The Longing Finally Fulfilled
“He 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. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11–13, ESV)
Out of the abundance of His own joy, beauty, and glory God has created all things. His creatures/creation all reflect, and in some sense, participate, in His glory. God has hidden himself in all the joy and beauty that He has made. We can see Him, sense and experience Him in all that is fair.
Mankind was made in the image of God as the crowning achievement of all that He had made. God created us with sensors to know Him and to recognize and enjoy all the expressions of his glory, even those glimpses found in the created order. He has placed eternity in our hearts! We long for God as we see the various manifestations of his glory all around us.
Yet, we are fallen creatures, partially blinded, and were unceremoniously escorted out of the Garden of God’s delights. Now, we cannot find out what God has done. We long for Him, for beauty, for glory; we can taste it and even glimpse it from a distance but it never fully satisfies. We long for home but we do not know the way. We have lost the map.
CS Lewis calls this longing, Sehnsucht. This German word roughly modified means “the sense of deep, inconsolable longing, yearning, the feeling of intensely missing something when we don’t even know what it is” (Jennifer Neyhart). From Till we Have Faces, “it almost hurt me … like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home … to find the place where all the beauty came from – my country, the place where I ought to have been born. The longing for home.”
We all have this longing for home, for joy, for satisfaction, for fulfillment. We try to slake this hunger with other created things; fame, wealth, physical pleasure, etc. but they never satisfy.
CS Lewis in speaking of meaning and joy of his short marriage wrote, “Are no all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who had some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year after year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.””
Later, speaking of this longing for home, Lewis wrote, “About death I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for a patria. It is the bright frontispiece which whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.”
Only God himself, his essential glory, can satisfy this longing. The glory that God has placed in the created order are hints, dim reflections, or better, foretastes of the satisfaction that we can only find in God. “Our hearts are restless, until they can rest in you.” (Augustine)
So, the preacher concludes, it is good for us to enjoy the foretastes, the hints of that glory, but not to rest in them short of the God who gave them. “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.”
So, enjoy the gifts of God that he has placed in the created order but follow the gifts to the great Giver, and find your rest in Him. “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us is we trust to them; it was not in them, in only came through them, and what came through them was longing… 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 visited.” CS Lewis. “One day, soon, we will be home. “What are hearts seek and hunger after is the overwhelming joy of homecoming and reunion with a Beloved.” (Terry Lindval)
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” (CS Lewis). Death is not the end. It is The End! The goal, the purpose, the place where our longing hearts will be satisfied. It is life, finally. It is home.The
