Sermon Discussion Questions:
1. Read Ephesians 5:15-16 together. How does the book of Ecclesiastes help you use your time wisely?
2. As you consider the poem on time in Eccl 3:1-8, what does it do if you are inclined to be more optimistic or pessimistic?
3. Why does acknowledging that God has designed our times and seasons according to a "beautiful" plan require a lot of faith? What season are you in that requires faith to continue to believe that there is a beautiful design behind it?
4. How does knowing that our time is short and out of our control free us to enjoy life?
“Ecclesiastes is perhaps the most enigmatic book in the Old Testament. Like the desert Sphinx, it teases us with questions, yields its secrets only grudgingly, and will not allow us the luxury of easy answers. In other words, it is thoroughly irritating, but at the same time almost mesmeric in its appeal. It draws us towards it by mirroring the perplexity we all feel as we grapple with life.” (Webb, Five Festal Garments)
[Turn to page 554]
1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 2 a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3 a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6 a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7 a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8 a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
9 What gain has the worker from his toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 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. 12 I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. 14 I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him. 15 That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.
16 Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness. 17 I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work. 18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. 19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth? 22 So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him? - Eccl 3:1-22
Let’s try to digest this chapter by asking three questions of it: What time is it? Whose time is it? And, What do I do with my time?
What Time Is It?
The question What time is it? is a relative question. To say that is 12 o’clock is to say that it is 12 of the clock. That is, in reference to the man-made device—the clock—it is noon. But, there are other ways to tell time. It can be summer-time. It can be a really busy time at work. It can be time to have a serious conversation with your teenager.
In the book of Proverbs, knowing the time and season is a mark of wisdom (Prov 6:6-11; 10:5; 15:23; 20:4; 25:11). The Preacher wants us to be wise, so he opens up this chapter with a poetic reflection on time
1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven 2 a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3 a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6 a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7 a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8 a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
- Eccl 3:1-8
The poem here shows us that life oscillates, teeters back and forth from one season to another, and these seasons are not like each other. Sometimes, you are in a season of plenty and ease…other times, you are in a season of pain and scarceness. Sometimes, you are in many different seasons all at once—maybe work is draining, but your children are delightful; maybe you are finding great joy in one aspect of life, while another languishes. Life is complicated.
And the poem, for all its fame and beauty, seems to only state what is without giving any guidance on how to navigate the times; it is description not prescription.
The poem doesn’t seem to possess any pattern or predictable structure other than the fourteen pairs of time given. It does not oscillate consistently from good-to-bad, or good-bad-bad-good. Some of the pairs are not necessarily bad or good—for instance, we do not know if “a time to keep silence,” is necessarily preferable to “a time to speak” or if “casting away stones” is bad, or “gathering stones” is good. But this lack of structure and ambiguity is precisely the point: this is what times and seasons in our life are like. You cannot predict them, you cannot control them, you cannot say, “Okay, I am in a tough season now, but that means that I am due for something good next!” You do not know that. You can only discern the time that is given to you and submit to it in the wisest way possible.
This poem does not give you a steering wheel to move from one season or another, just tells you: this will happen. Love, hate; laughing, weeping; silence, speaking; war, peace—these seasons, these times are what have been set and are on their way. So, how do you walk wisely in the season that you are in? That’s the ultimate question. Before the Preacher answers the question positively, he is going to show us one wrong answer.
What gain has the worker from his toil? - Eccl 3:9
Remember, ‘gain’ in Ecclesiastes is code for what humans can do to have control and management over life, over the inevitability of death. “Toil,” meanwhile refers to our work, our labor—or, as one translation I read describes it, “working our fingers down to the bone.” So, the question is: can we, with our own strength and engineering, have control over our life? And Solomon’s answer over and over again is…no. In other words, here, in light of the vicissitudes of life and changing seasons that come and go…what control do you have? There is a time to be born and a time to die—did you choose the day you were born or the day you will die? Your life is hemmed in, locked into place by a Power outside of your control. You are a passenger, not a pilot.
Before we move on, consider how this opening poem has a word of wisdom to the optimists and pessimists among us:
- To the sugar-coated, to the Leslie Knope’s, to those who believe that everything always will be fun, light-hearted, and organized…this poem shows us that the sad, uncontrollable, and tragic are a normal part of life. The stream of time sometimes bends down a dark valley where we lose, we mourn, we weep. And it may be a bend in the river that you cannot do anything to fix, but can only endure. And is not our death the perfect picture of that? Eventually, the river bears us—and everyone else—to the grave. Isaac Watts, in his hymn reminds us: Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away. They fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening of day.
