Themes of the Bible: Time (Ecclesiastes 3)

 

Themes of the Bible: Time (Ecclesiastes 3)

            If you remembered the homework from last week, then you know that today we will be in Ecclesiastes 3. And, just so you know what to pre-read for next week, we’ll be in a passage of Scripture that is maybe the most significant chapter in all of the Old Testament. Of course that’s an exaggerated statement, it would be impossible to pick one chapter, but this would definitely be up there in the top echelon, and that is Isaiah 53. So, Isaiah 53 for next week, but this week, we're in Ecclesiastes 3. If you read this, if you did your homework, you thought to yourself, ‘Why are we reading this? What in the world is he going to do with this?’ And I say that because halfway through the week I was looking at the chapter saying, “Well, why did I pick this and what am I going to do with this?”

Let me start and ask you, if I pose this question, ‘What is the secret of life?’ What if I had all of you write down on a piece of paper what you think the secret of life is, and you submitted them, I have a feeling I would get maybe a few similar answers, but a lot of different answers to that question. One of the reasons I know that, is because if you type this into Google, which is where we go to find all of our answers, you will get 1.5 billion responses in a matter of a split second. Now, I'm not saying they're all different answers, but there's 1.5 billion answers to the question, ‘What is the secret of life?’ Country singer Faith Hill, sings about it and she's got a song, called ‘the secret of life,’ and I listened to it for the purposes of this sermon. I wish that I hadn't, but every chorus offers different ideas about the secret of life. She says that the secret of life is a warm cup of coffee on a cold day, secret to life is spending time with friends and family, and when you get to the end of the song, Faith tells us that the secret of life is nothing at all. As if there is no real secret to life, and maybe that's the case, but I would suggest that the opening line of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 comes very close to answering that question. Look at verse 1 of Ecclesiastes chapter 3. [Read Ecclesiastes 3:1]. Scripture is teaching right here, that everything has its time. There is a time for everything. Now, I have worked really hard in figuring out how to communicate this, and I feel like I'm going to fail, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. Whatever it is that you're doing, whatever season of life you're in, there is a set time for that. What this also implies, is that there are other times that are not for that thing that you're talking about. Whatever it is that you're doing right now. There will be another season of life that is not for that thing. That is implicit in the understanding that there was a time for all things. There was a time that is not for that certain thing, as well. The reason I asked this, from this passage is because the world has lured us into believing the exact opposite. And I would suggest here in America, perhaps more than most places, or at least the West, we're led to believe that every moment is the time for everything. The phones that we are carrying around, they bring the world to us every second of the day. There's no set time for this or no set time for that, because any time you want to do this or that, it's good and available to you. You can do it anytime you want to and do it anywhere you want to do it. So, is it possible that in living like that, that we have thrown off God's restraints put in place to protect us? In other words, on our time instead of His.

This is where we are, we have thrown off the restraints that God put into place for a reason. We gravitate to cities that never sleep. Las Vegas, New York City. Electricity itself has allowed us to blur the lines between working during the day and resting at night. So, plenty of people now do their work at night, and electricity allows us entertainment, constantly, we have gyms and gas stations and grocery stores and coffee shops that are open 24/7. And when they're not open 24/7, when you can't go and get your mocha java latte soy milk at 1130 at night, you get really cranky about. ‘Gee, what is with Starbucks, not open at 1130? Don't they realize people we need a $30 dollar coffee drink right now?” We've come to believe that we can do everything all the time. Which would suggest that there's no real season for our stages of life anymore, it's all blended together, and we do what we want, when we want. Then Ecclesiastes is teaching us right off the bat in chapter 3, that maybe there's a lesson here that wise people will actually learn, that calls us to look at the way we approach daily life.  

The sociological data tells us that we're learning this lesson the hard way, that a seasonless digital life that so many of us live, is damaging us. It's diminishing our humanity. We don't have real friendships, we don't have real relationships anymore. The most we're able to invest in another person is 280 characters on Twitter. That's how much we engage with people, except maybe really close friends. And what Scripture shows us is that the most fulfilled people are the ones who respect the rhythms of time, who understand the time and the place where they are, dawn to dusk, day to night, six days to work, one day to rest. The most wholesome and fulfilled, are those who respect that.

Perhaps my life is a testimony to that. When I feel most fulfilled is when I'm respecting those things. How much family breakdown and family dysfunction can be tied to a lack of respect for the seasons and the rhythms of life. We constantly have to be doing something, we constantly have to be going over here, we constantly have to be working, and therefore we neglect relationships and that leads to family breakdown. How much lack of investment in the local church is tied to it? ‘Well, we would be more committed to the church, but we've got summer softball. We got to get our kids in that.’ Why, because they're going to play Division Three softball and then what.

