If I’ve not said this before I’ll say it here now that Augustine’s Confessions 1 would definitely make the list of books I’d choose to take if I was stranded on a desert island. He would make prayers of the sort that leave me with nothing else to add other than a hearty “Amen”:
“Man is a great mystery, Lord.
You even keep count of the hairs on his head and not one of them escapes your reckoning.
Yet his hairs are more easily counted than his feelings and the emotions of his heart.” 2
Why are we restless? The condition is elsewhere depicted like this:
“But the wicked are like the tossing sea;
for it cannot be quiet,
and its waters toss up mire and dirt.”
Isaiah 57:20
I deeply appreciate the image of the “tossing sea” used in this verse as it conveys that which is always active and never at rest. No quietness. No tranquility.
The sea also points to an inability to ever be satisfied, as we see the preacher of Ecclesiastes pointing to how “all streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full” (Ecclesiastes 1:7).
The same image of restless water is used again when Jude talks about “ungodly people” as “wild waves of the sea” (Jude 17). No doubt, this ‘wildness’ points to some kind of force or, if you will, a strong turbulence characteristic of a restlessness within. Jacob said something similar about his first born son Reuben whose passions were as “turbulent as the waters”(Genesis 49:4 NIV).
Consider another admonishment from Jeremiah:
"…Look at your way in the valley;
know what you have done—
a restless young camel running here and there,
a wild donkey used to the wilderness,
in her heat sniffing the wind!
Who can restrain her lust?…"
Jeremiah 2:23-24
A place where longings in their raging intensity are never satisfied sure sound like ‘hell’ – hence the above vivid and evocative images used by scripture. Why can’t these ever find rest? The well known quote from Saint Augustine which opens the entire book could serve as our answer:
The thought of You stirs [man] so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises You,
because You have made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in You. 3
Without the Lord our maker, we’ll be drowned by (and in) our own desires.
Those who look for their happiness in him are those who belong to the “Prince of peace”. They inherit the promise of “rest”.
And unlike the restless and unstable ones, these are as firm and stable as a “tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither” (Psalm 1). They’re in no way self made and it’s not because they haven’t got any desires in them. No. They drank from a special well. Jesus said of them:
"…Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I’ll give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
John 4:13-14
Come then, friend; the Lord bids us come and drink from the well that never runs dry:
“And the Lord will guide you continually
and satisfy your desire in scorched places
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.”
Isaiah 58:11