- To those soaking in vinegar, to those who feel like they have been burnt in the past with their high hopes and find it more manageable to live like Eeyore…this poem also shows us that our darkest of days do not have the final say. The gloom will not last forever; it is only a passing shadow, and there is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. Mourning will be replaced with laughter, weeping with dancing. And if you believe in Jesus Christ, then even our death—the blackest of all nights—will be turned into light and life eternal. Don’t despair.
Consider the story of our own church. Our church went through a dark season for many years where week by week saw the church contract and shrink. Now, our church, week by week seems to be growing—and we praise God for that. But what will happen if our church enters a new season of difficulty? Will we be prepared to weather that season the same way we have weathered this one? Or consider your own spiritual life. There are times of great fervor and intimacy with the Lord, and times where God seems distant. How do you walk wisely in one as well as the other?
Whose Time Is It?
10 I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. - Eccl 3:10-11a
Before we go on let’s consider the significance of what this small sentence is telling us.
Previously, in 1:13, the “business that God has given to man” was an “unhappy” one. But here, we are told that “God made everything beautiful in its time.” God made everything—the seasons and situations of our lives—and He has made it beautiful. God has elegantly designed the seasons of our life so that they fit together exquisitely. Life is not a tale told by an idiot; it is designed and crafted by a loving and good God and is freighted with eternal purpose. The season of loss and death may seem difficult to be seen as “beautiful,” but the point isn’t that the ugly parts are really beautiful if you just squint your eyes enough—the point is that God has orchestrated the various times of our life together into His symphonic harmony. The metaphor of a tapestry is often used to describe the Christian’s life—we sit on the bottom of the tapestry, only seeing the threads being used in our small square inch of life. God sits back with the perspective of the whole, and it is a beautiful sight.
And at this point we can stop and say two things. First, the way to walk wisely in the season you are in is to acknowledge that it is given to you by God.
To rage against it, to reject it, to use all your toilsome power to reassert some control is as futile as a passenger on a train pushing against his seat to try to turn the train around. It produces nothing but vexation and exhaustion. In a moment we will discuss what we are to do in the season we are in—I am not advocating a fatalism that resigns us to inaction, why get out of bed? That is not the Christian perspective on human agency or responsibility. But, half of the answer to what it means to walk wisely in the season we are in is to simply admit that it has been given to you by God. When Frodo tells Gandalf that he wishes the ring had never come to him, wishes that none of this would have happened, Gandalf wisely replies: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
Second, this requires an enormous amount of faith. To accept that “this is the way it is,” is one thing. But to see a design behind it, a beautiful design at that, requires great faith. Why? Because many times we do not see what God sees, and that is what exactly what the Preacher tells us in the second half of verse 11:
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. - Eccl 3:11b
This is a famous passage of Scripture that is often used to explain the idea that we have some internal sense of the divine, some longing for the infinite, for heaven. God has put eternity into man’s heart. What does that actually mean? Well, there are two very different possible meanings of the word. One is the traditional understanding of “eternity,” meaning that God has put some sense of time that extends before us and after us within us—whether that be a mental concept that we can intellectually grasp or an existential intuition, we all sense that there is more to life than our time-bounded, earthly experience. Another possible meaning that I became convinced of while studying this passage is that the word does not mean “eternity” at all, but “ignorance” or “darkness.”
Either way you translate the word, the result is the same. God has limited what man can know. As we strive to figure out what season we are in, what’s coming next, what God has done and will do next…we are left in the dark. God is not obligated to inform us of everything He is doing. And often, life seems to look like there is no grand design, no plan.
Let's hop down to one example that I think the preacher uses to illustrate this.
Look at verses 16 through 17.”
Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness. 17 I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work. (Eccl 3:16-17)
If there's anything that convinces you that maybe there's not a God in this world, it's the abuse of power where there should be justice. It's parents who should love their children but who abuse them.
It's governments who should care for their citizens but devour them. You look at the problem of evil, and you think, how could a good God be here in this? And the preacher says, I looked and I saw in all of the places where the police officers and judges and lawyers are supposed to be, they were all corrupt.
They were rotten. There was no concept of righteousness in them. It was self-seeking gain, wickedness.
But what is his conclusion? God will judge. God will judge the righteous and the wicked.
There may be corrupt justices. There may be corrupt police officers. There may be corrupt presidents.
But there is not a corrupt God. And there is a time that is coming when people judge the living and the dead. And every wrong will be set right, and every corruption and wickedness and evil that seemed to go off unpunished, it will be punished.
Hitler killed himself. He got off easy. But he will not get off.
