God Set Time and Eternity in the Heart of Man

by Pastor Baltazar A. Niangar, Pastor Emeritus, Th.B., A.B., D.D.

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

Have you ever stood under a night sky, or beside a grave, and felt that you were looking at something too large to hold? I have, many times, and I have watched others do the same. We usually call that feeling a failure of understanding. In this study I argue that it is something better. It is the moment a creature meets the limit his Creator set, and it is meant to turn him toward worship.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 describes that moment in a single verse, and I have written a meditation on it in three movements.

Everything God Made Can Be Counted, Seen, and Placed

God made everything beautiful in its time, and everything can be measured in three plain ways. It has number, from whole numbers to infinity. It has colour, from the first light God spoke (Gen. 1:3) to the brightness of His glory. And it has direction, east and west, north and south, so that even forgiveness is measured on the compass: “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Ps. 103:12). Each of these tells me something about the Maker. Each, followed to its end, leaves me at the edge of what I can know.

Mind and Matter Come from the Same Hand

Why does anything exist, and why are we among the things that know it? The inner life of consciousness is the most certain thing I have, and it is the hardest thing to explain. The material world, at its deepest level, is energy, and Christ “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). I do not set mind and matter against each other. They are two gifts of one Giver, and neither one explains itself.

Time Is a Gift, and Eternity Is in the Heart

I describe time in three ways: as moments, as a line, and as a cycle. The New Testament has two Greek words for it. Chronos is the clock, and kairos is the appointed hour. The cross of Christ is the supreme kairos, when “the fullness of time had come” and God “sent forth his Son” (Gal. 4:4). Yet the human heart is never satisfied with time alone. God has put eternity there, and Augustine gave the longing its most famous sentence: “Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”

Where the Limit Leaves Us

I say that God is proved unknowable by our own limits, and I mean it carefully. Unknowable is not the same as unknown. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deut. 29:29). We cannot comprehend Him, and we can know Him truly, because He has made Himself known in His Son.

That is why the right answer to the limit is worship. You were not made to fathom God. You were made to know Him, to love Him, and to enjoy Him forever.

Soli Deo gloria.