Time And Eternity
Man that is born of a woman is of few days . . . his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass.
Job 14:1, 5
Life is like a shadow, like a fleeting cloud moving across the face of the sun. David said, “We are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers” (1 Chronicles 29:15). The world is not our permanent home; it is only temporary. David went on to declare that “our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.”
When English patriot Sir William Russell went to the scaffold in 1683, he took his watch out of his pocket and handed it to the physician who attended him in his death. “Would you kindly take my timepiece?” he asked. “I have no use for it. I am now dealing with eternity.”
For every one of us time is slipping away.
I had a young friend who went for a ride one day with a friend of his, never dreaming it would be his last ride on earth. He swerved to avoid hitting a car, ran into another car, and was thrown from his vehicle and killed. The newspapers are daily filled with stories of the death of people by accident or by assassination or by war. Those people did not know when they got out of bed that they were beginning their last day on earth.
How different would today be if you knew it would be your last one on earth before meeting God face-to-face? We should strive to live every day as if it was our last, for one day it will be!
The Bible teaches that God knows the exact moment when each man is to die (Job 14:5). There are appointed bounds beyond which we cannot pass. And I am convinced that when a man is prepared to die, he is also prepared to live. The primary goal in life, therefore, should be to prepare for death. Everything else is secondary.
Our Father and our God, when my time on this earth is finished, please draw me safely into Your heavenly home. I pray that You will take me into Your presence when You are ready for me to go.
Help me to be ready for that time. If my work on earth is not yet finished, then please give me the spiritual strength to continue. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).