“I don’t like timing games!”
My youngest daughter was famous for uttering those words, time and again, whenever someone suggested playing a game that had a countdown. She simply didn’t like the mounting pressure of opportunity coming to an abrupt halt.
This pandemic has produced a variety of emotions, but, I would content, the fear of death and the afterlife is the most prominent. Coronavirus has reminded humanity worldwide that we are in the midst of a personal countdown to the appointed day of our physical death, and eternal existence either:
– in the presence of our Savior, Christ Jesus (Rev. 21:3)
– or receiving retribution for not obeying the gospel of our Lord Jesus: eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power (2 Thess. 1:8-9).
The unbelieving world would never acknowledge the truth that God is sovereign and has “written the days that were ordained for each person, when as yet there was not one of them” (Ps. 139:16).
They may vehemently deny that fact, but it is that reality producing their fear, and the mercy of God providing a reminder that “it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27).
Ecclesiastes 3:11 states,
“[God] 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.”
Alexander MacLaren wrote the following in regards to this passage,
What a madness it is to go on, as if either I were to continue for ever among the shows of time, or when I leave them all, to die wholly and be done with altogether!’
That eternity which is set in our hearts is not merely the thought of ever-during being, or of an everlasting order of things to which we are in some way related. But there are connected with it other ideas besides those of mere duration.
Knowing what perfection is, they turn to limited natures and created hearts for their rest. Having the haunting thought of an absolute goodness, a perfect wisdom, an endless love, an eternal life – they try to find the being that corresponds to their thought here on earth, and so they are plagued with endless disappointment.
My brother! God has put eternity in your heart. Not only will you live for ever, but also in your present life you have a consciousness of that eternal and infinite and all-sufficient Being that lives above. You have need of Him, and whether you know it or not, the vines of your spirits, like some climbing plant not fostered by a careful hand but growing wild, are feeling out into the vacancy in order to grasp the stay which they need for their fruit and their strength.
By the make of our spirits, by the possibilities that dawn dim before us, by the thoughts ‘whose very sweetness yield proof that they were born for immortality,’ – by all these and a thousand other signs and facts in every human life we say, ‘God has set eternity in their hearts!’
“God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood – to be received by faith” (Rom. 3:25)
Therefore, as Alistair Begg notes in his book, Name Above All Names,
“Christians have a story unlike any other story.
Islam has only scales, the good outweighing the bad. Hinduism, at best, hopes for multiple reincarnations. Zen Buddhism has no real god at all. But we have this amazing story of Christ for which so many believers have been willing to be marginalized, persecuted, and even killed.”
It is the Gospel for which the unbelieving world is frantically searching, amidst their personal countdown to a meeting with their Maker: a Creator who is “patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (2 Pet. 3:9)
