Why Did God Put Eternity in Man's Heart in Ecclesiastes 3:11?

     At first glance the book of Ecclesiastes might be a bit discouraging.  Like where was Solomon going with all his complaints about human life?  He was a king who had more wealth, more splendor, and more wisdom than any king then or since. So it could look a bit baffling why he said that everything is vanity of vanities.
 
     I learned when I read the Life-Study of Ecclesiastes that Solomon wrote this book after returning from falling away from God. Surely God let him go to the heights of success and pleasure and then to the depths of emptiness so he could write this book with full conviction. I found Witness Lee's explanation of the central thought of Ecclesiastes on page 2 of chapter 1 especially helpful:

Man was created by God with the highest and most noble purpose, that is, to express Him in the resemblance of Him in His life, nature, and expression. But God's enemy, Satan the devil, came in to inject himself as sin into the man created by God for His purpose.  Through this fall of man, man and all the created things that had been committed by God to his dominion were brought into the slavery of corruption, made subject to vanity (Rom. 8:20-21). Thus, the human life in the corrupted world also became a vanity, a chasing after wind. The writer Solomon had fully realized this and stressed this to the uttermost in his description. Yet he was not fully disappointed in this, but rather he instructed men that there is a way to get out of this vanity, that is, to come back to God and take God as man's everything, redemption, life, wealth, enjoyment, pleasure, and satisfaction, that man still may be used by God to fulfill His original purpose in man for the fulfillment of His eternal economy (Eccl. 12:13-14) (Lee, Witness. Life-Study of Ecclesiastes. Anaheim: Living Stream Ministry, 1995, Print).

I caught this snowflake studded web on my deck this week.

    What I see here is in every kind of human experience that Solomon lists in Ecclesiastes, he's pointing out that although you may enjoy every kind of pleasure under the sun, it cannot fully satisfy you. 

   And this Life-Study points out that it cannot satisfy you because of the way God created you. Solomon touches this in Ecclesiastes 3:11: He has made everything beautiful in its own time; also He has put eternity in their heart, yet so that man does not find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.  

My footnote on this verse references the Amplified Bible's translation of this verse which is really good!  Listen to this:  "...He has planted eternity in men's heart and mind [a divinely implanted sense of a purpose working through the ages which nothing under the sun, but only God, can satisfy],...."  This is actually the God-shaped vacuum spoken of by the famous mathematician Pascal.  Here is a short video put out by Bibles for America that talks about Solomon and this verse in Ecclesiastes: https://biblesforamerica.org/videos/the-meaning-of-life-and-mans-third-part/



Posts on the Books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, & Song of Songs

How Do You Read the Book of Proverbs?
Why Did God Put Eternity in Man's Heart in Ecclesiastes 3:11?
What Does the Imagery in the Song of Songs Portray?