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Some of the seeds of things I think about today were planted many years ago. I was an English Literature major at Cornell College, a small liberal arts college in eastern Iowa. I loved the academic and intellectual pursuit. I still do, and I came to faith in that setting.

I distinctly remember a thought that struck me one day while reading the sonnets of Shakespeare in an English literature class. The great writers time and again wrote about the inevitability of death and a longing for immortality. The next thought was this:

Why do people have this longing, this hope against hope, for eternity?

Many Shakespearean sonnets, other great writings, and art are preoccupied with the inevitability of death in tension with the desire for eternal life. Some of it is morose, and some of it is inspiring, if not fanciful; but many great artists, like Shakespeare, settle for posterity and legacy though the longing for eternity compels them.

All the writers who ever wrote are dead today. They writers do not around to appreciate their posterity ad legacy, yet that desire to “live on” inspired them to write. They lie in the cold, dank ground, without feeling, and without sense. Their life, creativity, and longing for eternity have turned into the dust in which their brittle bones have settled.

Though they have returned to dust, the works of great writers live on today in the hearts and minds of each generation of living readers who will also, in turn, die. What do these great works profit those writers? Are they not meaningless to them now? Why do we, then, find any meaning in them?

We see the angst and the tension of the knowledge of the certainty of death coupled with the desire for eternity in Ecclesiastes. The following verses from this book focus on the inevitability of death:

“Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: as one dies so dies the other.” (Ecc. 3:19)

“[A]ll come from the dust, and to dust all return.” (Ecc. 3:20)

“As a man comes, so he departs, and what does he gain, since he toils for the wind?” (Ecc. 5:16)

“A man may have a hundred children and live many years; yet no matter how long he lives, if he cannot enjoy his prosperity and does not receive proper burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. It comes without meaning, it departs in darkness, and in darkness its name is shrouded. Though it never saw the sun or knew anything, it has more rest than does that man—  even if he lives a thousand years twice over but fails to enjoy his prosperity. Do not all go to the same place?” (Ecc. 6:3-6)

“Do not all go to the same place?”

The book of Ecclesiastes that was written thousands of years before Shakespeare penned a sonnet observed, even then, that nothing is new under the sun. (Ecc. 1:9) The realization of the inevitability of death and the longing to escape death’s grasp is not an Enlightenment novelty.

It is the primal religious urging recognized in the caveman long before the book of Ecclesiastes – or any book – was written. Yet through the millennia of tension between the longing and the inevitability of death, modern humans have still not given up on the longing or the search for meaning, which grows out of the same longing. In the clutches of the stark and barren reality of death, we grope for the meaning we can reach as long as we have breath:

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“Anyone who is among the living has hope – even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!” (Ecc. 9:4)

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The author of Ecclesiastes concludes that we should make the most of what we have while we have it:

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“Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.” (Ecc. 9:9)

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This seems to be similar to the idea of Shakespeare: if we cannot have eternity, we should strive for whatever posterity and legacy we can achieve. If we can’t have eternal life, we should make the best of this temporal life we can make: eat, drink, and be merry!

That is a common sentiment today. It is the impetus of TGIF and the party culture. Some of us strive for momentary pleasure, while others seek to live on in their work. Neither purpose in living makes much difference at the end of a life – we all go to the same place.

We see in the history of humankind a continual striving for great things motivated by the uncomfortable knowledge that death is inevitable. In many of the great writers and other artists we see an almost desperate effort to attain the unattainable that is exhibited in the “consolation prize” of their posterity.

While longing for immortality in the face of the painful knowing that every life ends with death, and wanting to believe in immortality, they settle for a legacy left to others in the end. Or maybe the legacy isn’t the prize. Maybe the prize is in the striving, the creating, in the exercise of human capabilities while they can be exercised.

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“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.” (Ecc. 9:10)

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Regardless of the reason behind the way we live our lives, why are so desperate for meaning in our lives to begin with? Why do we even think about eternal life? Why do we pine for it when “all we are is dust in the wind” as the popular song goes?

How is it that we have any sense of eternity to begin with?

Have you ever wondered about that?

All we know is death and decay. People live and people die. Our pets die. Plants die. Gardens go to seed, houses fall apart, and civilizations collapse into the dust over time. We sing, “Nothing last forever but the earth and sky,” but even the universe will inevitably succumb to heat death.

How is it, then, that we understand the notion of eternity at all?

We not only grasp the idea of eternity, we have been driven by it since the first humans populated the earth through modern times! We have not lost the longing and desire for living on in all the millennia of human history from the beginning until now.

Even in the face of the seeming impossibility of it, people are obsessed with the thought that there is something beyond death. If death was all there is, how and why do we have any sense that there is (or may be) something other than or beyond death?

If eternal life is not reality, why would we have any sense of it?

If there was no such thing as eternity, why would it even cross our minds to consider it? By what measure could we even fathom an idea like eternal life? I believe the answer lies in this verse:

“[God] set eternity in the hearts of men.”

(Ecc. 3:11) I believe that we have a sense of eternity because God exists and God “put eternity into our hearts.”. He created us in His image, and part of that stamp of God on us is a sense of eternity. We long for it because we are made for God and for eternity.

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We don’t have much scientific evidence of life after death, but we do have some. The phenomena of near death experiences (NDE’s) do not necessarily prove that God exists, and they don’t prove (as in a mathematical formula) that humans live on after this life. NDE’s do, however, provide some evidence that the death of our physical body is not the end of us.

NDE’s have only been studied with scientific regimen for 50 years or so. If you are interested in knowing more about NDE’s, I have written about them quite a bit. You can explore what I have written here. I have referenced and linked to people and resources that you can research further if you want to go deeper than I have gone.