As a culture, we spend billions of dollars trying to find the secret to life, and maybe it's right there in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 1. Could it really be that simple? I want you to think of it this way: Have you ever laughed at the wrong time? Right. You know when there's a time that you should not be laughing. You know that there was a time to laugh, and the time not to laugh. And if you laugh at the time that you're not supposed to be laughing, you stick out, it's very uncomfortable and things don't go smoothly. It's the same principle that we're talking about here. When you laugh at an inappropriate time. That isn't good. And when you are believing that you are in the season that is not the season that you are in, or you are ignoring the season that you are in, it's the same principle: It isn't good. It isn't right, it isn't appropriate which means the secret of life might be found in accepting the limitations that time places on us. Notice the reference there in verse one, under heaven, or under the sun, depending on your translation. What we are being told here is that these are guidelines, these are ordained principles and realities that are binding on us as people living in this world. Now there is coming a day where we will not be bound by the restraints of time, we won't be bound by any of this, and the seasons that we go through, sometimes the seasons of suffering, they won't exist anymore. But while we're here, there is a time for those things.

As I was looking at this, I saw this when I was doing the research on the chapter, that maybe the easiest way to understand Ecclesiastes 3 is to see it as an answer to Ecclesiastes 2. Let me give you the second chapter in a nutshell. The second chapter is saying that you need to accept each day as a gift from the hand of God. Buy why? Why should I accept every day, even the bad stuff that happens to me, the really bad moments in my life, why should I accept that as a gift from the hand of God. Well, chapter 3 explains that because God is in control, and he has set a time for all things that you will go through and you will deal with, but ultimately he is in control of all of that. So, as you look at this chapter, you can see these back and forth, these polar opposites, and they're kind of divided into three sections, which just so happened to be the three sections of humanity: our body, our soul, and our spirit. [Read Ecclesiastes 3:1-3].

Alright, first of all, you know that none of us asked to be born, and none of us asked to die. These are seasons that we cannot escape and things that are going to happen to us that God has ordained, but then you get to that point of time to plant and the time to uproot, what exactly does that mean? I think it's a great analogy. I want you to think about this, if we get out of sync with what God has ordained what happens? You all live in a community where there are farmers and ranchers. There's the time to plant and the time to harvest or uproot. We all understand that. Imagine if the farmer chose differently that the God ordained times. ‘I don't want to live by those seasons. Instead of planting in the spring, letting it grow during the summer, and then harvesting in the fall, I will plant in the fall, I will let it grow during the winter and then I will harvest in the spring. How well is that going to work out? It's not going to work out at all, and that's the whole point God is teaching us: That one of the things that will lead us to discontent in this life is trying to run our own schedule, trying to be god of our own little universe.

There's an appropriate time for all things. When it comes to our bodies, how many people find aging unpleasant? I’ve got white whiskers growing in my beard now that our campers like to point out, even though they’re the ones who gave them too me. Stuff hurts when you wake up, body processes don’t work right anymore, and we all experience unpleasant aspects of growing older and fight aging to some degree. We don't ask for these things to happen, we can try to ignore that those changes have happened and fight it and ignore the reality, but the truth is that it is appropriate, so don't fight aging, especially because you're not going to win. There is a season for this. It's not evil, it's proper, God has ordained that there is a time for ageing, he's determined it. And for those of us who are in those later seasons, he's telling us that if he is in it, and he is ordained it, then it is right, and it's not something we should try to rebel against.

Now look what it says about at the soul verses, four and five. [Read Ecclesiastes 3:4-5].

God's teaching is that no one is going to escape the hurt and the sorrow of life. Go ahead. Hermit yourself away somewhere, and you're going to bring burden and sorrow on your own existence. If you do that, you isolate yourself from humanity, haven't we learned that in the last year, that we need fellowship with people. That's one of the realities of life God shows: hurt and sorrow. It’s evidenced by what you're going to read next week, by the life that his Son led. Isaiah 53, where we see that Jesus was a man of sorrows, that Jesus knew grief, and why? So that he could identify with those of us who God has ordained are going to have to go through these difficult seasons in our lives in a fallen world. It is appropriate that there will be hurt, and there will be weeping and each of those circumstances, unpleasant as it may be, God has a purpose in it.

Now, look at the spirit, verses 6 through 8. [Read Ecclesiastes 3:6-8]. God is speaking here about our deep commitments that we have: a time for new friends, a time to discard old friends. We do that when we go cleaning out places. We clean out attics, we throw things away and the same is true of our old habits and our old attitudes, there's a time for maturing and setting aside childish things that we used to believe in and hold on to. As part of spiritual maturity in marriage, you certainly learn the second part of verse 7, a time to speak and a time to be silent.  

