In Ecclesiastes, the wealthiest and wisest man of all, King Solomon, will compound on the words of Job when he describes the vanity and futility of life. Furthermore, Solomon will detail that the length of our lives, although known to God, is completely unknown to us: “Moreover, man does not know his time: like fish caught in a treacherous net and birds trapped in a snare, so the sons of men are ensnared at an evil time when it suddenly falls on them.” (2)
Life itself is like a whisper spoken into the wind or like a candle, which after being blown out, has lingering smoke for but a brief moment and then disappears forever. The brother of Jesus will later testify to these very realities in the New Testament: “You don’t even know what your life will look like tomorrow.” (3)
As Christians, we are committed to living for the glory of God, but in order to do so, we must effectively evaluate and examine the fragility and fleeting nature of life. In his resolutions, Jonathan Edwards rightly valued the scarcity of time and prayed that the Lord would impress upon his conscience the necessity of viewing our time here on earth with a profound sense of stewardship. With the brevity of man’s days and the eternal nature of man’s soul in mind, Edwards would pray, “Lord, stamp eternity on my eyeballs.” Edwards refused to live for the temporary, but insisted on making this personal resolution: