Charles Clough

From Biblical Framework

Lesson 2

I gave a reference in the notes to Ecclesiastes 3, we’ll come back again and again to this because it’s a central passage and the reason it’s so important is that it was written as part of a corpus of literature called the wisdom literature in the Bible. Solomon wrote it. Ecclesiastes is a fascinating book to read because Solomon tried every false pathway you could think of and he’s done it. He has done about everything a person can do, he had a lot of wealth so he could afford to do experiments, and basically he came up with a conclusion that the world doesn’t satisfy, only a relationship with God satisfies. Part of his explanation of this is in Eccl. 3:11, a key passage in the Bible. Something is asserted in this passage that is a puzzle, a powerful puzzle. Notice what it says: God “has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart,” whose heart? Men’s hearts. What has God set there? Not eternal life, that’s knowing Christ. He has “set eternity in their heart.” There is a sense of eternity in every human being, whether the person is an atheist or a Christian. Where does it come from? From the fact that God has placed His image in our hearts and if you want to think in terms of context here’s what happens. Go back to the dog idea, you have a circle of context around him, and then around him you have the idea of human society in which the dogs are used, then you have the context of history in which human society lives, and you have this expanding circle of ever widening context until you get out as far as you can think, the meaning of history and the origin of history. It’s that drive, verse 11, where he says He has put eternity in their heart, that is something of passion that He puts in our hearts that we want a foundation for our lives. So we keep on pushing outward, pushing outward, outward, pushing forever and ever greater circles of contexts, until we can get meaning for our life.

Some day read some of the 20^th century literature that our young people have to read in literature class. It amazes me that we always start literature classes with 20^th century writings, it’s backwards. What we should be doing is starting literature classes back in the days when there was a high and lofty view of language, moving forward from that time into the 20^th century when people couldn’t care less, have given up all hope for meaning and they write literature that’s profoundly despairing. It’s despairing because when they go to push the walls out to try to get meaning, there is nothing there. In philosophical circles that is what is ultimately broadly labeled as existentialist. We don’t bother with the big questions any more, we just describe, describe, describe, hoping that we write enough stories, enough poetry, enough here, enough there, have enough experiences that somehow it will satisfy things. It won’t, because God has set eternity in hearts, and until we push the context out to eternity we won’t be satisfied. It’s like we’re little marbles rolling around a big box. When you pack a box you fill it with Styrofoam peanuts because the box has to be filled. If you can think of that imagery, that’s what happens in the human heart. When we begin to know things and learn things we want it not to just bounce around in an empty box, but God has given us in our hearts a sense of eternity. That’s how big our hearts are. Not that the hearts are eternal, the hearts are not infinite, but there’s a sense of infinite, we are created to have fellowship with an infinite God and we’re not going to be satisfied until we have fellowship with Him.

Notice further in verse 11 the other side of the mystery. The first part of the mystery is that God has put eternity in our heart, but then look at what He does in the next clause, “yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done,” that is something we’ll get into called the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God, a very important idea of Scripture. We didn’t say we couldn’t know Him in a personal way, but to fathom His being is an impossibility. That’s a great comfort because every idol that man makes, by definition, isn’t incomprehensible, it’s comprehensible. All idols are comprehensible because man made them, so the mark of the true God is that He is not comprehensible, He lies beyond the power of reason to capture. All we know about God is what He chooses to show us, and if He does not choose to show us something, we do not know anything about God. That’s why this Book is so important. If God did not speak the Scripture we would know nothing. The modern theologian and the modern church have washed themselves clean of an authoritative Scripture and in so doing they have cut themselves off from ever comprehending God, because God is incomprehensible.

God has structured the universe to tease us into a relationship with Him. On the one hand He shows us His magnificence, and you can study tremendous things in science and literature, you can study unfathomable things, and we should because God told Adam to go out and name these. But a funny thing happens on the way. As we begin to get involved we begin to see these glorious things, and we begin to probe beyond them and beyond them and beyond them, and we finally realize that this goes on endlessly. It goes on forever and ever. Think of the physicist. First it was the atom, then it was the electron and the proton, then subatomic particles, now it’s going to be the grand theory of the strong force and the weak force in the nucleus, so we go on and on and on, it never stops.

Yet we have to come to know God. You can’t postpone knowing God now by saying in five more years if I take enough courses, if I read enough books, if I increase the volume of my knowledge, I’m going to know God better. No, that’s five years from now, what are you going to do at T+5, this is this year, at Y+5 you’re going to be here, you’re going to have that much knowledge. I can say, well, can’t you say the same thing at Y+5? But there’s so much more to know, so I need to read more books, I need to think farther, etc. etc. etc. etc. and we can perpetuate this argument forever, and there’ll never be a resting place. That’s what God is saying in verse 11, He says “I have given you people a sense of My presence and My eternity, but I’ve also structured the universe in such a way that you will never, on your own, get it unless you come to Me, and then you can only come to Me as I have chosen to reveal Myself.”