The Threshing Floor

¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. –Ecclesiastes 3:11

Time is an odd thing for a Christian. For a Christian he knows that God is eternal and we are his image. For the Christian he feels a certain disparity in his existence and is not sure why. It is almost as if we are in conflict with time itself. Why is it that we have difficulty with death and age? Should not have we become understanding of it by now? Why is it that the death of a loved one strikes us in a way to take us out of our normal regimented sense of being? These are the deep struggles of a creature that is not meant to be in time. There is a weight there. There is a conflict against time, which refuses to be anything but fleeting.

The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that God has injected eternity deep in our hearts. What torture! What torment for an eternal being to be suffocating in time. For in this we see that we are created for more than a handful of years that we have on earth. C.S. Lewis, in The Weight of Glory dares to whisper about eternity:

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, … I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both … The Weight of Glory, Lewis.

Lewis tells us that we are even so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it.

“How he’s grown!” we exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water.”

Isn’t it incredible how his great mind covers such a vast topic and yet translates it into ordinary language? We constantly wrestle with the very reality of living in a world in which we do not belong. Not just morally or physically, but even temporally we do not fit into this skin. Maybe the timeless is where we belong. Maybe time is not relative, ala Einstein, but systemically foreign. Therefore we desire to rush it when we long for it to be tomorrow yet beg it to slow when we have a portion of peace and pleasure. How irrational to say that there is “so little time?” No matter how we decide to package it, time is fixed. Time is neither fleeting, slow to pass, or money. Time denies the leashes that we try to put it in but perhaps we weren’t meant to be under the tyranny of the temporal after all. How immense the fall that even the soul cries out against the rising and setting of the sun?

But there is a bridge to the place where we do not know. Eternity is the bread we hunger for. Yet there is no access. There is something that brings us nigh and Lewis hits it on the nose…

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; 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 country we have never yet visited … . Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies . . - C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

We can become participants of the celebration of eternity in worship. In worship we become architects into the vastness of God. When we worship there is something much more than the construction of notes and words but there is a bridge built to the place where our skin feels at home…in eternity. As strange as it may be for the fish to be awed by the wetness of water, it would be clearly comprehensible if it were to one day return to land from which it came. As we continue to wrestle with time, we can bridge the gap to eternity in worship.

He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Yet when we worship we let down our hands and simply praise him for what he has done from beginning to end. Strangely in that submission we find that the eternity in our hearts has found a container vast enough to hold us for a while. In our earthly worship we have a lifeline.

But isn’t that what God desired all along for tormented sinners? Not to comprehend but to submit to the God who refuses to let us be crushed under the weight of time for long. So much that the timeless, eternal God stepped into this temporal world with all of its transgressions, so to pull us back on land.

“My heart is fixed, eternal God,
Fixed on Thee, fixed on Thee;
And my immortal choice is made,
Christ for me, Christ for me;”