Imagine you knew for certain that one day something would take place that would alter forever every aspect of your life. Would you, I wonder, live in the light of that knowledge or pretend that the future event would never actually occur and act all surprised when its imminence could no longer be denied?
The reason I ask is simple – we are all in just such a situation.
We are all going to die – and the day of our death is nearer than we think – even for those of us who do manage to make it to a ripe old age.
Take me, for example. I’m just a few months short of 60 and will therefore be 80 before I know it – in no more time than has elapsed since Twitter was launched. And still more frightening perhaps, I’ll be 90 in the same number of years that have passed since the Spice Girls burst onto the scene with the release of ‘Wannabe’. Which I’m not sure is something that I really, really want!
But how do we live in the light of our inevitable death?
Recently I’ve been reading the book of Ecclesiastes, whose author famously wrote ‘Vanity of vanities! All is vanity’ and ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ to convey how transient everything in this life is and how, for the time being at least, nothing ever changes. The sun rises every morning only to set again each evening, the seasons change as predictably as they always have, and the tides come and go with monotonous regularity.
And people are born, grow old and die – after which they are soon forgotten.
It is a sobering thought that in a hundred years’ time, for most of us it will be as if we’d never lived. I couldn’t even tell you the name of my great-grandparents, let alone what they did in their lives. And so it would be foolish of me to imagine that my great-grandchildren will care very much about what I managed to achieve in my lifetime.
Because I can no more make my fleeting life permanently significant than I can alter the course of the planets that move through space like clockwork. I’m simply not that powerful—or that important.
Which leads to another question. Why on earth do we try?
The answer, I think, lies in the fact that, as the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us, God has put eternity into our hearts.[Ecclesiastes 3:11]. Our desire for significance is not, therefore, in itself wrong. On the contrary, it is God-given. The problem, though, is that we look for it in the wrong places – in ourselves, in who we are and what we’ve done, rather than in God – in who He is and what He has done.
And so we are prone to ignore God’s eternal power and divine nature that has been made plain to us by what He has created. [Romans 1:20] Instead we seek our satisfaction in relationships and experiences, in what we achieve and what we have managed to understand. But wonderful though these things undeniably are, they cannot satisfy us fully – not in the way that the Giver of all that is good can.
So then, knowing that we all will one day die, how do we live in the light of that fact?
Well, rather than spending our lives ‘chasing after the wind’ [Ecclesiastes 1:14], seeking satisfaction in what cannot possibly provide it, we need instead to recognise the transience of our lives and our relative insignificance. And we need to look instead to the One who is both eternal and of infinite worth.
Because our significance comes not from within ourselves, but from the One in whom we are placed. ‘In Christ’ we belong to the One who is of infinite significance, the One who loves us deeply, despite how superficially we think about Him, despite us imagining that God is of no importance and that this world is all there is.
And so we need to trust Jesus, even as we seek to follow Him, for all that we are not: for the salvation we cannot achieve, the righteousness we do not possess, and the significance we’ll never create for ourselves. We need to hold onto the eternal significance that we already have in Him despite the transient and, therefore, seemingly futile nature of our present lives lived ‘under the sun.’ And we need to eat and drink and find enjoyment in our toil, knowing that none of what we currently experience will last for ever, but will one day be replaced by an everlasting and perfect rest in the presence of God, where there is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. [Ecclesiastes 2:24, Psalm 16:11]
Only then will we know both the newness of life and the eternity that we all so long for, and, whilst enjoying all that we do gladly possess, discover that life is not ultimately vain at all.
Related blogs:
To read ‘Heading Home’, click here
To read ‘Luther and the war in Ukraine’, click here
To read ‘When our joy will be complete’, click here
To read ‘When Bad Things Happen’, click here
To read ‘Weeping with those who weep’, click here
To read ‘Still weeping with those who weep’, click here
To read ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’, click here
To read ‘on the FALLEN and the FELLED’, click here
To read ‘What becomes of the broken hearted? Sorrowful yet always rejoicing on Palm Sunday’, click here
To read ‘Why do bad things happen to good people? Sorrowful yet always rejoicing on Good Friday’, click here
To read ‘Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things? Rejoicing, though temporarily sorrowful, on Easter Day’, click here.
To read ‘T.S. Eliot, Jesus and the Paradox of the Christian Life’, click here
To read ‘Monsters’, click here
To read ‘On Sleeping like a Baby’, click here
To read “Hope comes from believing the promises of God”, click here
To read ‘Reflections on the death of Leonard Cohen’, click here
Some musings 