- ETERNITY IN MAN’S HEART

In him was life, and that life was the light of men. (John 1:4)
I know there are many people who seem to find it rather easy to believe that God is eternal—but rather difficult to believe that God has put eternity, or everlastingness, into the hearts of men and women!
I have long insisted that if we had more courage we would preach more often on the image of God in man—and by that I do not mean that unconverted man is already saved.
But I do not hesitate to say that the only reason a man can be saved is that God has put eternity in his heart.
Man is fallen—yes! Man is lost, a sinner, and needs to be born again—yes! But God made man in His own image and He keeps the longing after eternity and a desire after everlasting life there within the heart of man.
The Holy Ghost, speaking through the psalmist in Old Testament times, caused him to testify: “from everlasting to everlasting, you are God” (Psalms 90:2 b).
If you will trace that word everlasting in the Hebrew language, you will find that it can mean “time out of mind,” or it can mean “always,” or it can mean “to the vanishing point.” It can also mean “to the beginningless past.”
From everlasting to everlasting, God is God!
From the beginningless past to the endless future, God is God!
That is what the Holy Ghost says about the person and the eternal nature of God.
Now, if you have one of those mousetrap minds—open and shut—you will casually remark: “It is all quite simple—that is the attribute of God called eternity. You will find it in the footnote on page 71 in So and So’s Systematic Theology. Now, let’s go out and have a soda.”
Thus you will dismiss it and leave it, or tuck it away in your memory among the unused items in the attic of your soul.
But brother, if you will let it live and the Holy Ghost is allowed to bring His radiance to it, there can be great meaning; for we are between the everlasting vanishing point of a forgotten yesterday and the equally everlasting vanishing point of an unborn tomorrow!
His own everlastingness
We take it for granted and we are not surprised at all about the eternal nature of God but the greater wonder is that God has seen fit to put His own everlastingness within the hearts of men and women.
This is really the amazing thought set down for us in Ecclesiastes 3:11 —that God has made everything beautiful in His time and He has “set the world in their hearts” (KJV).
The word world used there is exactly the same word used by the Holy Ghost when He said everlasting. He said the nature and person of God is everlasting and then He says that within the heart of the creature named man, and whom God made in His own image, there resides this quality of everlastingness!
One translation of this passage reads: “God hath put eternity into man’s mind.” That is it—with a period!
It is as though God is indeed saying that He has put time out of mind into the heart of a man; that He has put the “everlasting beginningless always” into the heart of a man. It says that God has put in the heart of a man “an affinity for everlastingness.”
Specialists are trying to give many reasons and explanations for the condition of mankind and I have no hesitation in speaking up about the troubled state in which men and women flounder.
I believe that this is the truth about our troubles and our problems: We are disturbed because God has put everlastingness in our hearts. He has put something within men and women that demands God and heaven—and yet we are too blind and sinful to find Him or even to look for Him!
In a real sense, God has spoiled man by giving him this touch of eternity in his soul. If we were of the earth only and we belonged to the beasts, we would never be disturbed. But man cannot agree to lie down with the beast and be no more.
What, then, is the matter with man? Why does he roam and fret and fight, and like the lion in the cage, pace back and forth and roar to the heavens before he dies?
The beasts in the fields do not have any wars. The cattle in the pastures do not have any gambling dens or whorehouses. Why is it that only man among the creatures plots and schemes to form such a device as “Murder, Incorporated”?
When we say that man lives a beastly life we are insulting the beast and lying about the man! Sin is not beastly—it is devilish and the beasts of the forest are not bothered with the devil.Only people—men and women—have a rough time with the devil and the reason is plain: God has put the appreciation of everlastingness in their hearts. He has made them in His own image. He has put an inner longing for immortality in their hearts.
Once more I repeat: our preaching and our teaching do not emphasize strongly enough that God made man in His own image. The modernists have scared us out. The Christian church is in need of many more men with backbone and intestinal fortitude—men who are not scared and cowering all the time.
Men and women need to be told plainly, and again and again, why they are disturbed and why they are upset. They need to be told why they are lost and that if they will not repent they will certainly perish. Doctors and counselors will tell troubled men and women that their problems are psychological, but it is something deeper within the human being that troubles and upsets—it is the longing after eternity!
I wrote in an article some time ago that God made man in His own image and that sin has marred the soul of man and ruined it. Then I continued, saying that when a man lifts his heart to God and prays he is doing the most natural thing in the world because God made him originally to do that very thing.
Well, some tough-minded, critical lady in an eastern state read that and fired off a sharp complaint against me to the president of The Christian and Missionary Alliance.
In charging that I was a liberal, a modernist, a heretic and a deviant in my theology, she asked for my dismissal as editor with the comment: ”Just imagine, saying that prayer is a natural thing!”
I believe that some day when we both get to heaven she is going to look for one certain little editor so that she can apologize with a red face for her ignorance down here about the ways of God with men and women.
What God intended
This is exactly the fact, ladies and gentlemen: God made you with eternity in your hearts, so that when you turn your face toward the Eternal One and ask, “God have mercy on me, a sinner,” and then go on to say, “Our Father in heaven,” you are finally being what God intended you to be in the first place!
