses, and I have had a few. Walking down a dirt road on a shining summer day I moved into a realm of beauty and depth that became indescribable once I had left it, but it gives me a hint that after I die I may say, “Oh, glory! What a thin way of living I have just left!”

Madeleine L’Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1996) 184-186