http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16469715/you-were-made-to-never-end
All the shine of a thousand spotlights,
All the stars we steal from the night sky,
Will never be enough,
Never be enough.
Towers of gold are still too little;
These hands could hold the world but it’ll
Never be enough,
Never be enough.—Loren Allred, The Greatest Showman
The world is too small to fill your heart. The best things that time can give you will leave unfathomed depths in your soul. It is a beautiful truth that you were made for eternity.
This is the perspective of “the Preacher” in Ecclesiastes, who spoke these famous words: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
In a nutshell, I think the Preacher is saying this: The longing we each possess for a coherence to our own story — and, indeed, the story of the world — has been graciously gifted to us by God. And part of the grace is the surprise that this longing takes the form of a pained looking, a perplexed pondering, as we try to — and then realize we cannot — join up all the dots of our own and the world’s stories. We long for more than we have, we long for what is transient to last, and we long for people and relationships that are temporal to abide forever.
This God-given desire for an uninterrupted, big-picture understanding of everything rubs against the piecemeal, fragmented nature of our grasp on reality. We have a sense that we were made for a grander and more perfect story than the one being played out in our brutal experience of the world.
Time Meets Eternity
This interpretation of Ecclesiastes 3:11 emerges when we attend to the verse’s parts, reading them in the context of the chapter in which they are embedded. Observe how the poetic phrase about eternity in the middle is bracketed on either side by references to time: the beauty of things in their right time and the language of beginning and end.
The juxtaposition of time and eternity is more than a difference; it is a tension, as seen in the words “yet so that he cannot.” There is something about the interplay of temporal affairs and eternity that creates a jagged edge in human experience.
This tension is borne out when we consider the whole chapter. Ecclesiastes 3 is famous for the lyrical tilt of its poetry: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die” (verses 1–2). There is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh” (verse 4). There is “a time to love, and a time to hate” (verse 8).
We’re meant to realize that there is no predictability to the arrival of these events, and often, their presence takes us by surprise. We live with life’s ugliness and pain as much as its beauty and delight, and we are not in charge of when, where, and to what extent each enters our lives.
These seasons are also nearly all relational. They involve the people whom we love and lose, those whom we wrong and forgive, our companions and our enemies. The ebb and flow of our lives is largely taken up with piloting the different seasons of these relationships and the effects they have on us.
The point about time is this: we cannot control it. We cannot control events, and we cannot control relationships. The rest of Ecclesiastes 3 makes clear that we also cannot control ultimate outcomes: “Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness” (verse 16).
This is why we “cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (verse 11). We simply do not know the end from the beginning of anything. We are bit-part players on the sprawling epic of world history, stumbling over our own lines, never mind understanding how this scene on Tuesday morning coheres with a chapter three years ago or the episode that will take place twelve years from now.
The absence of that big picture — particularly if there is injustice and wickedness to be endured or suffering to be stewarded in the meantime — can be one of the most bewildering features of our pilgrimage.
Every Heart a Stable
But now observe the rose among the thorns, the middle of verse 11: “[God] has put eternity into man’s heart.” The idea that God has placed something more than this world (eternity) inside an object in this world (man’s heart) is amazing and powerfully poetic. In The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis has Tirian, the last king of Narnia, and his party enter a stable, which is the threshold of death itself. On entering, they discover that all is not as it seems.
“It seems, then,” said Tirian, smiling to himself, “that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from without are two different places.”
“Yes,” said the Lord Digory. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”
“Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” (744)
That something finite could hold something infinite — this is in keeping with who God is and what he gives. From the fullness of his own immensity, he sought to bestow vastness on small creatures. He intended an experience of infinite bliss to be savored by finite beings. Eternal life for humankind, in the unending Sabbath-rest of the Creator God, was possible from the very beginning of creation.
Our first parents squandered it in an attempted coup, their vandalism of shalom (Genesis 3:22). Yet its loss does not mean its impossibility; rather, it means that we, in our fallen human nature, experience the echoes of who and what we were made to be. This capacity for eternity and its infinite depths keeps sounding in our hearts, in both major and minor keys.