But when you look down at the earth like a beast, you are not being natural—you are being sinful. When you refuse to call on God through Jesus Christ, you are not doing the natural thing—you are doing the diseased thing!
My brethren, remember that sin is to human nature what a cancer is to the human body. When a man has been delivered from a cancerous growth in his body and is able to breathe and live without pain and knows that he is free—he is doing the natural thing.
So, too, when a redeemed sinner says, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want,” he is doing that which goes back to the garden of Eden, to the loins of Adam; yes, farther back than that to the New Adam, Jesus Christ our Lord.
I know that for sure—and I know that I am not a liberal or modernist; neither am I a fanatic nor a heretic nor a dreamer. I am just an ordinary preacher exalting God and His Christ and I think it is no compliment to anyone who cannot see that!
Yes, God has put a longing after immortality in our hearts. That is what the spirit of man wants—and he dies of suffocation when he does not get it.
I want to illustrate that. I have read that they used to take birds down into the coal mines in order to detect the presence of dangerous gases. They probably do everything by machines and devices now, but there was a time when they would take birds in their cages and leave them in any areas where it was suspected that poisonous gases might be present.
The mine owners had determined that certain birds would react quickly to the dangerous gas. If there was a high concentration of the poisonous gas, the bird would quickly fall down and die in the bottom of his cage.
Now, plainly that was a bird created by God, a miracle in feathers, a wonder with wings, created and intended to soar over the green meadows and look into the shining sun and breathe the sweet air of the heavens. But take him down into the depths of an underground mine where there is blackdamp and pollution and he quickly dies of suffocation.
You can apply that to the soul of a man. God created man a living soul and intended him to rise and mount into the eternities and live with God. The Creator made us to look back on the everlasting vanishing point that was and then on into the eternal vanishing point that will be, feeling no age and not counting birthdays, but like God, living in God!
But sin has ruined us. We have listened to that serpent, the devil. We have gone down into the isolated, dark, poison-infested pockets of the world, and men are dying everywhere of spiritual suffocation. You see them and you recognize their condition.
Some of us spent a week in Dixon, Illinois, attending the sessions of our annual district conference. I noticed one older couple staying in the hotel there. I presume they were in their late seventies. They were well dressed and they had a big car, but aging had shriveled them up. Actually, they were mean-looking and they talked to each other as if they were both in deep pain. They both looked mean and whipped as though life had done them in. Not a trace of sunshine, no fragrance and no friendliness: just two tired, weary, frustrated old people, apparently too mean to die and too old and dried up to live. I sensed they walked waiting for the undertaker!
They were just an example—the world is full of them. Hopeless and helpless human beings: some in society, in big homes and big cars. Some are in jails, in hospitals, in asylums. They make me think again of the poor birds that God made to sing and soar but are now being smothered to death in the bowels of the earth.
That is the picture of mankind. The feverish activity is one sign of what is wrong with us. Sin has plunged us into the depths and so marked us with mortality that we have become brother to the clay. We call the worm our sister and death our brother—but God never meant it to be so!
God made man upright, saying, “Now let us make man in our own image!” And in the image of God made He him and gave him dominion!
But man has sinned—and all that he has left is an appreciation of the divine and a hidden wish that he might have the eternal.
Man has not found the answer
That is the point of his vital need and that is the craving that drives him and pulls him. But he has not found the answer. He does not have that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us. Sad indeed that man in his quest can only complain that everything he finds and tries is always counterfeit!
Now, some of you are thinking that this sermon sounds like it is developing in the minor key. But I offer no apology and I make no correction. You need never come back to hear me preach again if you think I am wrong—but take this from me: there is nothing being advertised in the catalogs, being sung about or pushed over the radio, appeals from Wall Street or Hollywood or London or Singapore or Rome, not a thing in the whole world that will not turn out to be a coiled serpent in your boot if Jesus Christ does not get into it!
You know that I preached some time ago in Dr. A.B. Simpson’s old tabernacle church at Times Square in New York City. The pastor was a learned brother with a delightful southern drawl.
After I had preached several days, we were walking together in the midst of those hurrying throngs when he turned to me and said, “Brother Tozer, I think I have figured you out.”
I asked him what he had discovered.
“I believe I have found your basic spiritual philosophy,” he said. “I think it boils down to this: `Everything is wrong until Jesus sets it right!’.”
I replied, “Thank you, brother. That is it. I would say you have summed it up.”
I had not thought about it in that way but I think he had it right, and that is where I stand, ladies and gentlemen. Everything is wrong until Jesus sets it right.
I was also asked to preach at a conference and perhaps I was wrong to go because the emphasis there is often upon fun and jokes and quips and the musicians play everything from a handsaw to a dried-up gourd. It is all very funny and something like Hollywood, I suppose.
The pastor there has since told me that after I left them his wife said to him, “Honey, after listening to Dr. Tozer, can it be true that there isn’t anything good in the world?”
Well, I know she had a Bible in her house and I would consider that foolish question number 5,821 for a preacher’s wife to ask.
