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Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything under heaven. But God has also placed eternity in our hearts, and that makes us strange creatures: able to rejoice in this life yet always aching for a life that only Christ can give.
A few weeks ago, my grandmother died. She was a tough woman. She worked hard, was fiercely loyal to her five sons. And she spent much of her life trying to make a life for herself and for them. She wanted her boys to seize life—to work, to push forward, to make something of the days they had been given.
Recently, I stood with my family at her graveside. There was no church. No processional. No familiar liturgy surrounding us with words I had spoken countless times before. We simply gathered there beneath an oak tree, beside the place where her body would be laid to rest.
The pastor, a friend from the Covenant Church, chose Ecclesiastes 3 for the service. It was not a passage I expected. But as he began to read, I understood why he chose it: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die…” (Eccl. 3:1-2).
Those words are familiar enough. But they sound different beside a grave. Standing there, I found myself thinking about my grandmother’s life. There had been a time for her to be born. A time to raise five sons. A time to work. A time to struggle. Throughout it all there had been laughter and disappointment, holding on and letting go, things gained and things lost. And now, unmistakably, there was a time to die.
But then the pastor continued to read. Later in the chapter, Ecclesiastes goes on to say: “God has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, God has put eternity into human hearts” (Eccl. 3:11).
Those words struck me. There is something strange about these words. We live entirely within time. Our lives are measured in minutes and years, birthdays and anniversaries, beginnings and endings. We move through all the seasons Ecclesiastes names: birth and death, weeping and laughter, mourning and dancing, embracing and releasing. And yet God has placed eternity in our heart. In other words, our hearts are somehow bigger than the hours of our lives.
This means we are temporal creatures with eternal longings. We know summers end, yet there are evenings we wish could last forever. We know children grow, yet some part of us wants to hold them exactly as they are. We know the people we love will die, yet something in us protests that this cannot possibly be the way things are supposed to be. We are mortal creatures carrying an ache for eternity.
And that ache has two sides. On one side, eternity in the heart makes us restless. We are given today but not guaranteed tomorrow. We are creatures with limits, and some part of us is always trying to crawl beyond them.
This longing is not itself the problem. God is the one who has placed eternity in our hearts. The problem is what sin does with that longing. Sin does not create the longing for eternity; sin bends that longing back upon us. Instead of receiving our lives from God, we try to secure them for ourselves. We take this longing and turn it into an anxious attempt to make this life last forever.
So we do all sorts of things because of this ache. We deny death and chase youth. We build legacies, preserve photographs, put names on buildings, and hope something will remain. We obsess over our health. We search for ways to extend our lives or accomplish things that will preserve our memory. We even speak carefully around death, as though softer language might soften the thing itself.
Luther recognized this restlessness. In his lectures on Ecclesiastes, he describes the human heart with clarity: “The heart is a constantly yawning chasm; it wants everything, and even if it obtained everything, it would go on looking for still more” (LW 15:19).
That is the trouble with eternity written upon sinful hearts. We want more, and then more after that. We are given today but reach for tomorrow. We want to understand the whole story of our lives, but God gives us only a page. We want to hold what cannot be held and make permanent what God has made temporal. Eventually every attempt to live eternally under the sun fails. The dance ends, the grass withers, the dust scatters, and the dreams fade. The people we love die, and then we die. There is a time for everything, even that.
But there is another side to eternity written in our hearts. That longing is not only a curse from which we need to be cured. It can also lift our eyes beyond ourselves and beyond the horizon of what we can presently see. A piece of music can awaken in us a longing for something we cannot quite name. Such moments remind us that the boundaries of what we can presently see are not the boundaries of reality. They awaken in us a longing for a distant country.
Hebrews speaks of the faithful as “strangers and exiles on the earth.” People who desired “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:13, 16).
This longing for the distant country is good. It means there is a good dissatisfaction with a world in which children suffer, bodies break, minds turn against themselves, families grieve, and cemeteries fill. There is something right about refusing to say, “This is all there is.”
Of course, this longing can lead to escapism from this world or trying to get everything from it. Instead, the answer to the passing nature of life is not to despise earthly things. It is to stop demanding that earthly things become eternal.
Meals are good, but they cannot save you. Marriage is good, but your spouse cannot bear the weight of being your Messiah. Children and work are gifts, but neither can give you immortality. Creation is full of gifts, but gifts make terrible gods.
We feel eternity written upon our hearts and keep asking temporary things to satisfy an eternal hunger. They cannot. And perhaps one of the hardest truths to learn is this: Life, as good as it is, is not enough.
