What is in Your Heart? (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

This sermon was preached on 7/4/2013

The words of Solomon in verses 1-8 are well-known to many people because they were turned into a folk song called Turn, Turn, Turn, which became popular in the 1960s and has been sung by many people since then. The folk song changes the last line because the singer wants to stress that peace from his perspective has not yet happened. Even those who have not heard the song will have heard some of the lines from Ecclesiastes used as proverbs in everyday speech. As we read the verses, no doubt we realised that at a basic level the author is saying that life is full of variety. But that is not all that he is saying.

Solomon wrote this book for a sceptical audience. His reign had been a very prosperous one, but all his wisdom could not change the circumstances he writes about here. So he wrote this book to give people a definite understanding of life. That understanding is summarised in the epilogue at the end of the book: ‘The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether good or evil’ (12:13-14). So when we read the contents of chapter 3, we should bear in mind what the author wants us to do – he wants us to fear God and keep his commandments and to remember that there will be a day of judgement.

What kind of words did the author use? Again the epilogue tells us. The author ‘sought to find words of delight’, and even the fact that his words are sung today indicate that they appeal to people. But they are more than words of delight, they are also ‘words of truth’ written by an upright man who had no wish to deceive his readers (12:10). It is important also to realise that behind the author’s words is God who is described in 12:11 as the Shepherd who guided Solomon to write these words, words that once they are heard will stick in the memory (12:11).

Solomon comments on the various ‘times’ by saying three things in verse 11: ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.’ The three things are: (1) God has made everything beautiful; (2) God has put eternity in our hearts; and (3) God has not told us everything. Or, as I have used in the headings, we have (1) consolation, (2) certainty and (3) challenge. So I want us to think about each of these issues briefly.

The consolation of God

We have already noticed that there is a great deal of variety in the several ‘times’ mentioned in verses 1-8. The variety inevitably means that we will find life to be difficult and even contradictory. With this background, I want you to recall how God described himself in 12:11. He is the Shepherd, and as the Shepherd his role is to go and find lost sheep wherever they are, whether or not they are experiencing pleasant times or if they are going through awful times. So what kind of Shepherd do we need?

Surely, we need a sovereign Shepherd, one who knows where we are at any time and who has the authority to do something about it. We can think about the sovereignty of God from different perspectives. Frequently we focus on it when we think of what he decided to do with and in the universe that he was to create. It is important to think about that aspect of divine sovereignty, but we should also think about his present sovereignty as he rules over every location in the universe. And he can see us where we are, whatever the circumstances.

Yet as we look at the ‘times’ in which we might be in, we also realise that we need a sensitive Shepherd, one who will care about us, especially in our difficult circumstances. We need a Shepherd who knows what it is to weep and mourn as well as help us in our happier times. Obviously we need a Shepherd who cares and who will act tenderly towards us, and God does so.

Of course, we also need a Shepherd who is skilful, and indeed verse 11 indicates that God is because he is able to make all our ‘times’ beautiful. As we have observed, many of those ‘times’ are tragic and seem beyond recovery. We may think that nothing beneficial can come out of those situations, yet this Shepherd can turn the ugliest circumstance into something of beauty. This is an Old Testament equivalent of what Paul says in Romans 8:28 about God being able to work everything together for good concerning those who love God.

And in addition we need a Shepherd who can actually deal with the root of all the problems that the author describes in this book, and the root is sin. Ecclesiastes does not tell us how the Shepherd will deal with the root but we know how he did. The Good Shepherd we know is Jesus and he dealt with sin when he suffered on the cross. Because he did so, he can also function as the skilful, sensitive, sovereign Shepherd. And that is the consolation offered to us as we live in a sceptical world that suspects that nothing can be done about all the problems.

The certainty

We can see from verse 11 that God gives a particular blessing to each person and that blessing is an awareness of eternity. Some translations give other renderings, but the word is usually translated as eternity. Of course, the aspect of eternity that we have is the eternity ahead. We cannot sense anything about the past eternity because we did not exist in it. But we have an awareness that we will exist in the future.

The ability to think about the eternity to come is part of our dignity as humans made in the image of God. Your neighbour’s cat does not think of eternity. The dolphins, the creatures that some scientists think are the most intelligent, have never thought of eternity. But we, because we are the image-bearers of God, are able to imitate him and consider what is ahead in eternity. We should never minimise our dignity of being created in the image of God by refusing to think about our eternal future. 

In addition, we are aware, and cannot remove this awareness from ourselves, that eternity is our destiny. Despite the attempts of countless individuals to explain it away, people still want to believe in an after-life. Even although the Bible is ignored, people still look ahead to some form of existence after death. Their opinions, no matter how strange, indicate that eternity is written in their hearts. God has put it there and we cannot get rid of it.

Moreover, this awareness of eternity creates for us our greatest dilemma. Since we know we are going to exist there, we want to find out some details concerning it. Yet we cannot. Instead we have to depend upon God telling us what eternity will be like. And he has done so, in the Bible. In its pages he has provided all that we need to know about eternity.

Because of that information in the Bible, eternity becomes for us either our greatest delight or our greatest dread. It is our greatest possible delight because we can spend eternity in the perfect new universe that God will create. But it can be our greatest dread because we know that we could spend eternity in hell, the place of endless punishment. The fact is, every one of us at this moment is conscious that we are going to live forever, and that fact either fills us with delight or with dread.

Our place in eternity depends on the Shepherd we thought about earlier. Eternity is his space which he has chosen to share to some extent with his creatures. We can share it with him or we can exist in it without his blessings and experiencing his judgment. Eternity should be our chief concern.

The challenge

What is the challenge for us? The first aspect is to accept our ignorance, particularly in that we cannot understand at present what God is doing with our ‘times’. The one thing that we do know about them all is that they will have consequences in eternity.

The second aspect of the challenge is to spend our lives living for God, for the Shepherd, for Jesus. Doing so will make the mundane things of life a source of joy (vv. 12-13).

The third aspect of the challenge is to think about eternity every day. This, after all, is what your heart was made to do. When you do this, you will discover true pleasure, true longing, true love because thinking properly about eternity will cause you to think about Jesus and what he did in order for sinners to have a blessed eternity.