Minor-Key Echoes
In minor key, consider the horror of death. Eternity echoes in our grief. Why is it that we find the idea of the total and absolute nonbeing of our loved ones intolerable, such sorrow unbearable? Christian and non-Christian alike have a sense of, and a yearning for, the person’s existence to continue in some form, in some way, however vague and uncertain. This longing for uninterrupted and durable relationships, for reunion, for wholeness, for completeness and perfection — ultimately, for a share in the life of God — is what it feels like for God to set eternity in our hearts.
God has placed it there as an invitation to humility. As John Jarick puts it, “The human being . . . wants to pass beyond his fragmentary knowledge and discern the fuller meaning of the whole pattern — but the Creator will not let the creature be his equal” (quoted in Tremper Longman, Ecclesiastes, 121). Instead of trying to rise above our station and know what only God can know (the beginning and the end), Ecclesiastes 3:11 reminds us that God is not bound by the changing times in the ways that we are.
The times happen to us, but God happens to the times. He sees and knows what we cannot; he is the one in charge of the ultimate coherence of all things. It is part of the Preacher’s invitation, as Derek Kidner comments, “to see perpetual change not as something unsettling but as an unfolding pattern, scintillating and God-given. The trouble for us is not that life refuses to keep still, but that we see only a fraction of its movement and of its subtle, intricate design” (Message of Ecclesiastes, 38–39).
No one would open The Lord of the Rings to a random page two-thirds of the way through and conclude, after a few minutes of reading, that it had no point, that it was incoherent. Why do we feel so confident interpreting our own times in this way, when in fact the story is still being written by the divine Author?
We are actors, not the Playwright. We are not his equal.
Major-Key Servants
The eternity in our hearts breaks through in other ways. There is a major key as well. The world we recognize so well in Ecclesiastes 3:16 is followed by a depiction of the world we long for so passionately: “I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work” (verse 17).
Judgment is a divine promise. All the events of human history that have slipped through the hourglass of time into the past might be lost to us, but they are never lost to God. One day he will pull the past into his present to bring it to account. Every sorrow, every injustice, every unanswered grievance will have its day in court.
Even more, such longing for the beauty of coherence, or for the rightness of justice exactly meted out for wickedness, is a pointer to the eternal perfection of life with God. Lewis expresses this powerfully:
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. (Mere Christianity, 136–37)
Perhaps his most beautiful expression of this idea comes from “The Weight of Glory,” where he manages the rare feat of analyzing an emotion (nostalgia) in a way that makes the emotion more beautiful after the analysis than it was before. He describes nostalgia as the bittersweet, special emotion of longing, observing that only the emotionally immature believe that what they are longing for is actually what they are longing for.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; for it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a far country we have not yet visited. (30–31)
Is it not true that we often treat the best and most beautiful things we have as ends in themselves? In fact, they are messengers, servants of eternity in time-bound form, sent to us from God with an invitation to see through them to the One who gave them and who made us for him. They are images, shadows, and dreams. They are too small to satisfy us. They are passing. We were made for eternity.
-
Prayers of the Apocalypse
As the Author reads the final sentences of this world’s story, as the final sheep steps into the fold, as the last martyr’s blood spills to the ground, we hear heaven suddenly swell — with silence.
The hallelujahs halt. As a “darkness to be felt” stretched over the land of Egypt (Exodus 10:21), now a silence to be felt stretches over heaven itself. The burning ones bite their tongues from screaming “Holy, holy, holy!” Saints momentarily quiet their songs about the crucified Lamb. The apostle John reports “silence in heaven for about half an hour” (Revelation 8:1). Heaven, that place of highest praise, sinks into the solemn stillness of an army on the eve of battle.
As all quiets onstage, trumpets are distributed to seven archangels, and the spotlight shines on a priestly angel (possibly the Lord Jesus himself), who wades through silence to stand at an altar with a golden censer and much incense. He is to burn the incense before the throne. He performs what the Old Testament priests once did in the temple, when the gathered people went silent, and the fragrant smell of burning incense rose into heaven. But what cloud of aromas now rises before the Lord? Incense from the golden bowls, the prayers of the saints (Revelation 5:8).