He will face the music. Now, to arrive at that conclusion, you need more than what your eyes can see, right? We don't see the wicked being handed justice.
We just see them getting away with it. Yet the preacher is able to say, I'm confident there is a God. But what is he doing?
To hold on to this view that God will one day right all wrongs requires faith, something more than your eyes can see. And he uses another example as well.
I wonder if you caught the limitations on human knowledge that the Preacher picked up in the seemingly bizarre comments about how men and beasts are the same? He asks in verse 21, “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?” What is the Preacher doing here? He isn’t saying that animals and humans are the same in every way. He is being intentionally provocative to underline two things: we die just like beasts do, we have the same breath they do, and we “all go to the same place,” that is, we all go to the same grave—like the beasts, we too are just creatures that God has made. This, according to verse 18, is a “test” that God brings upon men. When the Preacher asks who knows whether the spirit of man goes up or the spirit of beast goes down, he isn’t questioning whether or not there is an afterlife—as we will see later, he clearly believes in an afterlife—he could be asking whether or not animals have souls that join us in heaven, or he could just be provocatively saying: What do your eyes see? Your eyes see that men die just like cattle, like mice. But your eyes do not see what happens next, just like you cannot see what God is doing before and after you (cf. 3:11).
The other day, my son asked me if when a Christian dies if those nearby get to see the gates of heaven open and see the soul of the dead Christian go up. I said, “There are some stories we hear of that happening, but that isn’t what normally happens—most of the time we are left on this side, only seeing the person die and are left to trust that their soul is now with Jesus.” To know what happens on the other side of the grave is not something that we can know from empirical experience, but relies on the eyes of faith. God has “left us in the dark” so to speak. And if you are a Christian here today, you may want to immediately rush to the resurrection of Christ and say, “See, we have seen and heard what life is like on the other side of the grave!” And that is true! Praise God for that. But consider the point that the Preacher is making. Why is he telling us all this? So that we would be humbled in our knowledge.
What do you think of Paul’s rebuke in Romans 9, where the imagined debater arguing with the doctrine of election, flinging accusations of, “But that’s not fair! Why would God do that?!” is answered with: “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” (Rom 9:20). Does that seem like a cop-out to you? To demand the same perspective that God has is just another way of saying, I should be God.
What do you do when you encounter the limits of human knowledge, when God tells you something, when God puts you into a season of life, and you say, God, I do not understand why you are doing this. Why would you put this in the Bible? Why would you make this happen to my family? Why would you let this occur? I don't understand it.
What do you do in those moments?
Well, you have two options. One is to assert what you think should be happening, what you think should be true, and charge God with getting it wrong. Or two, you confess your arrogance and you submit.
Those are the only options.
Friend, maybe your angst and depression and frustration at God really is a charge that God messed it up, and if you were in charge, you would sort it out. And God is inviting you now to repent and submit to His beautiful design.
“If we could see the end from the beginning and understand how a billion lives and a thousand generations and unspeakable sorrows and untold joys are all woven into a tapestry of perfect beauty then we would be God,” (Gibson, Living Life Backwards, p.59).
What Do I Do with My Time?
Enjoy Life
I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; 13 also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. (Eccl 3:12-13)
So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. (Eccl 3:22)
The French philosopher Michel Montaigne brought up this thought experiment. He said, what if a criminal, sentenced to execution, was offered one final meal? And let's say that the meal was the most exquisite meal he could possibly ask for, from the taste of the food to the environment that he's in—everything was superb. Would he be able to enjoy it, knowing that as soon as it was finished, he was to die?
The preacher of Ecclesiastes says, Yeah! Totally! How?
Ecclesiastes is a weird book.
It's kind of like the gloomy goth kid from high school, who's talking about death all the time. Maybe you just feel like you don't want to be around that much. Come on, lighten up.
But that's not what the book is about. The book is a manual for you to live life with joy and meaning, facing the facts. You can find joy in life by ignoring death, by running from it.
You can get shots in your face to make you look younger. You can work out and exercise so that you try to stave off death as long as you can. You can try to eat healthy. You can try to do everything in your life that captures this little picture, this veneer of youth and life, when the reality is that we're all marching to death. We all are the prisoner, in Montaigne's example. And joy that comes as a diversion from that will always feel hollow, like standing behind the curtain of a rotting corpse while you're at a party.
The smell is going to come. You're going to know that something's wrong. Ecclesiastes is here to teach you how to have joy in life by facing the facts, not ignoring them.
And in fact, it's only when you face the facts, your life will not last forever. It is fleeting and brief, and you control remarkably little. Only then can you actually enjoy a meal, a drink, marriage, children.
