God is from everlasting to everlasting. He sets eternity in the hearts of men (Ecc. 3.11), but our glimpse of eternity and our sense of God is often obscured by the every day realities of our lives.

That God set eternity into the hearts of men should tell us something. It should urge us to look beyond ourselves, to look to God for His purpose in our lives. Yet we are often given to walking with our heads down, driven with blinders on chasing after self-fulfillment or prone to obsessive self-reflection with eyes turned inward. We have a hard time seeing past our own noses, much less focusing on an eternal God  We have a hard time, wherever our gazes are set, letting go of self-direction.

The Bible calls that sin.

Take the morality out of sin, and sin is simply missing the mark. The mark is God, His character and His purpose. When our focus is on other things, when we are pursuing other things to the exclusion of God, we are missing the mark. We are missing the purpose of God in our lives.

God, of course, is the very reason for our existence.

We think and we act as if we are the center of the universe. We are the center of our own universes, but our own universes are provincial, insular and narrow-minded, limited by our finite existence and this temporal world.

We toil in mundane difficulty, but we have eternal potential just over our horizon.  

Lift your eyes to the hills! Look to the mountains! Stretch your gaze to the heavens! Consider the greatness of God who contains the infinitely expanding universe in His being. Consider that God has set eternity in your heart, and contemplate His purpose for your life.

The purpose for your life only begins with you. It begins with the fact that God made you. It begins with the raw material that God has built into you. That substance is made in God’s likeness and in His image, and it is intended to reflect him and his character.

From everlasting to everlasting, God is, was and always will be. He is unchanging. His character, His promise, His very being is from everlasting to everlasting; it is the same yesterday, today and forever.

If we do not accurately reflect that unchanging character of God in our lives, we miss the mark. We sin. And it doesn’t take me to tell you that all men have fallen short of that mark. To the extent that we are self absorbed and self-directed, we fail to reflect the character of God, and we sin, we miss the mark we fail to fulfill the purpose for which God made us.

Not that we could possibly hit the mark!

But God stooped low by entering this temporal world in the form of one is us, and by consistent with His everlasting character displayed in the person of Jesus Christ, he made a way for us to align with Him. He humbled Himself to the depth of the cross and was obedient unto death so that when He rose from the abyss of death, He lifted humanity on His shoulders so that we can be where God is.

By the death and resurrection of Jesus, we who enter into that death by accepting what He has done, allowing Him to take His rightful place in our hearts and to have command of our wills, and confessing Him as our testimony, we may be born again, not of this temporal world, but of the very nature and Spirit of God.

God desires us to be His temple where He is pleased to dwell in us, ever in communion with our spirit, renewing our minds and conforming our hearts to the very image of God. Thereby, we begin to hit the mark that God intends for us. We begin to become like Him, and he begins to author and perfect us in faith.

From everlasting to everlasting becomes our destiny which God intended for us before the foundation of the world. God set eternity in our hearts so that we would aim at eternity. Not that it is attainable by us, but God has made eternity our destination. Our purpose is to accept the way God has made for us to enter into that narrow gate and fulfill that purpose.