Eternity in Their Hearts
The old hippie poem went like this:
Ashes to ashes,
Dust to dust,
If the cigarettes don’t kill us,
The fall-out must.
The fall-out was the radiation left by the atomic bombs.
The hippies of the 1960s felt doomed to be killed by something in their environment, eventually. I suppose the jungle man of the day could have said, “If the pythons don’t kill us, the lightening must.”
An astronaut now could say, “If the take off doesn’t kill us, the re-entry must.”
There’s always something volatile in the environment. For example, a farmer was working in his chicken house, fell from his ladder, and stabbed himself to death with his screwdriver in his hand. A realtor was out eating with his wife to celebrate a big sale of property. She choked on a bite of steak…and died. Two brothers had the same off day from work. One was trying to learn the ropes of operating a motorcycle and accidently made it go forward instead of stopping at the highway; he ran in front of a car and was killed.
We may feel that we are walking on eggshells here. Our lives seem so fragile.
Obviously, we cannot claim to be masters of our fate. That was why it was so unusual when the Evangelism Explosion team heard these unusual words from someone on their outreach recently; a young man refused their gospel witness to him and stated that he was not concerned about a future after this life. He said that he has his heaven or hell here on earth.
No, dear friend. This is not heaven or hell; one of them will be next for everyone.
And we all have a sense of knowing this from the way that God has wired us. Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from the beginning to end.” (NIV)
So, if we encounter such a response as the one above, we can tell the speaker that we do not believe him. There is too much evidence against such a stance. A book by Don Richardson, Eternity in Their Hearts, does a thorough job giving examples of people from many cultures showing that they know that there is something more than what this life offers.
This is the day to take advantage of God’s offer to know Him personally. It is through Jesus. Peter told us there is no other name under heaven whereby we must be saved (Acts 4:12). Paul yearned, “…that I may know Him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings” and warned the Athenian philosophers that “The times of this ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” (Philippians 3:10, Acts 17: 30-31). If we do not have that same yearning, it’s not too late to ask God for it.