If you're the person who is using the joys and pleasures, the education and work and sex and status of this world as a diversion from death, you will never be able to enjoy them as freely because you will be freighting all of those things with, this has got to turn me away from that scary black hole I have in my mind. And they'll never satisfy. They'll always leave you empty.
They'll always be frustrating. But when you've dealt squarely with, I know death's coming. And this meal, these friends, this vacation, that sunset, it doesn't have to deliver me from that.
It actually frees you to enjoy it.
Do good
I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live (Ecc 3:12)
“Our job is not to determine what season we are in. Our job, however, is to do good with the time that's given us.
So parents, you've been given a season with your children. Take advantage of it. Grandparents, you've been given a season with your grandchildren.
Do good. Work hard. You've been given a certain amount of mental acuity and physical strength for this season.
Use them. Do good. The reality of God setting aside our times and seasons does not render us inert like stones.
It rather frees us to realize that this time, this moment has been freighted with eternal significance. God has made this moment. He has brought it before me, and he has given me an opportunity to do something with it.
Fear God
Not only are we left in the dark, but then the Preacher sinks the nail even deeper when we jump down to verses 14-15
I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away. - Eccl 3:14-15
God writes in indelible ink. Do you get the sense that the Preacher is trying to convey to you? Who is in control? Who determines what happens? God does. Consider the sum of the Preacher’s argument thus far: God is the One who controls the time and season you experience. You do not. God is the One who knows the beginning and end. You do not. God’s work lasts forever, never needs addition, and nothing can be subtracted from it. Your work is smoke and vapor.
Now, imagine that you were pulled into some strange world where there was a Ruler over your life—and that Ruler got to dictate every facet of your life. When and where you were born, what happened in your life, and when you would die. No matter what you do, you cannot alter the decree of the Dictator. He is that powerful. That would be terrifying. It would sound like some dystopian Orwellian nightmare. Is that what the Preacher intends us to feel when he says that God has done this “so that people fear before him”? Now, change the illustration slightly. Imagine that you enter a world where there is a wise, good, and loving God watching over you, governing every affair and time and season of your life for your greatest good and deepest joy. No matter what you do, you cannot ruin this good God’s loving plan with your boneheaded mistakes and your failure. He is that powerful. That sounds like heaven, doesn’t it? The fear of God in this sense is a “rejoice and tremble” a fearful delight in the goodness, beauty, and wonder of God.
Either slant you take, the futility of your own power is evident. Your experience of the fear of God will shift from fearful dread to fearful delight depending on what you imagine God to be like. So, friend, what do you think God is like? If you want to try to dig down deeper into what your heart really believes, consider how you respond when the times and seasons don’t line up with your plans.
Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate—the gift of God’s Word is a revelation of who God is, what He is like.
What do you imagine him to be like?
Is he an iron, cruel, tight-fisted dictator who puts up with you, tolerates you, and quickly flies off the handle at the second that you mess up? If that's your conception of God, then meditating on his meticulous sovereignty will terrify you. But brothers and sisters, thanks be to God, that is not who our God is.
Our God is not a cold-hearted, stingy, tin-pot dictator. He is the God who has revealed himself as a loving father, as a gentle Savior, as a compassionate Messiah. He is the God who has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, one who is patient with you, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and mercy, one who is so committed to your good that he will bleed and die before he lets you wander off into destruction.
God has revealed his character, his heart, his nature, his trustworthiness to you. You have no control over your life. The seasons of your life, you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.
You don't know if you will live to the end of the day.
What you do control is how you view God. And I promise you, it will change everything in your life.
When you walk through a dark season where everything is turned and angled against you to cut and scrape you down to the bone, if you know that there is a good, compassionate, merciful, loving God who is so committed to your good, He will not let a single thing touch you for your harm. You will receive that dark season with confidence. God sent this.
He has good, wise purposes that I cannot see, but I trust Him.
In 1993, there were three New Tribes Missionaries in Columbia who were kidnapped by terrorists.
And for eight years, their families and friends wondered and prayed and worried. But eventually, [in 2001], they received word that these men were in all probability dead. Dan German was the director of that mission in Columbia at that time during the kidnapping.
And in an interview, interestingly enough, he says that during that whole long ordeal of eight years of daily anguish and prayer, the way they prayed changed.
He said that they started out praying that God would bring them in home safely. He said they ended up praying, God, even if we never know what has become of them, you will still be God.
And Dan said there is a very special sense of awe at who God is and how sufficient He is when the miracle didn't happen, but the wonder of His sufficiency is still present.
