Nothing Can Satisfy Our Deepest Longing

Reading: Isaiah 29
My Verse:  "As when a hungry man dreams, and behold, he is eating
                       and awakes with his hunger not satisfied,
                    or as when a thirsty man dreams, and behold, he is drinking
                       and awakes faint, with his thirst not quenched,
                    so shall the multitude of all the nations be
                       that fight against Mount Zion" (29:8).

How this speaks to us today!  We strive and strive for that something to ease the deep longing within our souls.  Neither religion, nor cultural traditions nor ethnicity, not even family can fill that void.  Some manage, for a time to quiet that inner need with various distractions, pleasures - but it just bubbles back to the surface of our awareness.  We hunger and thirst for something that nothing on this earth can satisfy.

Solomon, considered the wisest man to have ever lived spoke to this most eloquently.  He was given the gift of wisdom but he wanted to personally experience all the world had to offer.  Because of his great wealth he did, only to realize that nothing on this earth is a substitute for You, LORD God.  His writing is filled with wisdom but with a deep pathos.  Longing, regret and even despair haunt him.  

"What does man gain by all the toil

   at which he toils under the sun?

A generation goes, and a generation comes,

   but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down,

   and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south

   and goes around to the north;

around and around goes the wind,

   and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea,

   but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

   there they flow again.

All things are full of weariness;

   a man cannot utter it;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

   nor the ear with hearing.

What has been is what will be,

   and what has been done is what will be done,

   and there is nothing new under the sun"  (Ecclesiastes 1:3-9)

His book of wisdom begins and ends with the despairing words . . . 

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity"

You,  LORD God, offer grace.

"Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you . . ." (Isaiah 30:18).

I heard this wonderful truth:  The third act of creation was that of the image of God in man and woman.  The study of human beings is the realm of the human sciences.  Our bodies can be analyzed chemically and our living processes biologically, but human behavior can only really be understood in terms of our relation to God, whose image we share.

We want so much to "know" ourselves, but that as Solomon found is only vanity.   Blaise Pascal echoes Solomon with this:

"It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the cure of all your miseries.  All your insight only leads you to the knowledge that it is not in yourselves that you will discover the true and the good.  The philosophers promised them to you, and have not been able to keep their promise . . . Your principal maladies are pride, which cuts you off from God; sensuality, which binds you to the earth; and they have done nothing but foster as least one of these maladies.  If they have given you God for your object, it has only been to pander to your pride; they made you think that you were like Him and resembled Him by your nature.  And those who have grasped the vanity of such a pretension have cast you down into the other abyss by making you believe that your nature was like that of the beasts of the field, and have led you to seek your good in lust, which is the lot of animals." 

You, LORD God, offer peace.

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world gives. . ." (John 14:27). 

Only You, LORD God can satisfy the void within. 

"He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry.  As soon as He hears it, He answers you" (Isaiah 30:19).

Like David I must admit my neediness and cry out to You, for You only are my help.

Ditat Deus - God Enriches!