“[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what he has done.” Ecclesiastes 3:11
The idea of gratitude often loses its true flavor when we talk about it colloquially. Our habitual interaction with one another is overrun with “thank you”s and “your welcome”s, and as a result we often think of Thanksgiving in this same bland spirit. This holiday provides a unique opportunity to intentionally seek out what, exactly, we need to be thankful for, and I think that Ecclesiastes provides a really strong answer. Essentially, we need to thank God for “setting eternity on the human heart”.
This verse, and that phrase specifically, may be my favorite in the entire Bible. The idea that the all-knowing, omnipotent God has gifted us with a taste of eternity feels simultaneously outrageous and perfectly correct. On the one hand, the human experience is defined by its lack of eternity. The harshly real presence of death sits like a looming crow above everything that we do. But on the other, our lives are filled with precious foretastes of the eternal: a sunrise, a song, or good book each reflect, in some infinitesimally small way, the perfect beauty of the eternal God.
And it is precisely these gifts which we must be grateful for. When we watch the sunset over the mountains, or when we sing a hymn with friends, we literally experience the eternal. The mind-boggling craziness of this cannot be overstated. Those small pieces of goodness and joy are a reflection of the eternal celebration which awaits us in Heaven. In understated and hidden ways, God gives us small pieces of his perfect beauty everyday, and the only reasonable response to these lavish gifts is desperate gratitude.
When God set eternity on our hearts, he allowed us into relationship with him, and he gives us glimpses of himself even while we are still broken. We have received eternity from the perfectly loving God, and all we can do is celebrate with joyous Thanksgiving.
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