God has planted eternity in the human heart.
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
This life is not all there is.
Life on earth is just the dress rehearsal before the real production. We will spend far more time on the other side of death — in eternity — than we will here. Earth is the staging area, the preschool, the tryout for our life in eternity. It is the practice workout before the actual game; the warm-up lap before the race begins. This life is preparation for the next.
At most, we will live a hundred years on earth, but we will spend forever in eternity. Our time on earth is, as but a small parenthesis in eternity.” We were made to last forever.
The Bible says, “God has . . . planted eternity in the human heart.”We have an inborn instinct that longs for immortality. This is because God designed us,in his image, to live for eternity.
Even though we know everyone eventually dies, death always seems unnatural and unfair. The reason we feel we should live forever is that God wired our brains with that desire!
One day our heart will stop beating. That will be the end of our body and our time on earth, but it will not be the end of us. Our earthly body is just a temporary residence for our spirit. The Bible calls our earthly body a “tent,” but refers to our future body as a “house.” The Bible says, “When this tent we live in — our body here on earth — is torn down, God will have a house in heaven for us to live in, a home he himself has made, which will last forever.”
While life on earth offers many choices, eternity offers only two: heaven or hell. Our relationship to God on earth will determine our relationship to him in eternity. If we learn to love and trust God’s Son, Jesus, we will be invited to spend the rest of eternity with him. On the other hand, if we reject his love, forgiveness, and salvation, we will spend eternity apart from God forever.
C. S. Lewis said, “There are two kinds of people: those who say to God ‘Thy will be done’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right then, have it your way.’ ” Tragically, many people will have to endure eternity without God because they chose to live without him here on earth.
When we fully comprehend that there is more to life than just here and now, and we realize that life is just preparation for eternity, we will begin to live differently. We will start living in light of eternity, and that will color how we handle every relationship, task, and circumstance. Suddenly many activities, goals, and even problems that seemed so important will appear trivial, petty, and unworthy of our attention. The closer we live to God, the smaller everything else appears.
When we live in light of eternity, our values change. We use our time and money more wisely. We place a higher premium on relationships and character instead of fame or wealth or achievements or even fun. Our priorities are reordered. Keeping up with trends, fashions, and popular values just doesn’t matter as much anymore.
If our time on earth were all there is to our life, I would suggest we start living it up immediately. We could forget being good and ethical, and we wouldn’t have to worry about any consequences of our actions. We could indulge yourself in total self-centeredness because our actions would have no long-term repercussions. But...and this makes all the difference, death is not the end of us! Death is not our termination, but our transition into eternity, so there are eternal consequences to everything we do on earth.
Every act of our lives strikes some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
The most damaging aspect of contemporary living is short-term thinking. To make the most of our life, we must keep the vision of eternity continually in our mind and the value of it in our heart. There’s far more to life than just here and now! Today is the visible tip of the iceberg. Eternity is all the rest we don’t see underneath the surface.
God has a purpose for our life on earth, but it doesn’t end here. His plan involves far more than the few decades we will spend on this planet. It’s more than “the opportunity of a lifetime”; God offers us an opportunity beyond our lifetime. The Bible says, “[God’s] plans endure forever; his purposes last eternally.”
The only time most people think about eternity is at funerals, and then it’s often shallow, sentimental thinking, based on ignorance. You may feel it’s morbid to think about death, but actually it’s unhealthy to live in denial of death and not consider what is inevitable. Only a fool would go through life unprepared for what we all know will eventually happen. We need to think more about eternity, not less.
Just as the nine months we spent in our mother’s womb were not an end in themselves but preparation for life, so this life is preparation for the next. If we have a relationship with God through Jesus, we don’t need to fear death. It is the door to eternity. It will be the last hour of our time on earth, but it won’t be the last of us. Rather than being the end of our life, it will be our birthday into eternal life. The Bible says, “This world is not our home; we are looking forward to our everlasting home in heaven.”