God ordained silent tongues when we're tempted to gossip. Is the information that you have heard actually valuable in building others up? If not, keep your mouth shut. You can tear up so many people and destroy so many people with gossip and loose lips. Of course, there's also a time we speak, we confess the name of God before men, and verse 8 says there is a time to love. That makes sense right, there's a time to love. But there's also a time Christian’s should hate. Does that even make sense with the rest of Scripture? Let’s look at William Wilberforce and ask if there's a time to hate. William Wilberforce began the abolitionist movement that ended the slave trade in England, and it happened because he stood and watched at a slave auction, where a young mother with her two children stood up for auction, one was an infant and one was a five-year-old boy, all sold to three different slave owners. And as they're ripped apart as a family, the five-year-old boy grabs ahold of his mom's leg, screaming, the mom is reaching down, they're ripped apart and sent in different directions, never to see each other again. William Wilberforce came to hate the slave trade. And he dedicated his life to ending it. So, is there a time to hate? Yes, Christians, there's a time to hate.

There's a time to hate the sin that is all around us, that is destroying people's lives. God has a time for everything, and this chapter is telling us something even more reassuring. Look at verse 11. [Read Ecclesiastes 3:11]. There’s three different parts of this verse to understand. I get hung up on the first part everything appropriate in its time, some of your translations say, ‘beautiful in its time.’ Even the negative that Satan is trying to use to harm us, God will bring to his glory. Can we not see that there are appropriate times for even the bad, that God has made this appropriate, for a purpose, and he's using it to bring him glory. If we surrender the situation to him, we can come to see our suffering as something that can bring God glory. That is what he did with Esther, it's what he did with Job, so what is it in my life that can prevent me from doing the same? God makes everything appropriate and beautiful in his time. These aren't curses, they are opportunities to be blessed. Job embraced it.

Now look at the second part of that verse. The fact that God has put an eternity in each of our hearts. There is something in each of us that yearns for something more than what this world is, and is there any better evidence that your soul was made for another time and another place than this? The fact that nothing in this world can satisfy you. Look at the atheists that are always looking for answers. Carl Sagan spent his whole life with giant satellite dishes pointed towards the sky listening for aliens, because, he said, “when we find out who they are, then we'll know who we are, will know the answers to life.” He's looking for answers, he's looking for meaning, there is something in every human being that is yearning for more and understanding of more. We search for contentment, and we search for purpose. We are made for worship. Only human beings have this emotional, spiritual side to them that yearns for worship. You know what can't explain that? Evolutionary naturalism can't explain that. Darwin could not explain why human beings are set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in these kinds of ways, but what does explain it? Ecclesiastes chapter 3 does. That God has placed in the human heart the desire for eternity. C. S. Lewis says it better than anybody, he said, “our Heavenly Father has provided many delightful ends for us along our journey, but he takes great care to see that we do not mistake any of them for home.” So, there's nothing that will ultimately satisfy your soul, apart from your relationship with Christ, and your membership in the kingdom of heaven.

The final part of that verse is very reassuring to me, that they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I used to know so much. When I came out of college, there was virtually nothing that I didn't know. And I think it's happening earlier now, it only takes about a semester of college before students know everything, and everything that they've been told before by parents, teachers, and churches is wrong. This is one of those seasons, where you start to realize how little you actually know, and if you're smart, and you become spiritually mature because of it. It makes you cling on to the things that you can know for sure, and all of this other stuff and these opinions and beliefs that you had start to wither away, and the stuff that you do know, you cling to and you hold on to.

The truth is, we can't know the answers to all of our questions. For some, that doesn't bother you. For others, you need the answer. What is the answer for this? I need the explanation for this. But that's why Scripture tells us that when we can't understand, we trust. This is what Jesus says, Matthew 18:1-4, “At that time the disciples came to Jesus and said, ‘Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, and said, ‘Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’” A child has no answers to the great problems of life, but they trust their parents to take care of it, and that's what Jesus is saying, that you will never have the answers to all of your questions, but you can trust your Father. He has things under control. That's the life of faith that we are taught in Ecclesiastes 3. It's the life of faith that we are to embrace, because we can trust our Father.

Let’s look at verse 14. [Read Ecclesiastes 3:14]. God is sovereign and His ways will never be thwarted, not by the enemy, not by any of us. So, what is the secret to life: Don't try to be God. Accept that there is a God, and you aren't him. And that is so difficult, and we fail here so often, because when things don't go the way we think they should go, when we think we know what God should be blessing us with and when that doesn't happen, then we start questioning His existence. ‘Well, I don't know that God can really exist with everything that's going on.’ ‘I really think I deserve that, and if He isn’t giving me that, then He certainly isn't trustworthy.’ ‘I don't know that he could really love me if he's allowing me to go through this. . .’ What arrogance of us human beings, to think that we have all the answers, and that God our Father does not.

What's our big takeaway? Look at that last verse, verse 22. [Read Ecclesiastes 3:22]. Go back to Ecclesiastes chapter 2, take every day as a gift from the hand of God. That's what it is, for who can bring them to see what will happen after them? Only God helps us understand what is on the other side of this life, and the entire chapter is about finding contentment in situations that we face in this life, knowing that God has ordained, that God leads, that God owns every situation and that He is infinitely wise. So, make sure that you know that God, and you will have that peace and contentment.

Let’s pray.