Certainly there is nothing good. There is none that doeth good, no not one. Everything is wrong until Jesus sets it right. We all know that there are plenty of things that are considered good on the human level—but there is nothing that is divinely good until it bears the imprint of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Marks of the curse
There are three very distinct marks of the ancient curse resting upon everything in this world. First, everything is recent. Second, everything is temporal. Third, everything is transient.
As opposed to eternity, everything that man is proud of—his automatic electrical gadgets, his high-powered automobiles, his ability to go flying through the skies—all are recent. The animal man with his busy brain says, “These are the most wonderful things in the world!”
But his inner being would cry out if he would let it. ”No, no! That is not the answer. That is something that belongs to the brain and to the world—but my heart is still crying for everlastingness!”
Temporal and transient things surround us—but their curse is that they belong to us only for a brief day. The curse is that man settles down in contentment, completely satisfied with the gadgets and the services which assure him every creature comfort as long as he lives.
Brother, I remind you of that day when one of those wonderful and handsome and modern vehicles will pull up to your front door. Two gray-faced men will get out with a basket and they will lug you out—away from your radio and television and electric stoves and refrigerators and sweepers and massagers—they will lug you out and someone will prepare for your funeral.
It is not the brain, it is not our human cleverness, it is not our modern progress that is going to win. If this is our pride and our desire and our joy, it is better never to have been born.
I suppose it may be more comfortable to go to hell in a Cadillac, or to pride your animal nature on food cooked in an automatic oven, but it is hell, nevertheless, when you get there.
I know I am not wrong when I warn you that your poor heart in which God has placed appreciation for everlastingness will not accept electrical gadgets and human progress in lieu of eternal life. Something inside of you is too big for that, too awesome for that, too wonderful for that! God has set the quality of everlastingness in our hearts.
So, all around us are the marks of the temporal, the transient.
I am sure you have watched a small child viewing a colorful circus parade. The great wagons, the clowns, the elephants, the lions and the tigers, the bands, the costumes, the spangles. Each thing excites the child—the eyes pop out and there are screams of delight. But it is passing. It is temporary. It is transient. The parade goes on down to the railroad station into its train and disappears.
And so it is with everything that the world has to offer us. Some kind of a pretty trinket. Some kind of a pleasing rattle to shake. Some kind of a pacifier for the scene in which we live.
When I was small, the child’s pacifier was a great thing, and I suppose it still is. In my boyhood, back in the country, the pacifier never came from a store. It was a “sugar nipple”—a little cloth affair filled with sugar and then sewed up on the end. When the baby would start to squall, they just stuck this thing in his mouth—and the little fellow would stop squalling, for he was satisfied, temporarily.
I just want to make the observation that many of the preachers in our day are adept with the old-fashioned custom of the pacifier, the sugar nipple. They think it will result in more people coming to their churches. They think it will result in bigger offerings. They think that they will be more likely to be successful.
If there has to be some kind of compromise or pacifier to be crowded out, then they can go right on past as far as I am concerned.
God Almighty never said, “Young fellow, get yourself a pocketful of sugar nipples and go out and feed them to the carnal public.”
What He did say was, “Preach My Word—and I will put My words in your mouth, and do not be afraid of them because if you are afraid of them I will confound you before them! But if you will be fearless I will stand with you and I will make your neck like brass!”
Consider if you will, this little old wrinkled neck of mine, with a size 15 collar. You would think that if someone bumped my head, it would come off.
But, brother, it is like brass. God Almighty said, “I will make it like brass!”
Now, we are not stopping on that note.
Dare to believe and claim
Have you dared to believe and claim this revelation from John that Jesus Christ, The Word, was with God and was God?
Have you dared to confess that great something within you that appreciates everlastingness and will not be satisfied without it?
What is it you have always really wanted?
It is not religion. You can trace that back—it is recent. It is not philosophy. It is not civilization. These you can trace back. They are recent and temporary.
We have been betrayed by every prospect that man creates.
But when we know that we are perishing, ready to perish, God’s Holy Spirit is faithful, and He whispers, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
There is eternity, and eternity was made flesh and walked among us, and whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.
The Eternal Word, the Eternal Son came to redeem us. Do you ever think as I do of the mystery of divine love and grace—how He walked around the carpenter’s shop on little, rubbery legs?
Oh, a baby is a harmless thing and captures you more quickly than a regiment of soldiers. If you had seen eternity walking around on baby, rubbery legs, tumbling and falling flat among the shavings, you would have run and picked Him up and dusted Him off, whispering “It doesn’t hurt. Be a big boy!” He would have smiled, shaking away a tear, and toddled off for another tumble.
That was eternity walking in flesh. It was God Almighty come to live among us to redeem us and to save us from the recent and the temporal and the transient—and to give us eternity!
Every one of us who will receive Him has that eternal life which was with the Father and was given unto men.
How wonderful that a loving God gives us this—and yet how terrible that we refuse and reject, and have to be whipped into heaven with the thongs of hell!
Oh, God offers us true Light! The sin in our nature has ruined us but He only asks that we turn to Jesus Christ and confess: “Lord Jesus, I believe You. I believe that You are the Eternal Word and that in You I have the everlastingness that is equal to God’s everlastingness—that eternal life which was with the Father!”