At the end of this world, heaven quiets itself to solemnize the prayers of God’s people, rising as worship before God. John writes, “And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel” (Revelation 8:4).
And for what do these prayers plead? In one word: justice.
Appeals of the Apocalypse
The hushed scene picks up from the intermission of chapter 6, where John sees the ascended Lamb break the seven seals one by one. The breaking of the first four seals unleashes different horsemen, who bring violence, famine, and sickness (Revelation 6:2–6). Hades gallops close behind (verses 7–8). Saints are slaughtered during this period of broken seals.
At the breaking of the fifth seal, John sees their host, “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne” (Revelation 6:9). In silence, overhear the theme of their prayer:
They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10)
“Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been” (Revelation 6:11). That moment arrives in chapter 8. Silence to hear solemn appeals of murdered saints now crying out for God to avenge their blood.
Commentator Grant Osborne strikes the vital note: “The silence in heaven is an expectant hush awaiting the action of God, but that is not to be just an outpouring of wrath but God’s answer to the imprecatory prayers of the saints (6:9–11 recapitulated in 8:3–4). Thus there is worship (the golden censer with incense) behind the justice” (Revelation, 339). The scent of worship will soon rise from the wrath. God’s sentence against the impenitent persecutors is not just a response to sin’s penalty, but to his saint’s prayers.
Before this volcano, mouths do not open, eyes do not shut. How does God respond?
Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. (Revelation 8:5)
Fire falling, thunder crashing, rumblings, lightning lashing, earth quaking — “Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord, for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling” (Zechariah 2:13). And so begins the final judgment, for verse 5, writes G.K. Beale, “is to be interpreted as the final judgment, not as some trial preliminary to that judgment” (Revelation: A Shorter Commentary, 169).
Prayers to End the World
Again, God’s wrath against the impenitent is not just a response to sin’s penalty, but a response to his saint’s prayers. His children’s pleadings escort that judgment, beckon it forth. “The utterly astonishing thing about this text,” comments John Piper,
is that it portrays the prayers of the saints as the instrument God uses to usher in the end of the world with great divine judgments. It pictures the prayers of the saints accumulating on the altar before the throne of God until the appointed time when they are taken up like fire from the altar and thrown upon the earth to bring about the consummation of God’s kingdom. (The Prayers of the Saints and the End of the World)
Do we find this astonishing? Are we more prone to interrogate (rather than to appreciate) such prayers? “Do our prayers,” asks Beale, “come out of a sacrificial life, or do we come asking God only to throw us life-preservers to rescue us from our own foolishness? The prayers of the saints as pictured there focus on the holiness and truthfulness of God and a desire for that to be manifested in the execution of his justice. Are our prayers directed toward obtaining benefit for ourselves or glory for God?” (168).
Sheltered from much persecution, the sweetness of this incense has not yet pleased me as deeply as it might. It hasn’t needed to. Egypt’s whips have not struck my wife’s back. Pharoah has not tossed my children into the Nile. The unjust judge has not yet denied me a hearing. Romans 12:19 hasn’t met any existential crisis: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” But it has for many saints who have been more profoundly inflicted by injustice and scarred by sin.
Hesitations about imprecatory prayers, especially in the West, often expose (among other things) a lack of sympathy with our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world and throughout history.
Venerating His Vengeance
Whether you and I can relate circumstantially to these prayers for justice, such judgments have their place in our worship. The first thing we see Israel doing after deliverance from Egypt is gathering at the Red Sea, tears of gratitude flowing down their cheeks, voices joining in song to praise God for saving them by sinking their foes like a stone (Exodus 15:5). Saints of old could see the crushing of their enemies as God’s covenant love for them:
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever . . .to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt, for his steadfast love endures forever; . . .to him who divided the Red Sea in two, for his steadfast love endures forever;and made Israel pass through the midst of it, for his steadfast love endures forever;but overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea, for his steadfast love endures forever. (Psalm 136:1, 10, 13–15)
The psalmist can’t finish sentences detailing God’s righteous judgments without inserting praise for God’s love to his people displayed in the same act. Thus, after the prayed-for judgment falls at the end of time, we hear the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,
Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just; for he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality, and has avenged on her the blood of his servants. (Revelation 19:1–2)
Thy Kingdom Come
When the priestly angel reaches into his golden bowl, will he find our prayer there? While many of us may not often have prayed for God’s retribution to fall upon the wicked, Jesus teaches us to fill up that bowl in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9–10).