That is not a rejection of creation. Life is good because God made it and called it good. Death is an enemy—not the fulfillment of creation, but the wages of sin. We were not made for the grave.
The trees above my grandmother’s graveside were good. The breeze was good. The sunlight was good. Her fierce love for her sons was good. The years God gave her were good. But they were not enough. We were made for more than a few decades under the sun. We were made not merely for a longer life, but for life with God that death cannot take away.
That is why the gospel is such good news. The ache we have for eternity is not the gospel. It is a longing for something we cannot give ourselves. Our hearts can tell us that we are homesick, but they cannot show us the way home. They can protest that death is wrong, but they cannot raise the dead. I may long to know that I am forgiven, but I cannot speak that forgiveness to myself. It must come from outside of me.
God does not answer our longing by teaching us how to escape time. God enters it. The eternal Son is conceived in the womb of Mary. He hungers, sleeps, and grows tired. The one through whom all things were made takes a human heartbeat. The eternal enters our hours.
And then there comes a time for him to die. The Lord of life dies on a cross. The one who holds history in his hands becomes a footnote. The one who without beginning accepts an ending is laid in a grave.
And for one terrible Sabbath it seems that Ecclesiastes has spoken the final word: a time to die.
But then comes Sunday. The stone is rolled away. Christ rises. And suddenly the gospel tells our aching hearts something they could never have discovered for themselves: death does not get the last word. Christ walked out of the tomb. There really is more. The gospel tells us what we are aching for: resurrection, life with Christ, and a creation made new.
As my grandmother’s casket was lowered into the earth, I thought about my cousin who is buried nearby. She was born with cerebral palsy and never spoke a word in her life. Her mother loved her fiercely. And throughout her life, her mother spoke the gospel over her.
There is something about that which moves me now. My cousin never spoke a word, but salvation never depended upon her finding the right words. She could not give a testimony about what she believed or describe what she hoped for. But God had words for her.
He spoke his promises over her. He claimed her in his mercy. The hope of eternal life did not rest upon her ability to reach toward Christ, but upon Christ reaching toward her.
Standing there in that cemetery, I also remembered a young man from the first youth group I served more than 25 years ago. He struggled terribly with mental illness and took his life during his first year of college. His family was devastated. He had struggled with this life and in the end, he did not know how to go on living it.
But his final act does not get to be the only word spoken over his life. Christ had spoken another word long before that. In the waters of Holy Baptism, Christ placed his name upon him. He was claimed by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christian hope does not finally rest upon how tightly we are able to hold onto Christ. It rests upon Christ’s hold on sinners.
My cousin, who never spoke a word, was held by that mercy. That young man whose life became unbearably heavy was held by that mercy. Christ holds them both.
And this is the good news: eternity may be written upon the heart, but the promise of eternal life must be spoken into our ears. Our hearts may ache for eternity, but the ache cannot forgive our sins. For that, God must speak from outside of us: “You are forgiven.” “You are mine.” “You are baptized into Christ.” “Your life is hidden with Christ.” “This is my body, given for you.” “Christ is risen.” These are more than hints of eternity. They are promises from the Lord of eternity.
As I stood under those trees, watching my grandmother’s casket descend, I was struck by how quickly life passes. The days are long, and the years are short. A whole human life can feel enormous while you are living it and impossibly small when you stand at its end. There was a time when my grandmother was a little girl. A time when she was raising five boys. A time when those boys became men. A time when grandchildren and great-grandchildren and even great-great-grandchildren were born. A thousand ordinary days of meals, bills, arguments, birthdays. And then there we were. A time to die.
But Christ does not merely teach us how to accept that there is a time to die. He promises another time. A time to rise. A time when the dead will hear the shepherd’s voice. A time when what is sown perishable will be raised imperishable. A time when mourning will finally give way to dancing and no approaching hour will bring the music to an end.
As we wait for the resurrection, eternity remains written upon mortal hearts. And yes, that inscription hurts. It makes us restless and tempts us to grasp many things. But that ache can also become a kind of holy homesickness, lifting our eyes beyond the grave and teaching us to long for the day when death will be no more.
One day the distant country will no longer be distant. The dead will rise. Mourning will give way to dancing. And the one who entered our hours, who took our death into himself and walked out of the grave, will speak a word over all creation: “Behold I make all things knew.”
Until them, we wait, we hope, and we pray: Amen, come Lord Jesus!
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