Martin Luther once taught us that this is to place all that opposes our God’s dominion into a pile and pray: “Curses, maledictions, and disgrace upon every other name and every other kingdom. May they be ruined and torn apart, and may all their schemes and wisdom and plans run aground” (Luther’s Works [1956], 21:101). “Thy kingdom come” is the positive way of praying, “Destroy every other kingdom that resists your will or stands in your way.”
Or as Piper exults,
What we have in Revelation 8:1–5 is an explanation of what has happened to the millions upon millions of prayers over the last 2,000 years as the saints have cried out again and again, ‘Thy kingdom come. Thy kingdom come.’ Not one of these prayers, prayed in faith, has been ignored. Not one is lost or forgotten. Not one has been ineffectual or pointless. They all have been gathering on the altar before the throne of God.
We pray for God’s dominion, a dominion that will overthrow all others. We pray for King Jesus to return, knowing judgment must come with his heaven (Revelation 1:7). We desire God’s righteous justice to be satisfied — at the cross or in hell. And we desire most of all that our Savior come so that the dwelling place of God is again with man — thy kingdom come!
Not one of our prayers for Christ to come, to bring his kingdom, and to make all our deepest wrongs right will be lost. They are gathered in a bowl, soon to be burned as incense before the throne and scattered as fire upon our enemies. Some of us stare at the skies, joining that solemn silence, groaning for justice, and aching for home. He will not disappoint. He will not delay a moment longer than his Father determines. As we wait, we close the distance and assault the interval with one beautiful weapon: prayer. Come, Lord Jesus!
-
Does God Delight in Justification or Holiness?
Audio Transcript
Happy Friday, everyone. Today we talk about the pursuit of holiness as justified believers — something we must get right. It’s basically the question over whether God delights in us as justified children, in our imputed righteousness, or whether he delights in our actual, lived-out holiness.
The question is from Kelly, a listener who lives in the state of Georgia. “Pastor John, one of the most joy-inspiring truths of the gospel is the imputed righteousness of Christ on our account. I’m thinking here of 2 Corinthians 5:21. Is it safe to say then that God is fully pleased with me based on Christ’s work alone? If so, how do you reconcile this with scriptures such as Colossians 1:10, where Paul encourages us to ‘walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing in his sight’? Does God’s pleasure in me depend upon Christ’s work or my own works? Or is it somehow both? Can you please explain this dynamic?”
This is really crucial. It’s a question that lies very close to my heart because, as I look out across the longer-term effects of the gospel-centered movement of the last forty years or so, one of my concerns is that the stress on justification by faith — which is a glorious doctrine, not to be diminished or compromised at all — has not been accompanied by a biblically proportionate focus on sanctification by faith.
One form that this neglect has taken is the hesitancy for some pastors to say to their people, “You should seek to please the Lord by the way you live.” One of the reasons they’re hesitant to say this is that they think it undermines the doctrine of justification, which says that we already stand pleasing, or perfect, before God, clothed with the perfection and the righteousness and the obedience of Christ, which is counted as ours through faith alone.
So this question is absolutely crucial in order to preach and live biblically, because there’s no doubt that throughout the Gospels and throughout the Epistles we are exhorted to walk — that is, live practically with our minds and our attitudes and the members of our body — in a way that pleases the Lord. You may not please the Lord if you don’t walk that way. Now, that’s not a peripheral teaching, and it’s not in conflict with justification by faith.
Glory of Justification
So let me give some biblical foundation for each of those realities — namely, justification as the imputation of Christ’s obedience to us, and sanctification as a way of life that pleases the Lord. I’ll try to put them together.
“For our sake [God] made [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
“[That I may] be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Philippians 3:9).
“As by the one man’s [namely, Adam’s] disobedience the many were [appointed] sinners, so by the one man’s [namely, Christ’s] obedience the many will be [appointed] righteous” (Romans 5:19).We call this appointing imputation, or being counted righteous, and this imputation happens by union with Christ through faith, not works. Romans 4:5: “To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.”
So the moment — and this is the glory — the moment we experience authentic faith in Christ and are thus united to him, at that moment his death counts as the punishment of all our sin so that all divine wrath is forever removed from us. In that same glorious moment, Christ’s entire obedience is counted as ours so that he fulfills for us every demand that the law made on us in order to be found in God’s everlasting favor. From that moment on for the rest of eternity, God is 100 percent for us — not 99 percent for us and a little bit against us, but 100 percent for us. That’s the glory of justification by faith.
Committed to Our Holiness
Now, the fact that God reckons us to be perfect in Christ, and thus acceptable to him in his holiness, does not mean that God is willing to leave us in a condition embattled by sin where we can’t fully enjoy him forever.
The fact that God accepts us fully in Christ means he is fully committed to making us fully happy forever, which means that he is displeased with anything short of our joyful perfection in attitude and heart and mind and body, because any imperfection is a dishonor to his worth and a diminishment of our joy. God cannot, as a justifying God, be indifferent to our everlasting happiness, which means being indifferent to our everlasting holiness. He cannot. That’s what justification guarantees.
“God intends not only to count us righteous because of Christ, but to make us righteous because of Christ.”
So we have texts like the one Kelly points out in Colossians 1:9–10: “We pray for you,” Paul says, “that you may . . . walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.” That’s what Paul’s praying for. God intends not only to count us righteous because of Christ, but to make us righteous because of Christ.
To say that he sees us clothed with the righteousness of Christ for the sake of justification does not mean that he has become blind to the attitudes and thoughts and deeds of our life on earth. He has not become blind or indifferent to our lived-out holiness. On the contrary, it’s only because our sins are completely forgiven that we can get any victory over sinning at all. Practical holiness is only possible because of the prior imputed holiness. God means to get glory for Jesus, not only as the one who deals with the guilt of our sin by justification, but also as the one who deals with the power of our sin by sanctification.
Pleasing God in Our Walk
Over and over, Paul tells Christians to make it their aim to please the Lord by the way they walk — that is, the way they live.
“We ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more” (1 Thessalonians 4:1).
“Whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him” (2 Corinthians 5:9).
“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord” (Colossians 3:20).
“I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people. . . . This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior” (1 Timothy 2:1, 3).
“Let them first learn to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God” (1 Timothy 5:4).The flip side of this repeated refrain that we can and should please the Lord by the way we live is the fact that we can displease the Lord by the way we live — even as justified, accepted, loved children of God. Paul says, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30). In 1 Thessalonians 5:19, he says, “Do not quench the Spirit.”
Made Delightful Through Discipline
In Hebrews 12, God disciplines those he loves, his justified children. And then he explains what he’s doing. It says, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness” (Hebrews 12:11). That’s not imputed righteousness. That’s practical righteousness that happens because God is disciplining us in our need.
“The only sin you can get any victory over is a forgiven sin, not the other way around.”
So there is imputed righteousness, and there is imparted righteousness. The imputed righteousness is the foundation of imparted righteousness. The only sin you can get any victory over is a forgiven sin, not the other way around. The imputed righteousness is the way we become the children of God so that he now exerts his omnipotent fatherly favor to impart his own righteousness to us by the Spirit.
Kelly asks, “Does God’s pleasure in me depend upon Christ’s work or my works? Or is it somehow both?” Here’s the way I would answer. Proverbs 3:12 says, “The Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” So, God is seeking to make us delightful to him in our lived-out holiness and happiness because we are delightful to him as his justified children.
-
What Is Slavery Like Without Threatening? Ephesians 6:5–9, Part 6
John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.
