I. A Time for All Events in Life (3:1-8)
Verses 1-8 were made popular by the 1960s song, Turn, Turn, Turn, by the band, The Birds. Show pic. We often talk about how God’s word has made an impact thousands of years after it was written. Who knew that Solomon would have a #1 Billboard Hit 3000 years after he wrote this passage. Let’s go back through and examine these a little closer.
3:1-2:
“a season for every activity under the heavens” – We cooperate with the seasons. In the ancient world and in agricultural communities, the seasons determine feast or famine. The Jewish calendar was tied up in the seasons –Passover, the Feast of Booths and Pentecost.
The seasons dictates how we dress. Sometimes it prevents us from doing the things we want. They signal different activities.
“a time to be born and a time to die” – You don’t decide when you are born. You don’t decide what family you are born in. You didn’t decide what your hair color, your intellect, your athletic ability, etc.
We may foolishly hasten our death, but we cannot prevent it when our time comes –unless God so wills it. King David declared: “All the days ordained for me were written in Your book” (Psalm 139:16).
Of course, humans refuse to accept the limitations of death. And we believe that we can harness technology and human ingenuity to prolong our lives indefinitely. Ian Pearson, a professional futurologist, which sounds like a glorified fortune teller says, “Realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it’s not a major career problem.” Therefore, if we are able to clone ourselves in the future, we can download that data into our twin and live on.
This is sort of like that Netflix series Altered Carbon where the rich elite can upload their memories and experiences to a protected cloud and keep physical copies of themselves in case something happens.
David Chalmers (transhumanist professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University) writes, “No such technology is currently on the horizon, but imaging technology is an area of rapid progress.”
“It is true that we have no idea how a nonbiological system, such as a silicon computational system, could be conscious. But the fact is that we also have no idea how a biological system, such as a neural system, could be conscious. The gap is just as wide in both cases.”
Just as Thanos, which means death in Greek, says in Avengers Endgame, “I am inevitable.”
3:3-4
“a time to weep” – Some of us pride ourselves in how long it’s been since we last wept. Don’t think it’s unspiritual to weep. Jesus wept. Paul prayed for the people he led to Christ with tears.
“a time to mourn” – Some of us have experienced loss recently. Scripture does not speak disparagingly about mourning. In fact, Jesus mourned at the loss of Lazarus. Jesus declared, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
Many of you have not experienced the loss of a close loved one, yet. But as you get older, you will mourn the loss of friends and close family members. Mourning is the normal course of living in fallen broken world.
As modern Western people, we want to edit this by striking out all of the negatives in this section. We want it to read like this:
A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest
A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance.
We expect for life to go smoothly, for us to live in happiness and comfort. And yet, we’re blindsided by suffering. We’re bewildered by feelings of sadness and grief. The harsh realities of living in a broken world can crush our optimism and send us into cynicism. But as we shall see, God has a broader plan at work in our lives.
3:5: There’s a time to show affirmation with an embrace. Some of us don’t really like showing physical affection.
3:6: A time to hoard and a time to purge.
3:7: Some take tearing as the ancient near east practice of tearing one’s garments in mourning. However, the parallel “sew together” isn’t an expression for the end of mourning.
This is probably talking about varying activities we engage in, some are destructive and others are creative.
“a time to keep silent and a time to speak” – Scripture has a lot to say about our speech. Solomon, who was probably the author of Ecclesiastes, wrote extensively about how to use discretion in the book of Proverbs.
Jesus exhibited this during his life and ministry. He always had the right word for every situation. He gave straight answers to those who he discerned asked genuine questions and he confounded those who tried to trap him.
3:8: Now, what are these verses supposed to teach us, you may be wondering? The Koheleth, the teacher, is using a:
merism def. A rhetorical device which puts two polar opposites together to encompass everything in between, that is, totality. In other words, birth and death and everything in between. Crying and laughter and everything in between. However, there are two disturbing features of these 14 merisms.
We are made to dance to a tune not of our own making. We throw ourselves into some absorbing activity which offers us temporary fulfilment, but how freely did we choose it? How soon shall we be doing the exact opposite? The peace-loving nation prepares for war. Close friends part in bitter conflict. Nothing we do seems free from this outside pressure. The Old Testament scholar, Derek Kidner says, “Perhaps our choices are no freer than our responses to winter and summer, childhood and old age. The steady march of time dictates what we do.” Second…
Nothing we pursue has any permanence. Notice each of these negate the other: birth/death, killing/healing. From our limited perspective, life under the sun, each season of life cancels each other out, leaving a net zero sum.
3:9-10: The Koheleth reminds us by reiterating what he said in 1:13. What do we get from all of this toil for which we strive under the sun? Remember, he’s writing from the perspective of life under the sun, that is, this life is all there is, nothing more. And yet, he gives us a glimpse of what life could look like above the sun.
3:11:
“yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” – The problem for us is not that life refuses to keep still, but that we see a small fraction of the overall picture.
We are like desperately nearsighted people, inching our way along a large mural in the attempt to take it in. We see enough to recognize something of its quality, but the totality of its beauty is lost on us. We can never stand back far enough to view it as its creator does, from the beginning to the end.
This lack of clarity is dismaying for the non-Christian person. Not so for the believer. The Koheleth reminds us:
“He has made everything beautiful in its time.” I think the New Living Translation does a better job capturing the meaning of the Hebrew here. “God has made everything fit beautifully in its time” (NLT). Though we cannot see the full picture now, God will reveal to us how he used even the most difficult parts of our life for his purposes.
“He put eternity in our hearts” – This is one of the most profound statements in Scripture. God has planted eternity in our hearts. Notice he doesn’t say, “in our intellect” but “in our hearts.” There is something very deep, very visceral, something innate in a human being.
You see, the Koheleth has resolved to understand ‘all’ that is under the sun (1:13). But there is something within him which makes him realize he can never comprehend God’s plan in its entirety.
Beauty: Julian Barnes (an English author), for example, finds himself moved deeply by certain works of art that he realizes should not. For example, Mozart’s Requiem relies on the Christian understanding of death, judgment and afterlife.
Barnes rejects these ideas. He believes that nothing follows after death, but extinction. Nevertheless, the Requiem moves him and not just the arrangements of notes, but the words. “It is one of the haunting hypotheticals for the nonbeliever…What would it be like ‘if [the Requiem] were true’[?]”
Leonard Bernstein (an American composer, conductor) famously admitted that when he heard great music, he sensed “Heaven.” “[Beethoven] has the real goods, the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at the finish: something is right in the world. There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently: something we can trust, that will never let us down.” If we are the product of accidental natural forces, then what we call “beauty” is nothing but a neurologically-hardwired response.
You only find certain scenery beautiful because you had ancestors who knew they would find food there.
By contrast, Scripture teaches that our capacity for creating and appreciating beauty in the world through art or music, all comes from God. Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship.” God creates beauty in the world. Show pics. And our appreciation of it. The feeling you get when you are moved by it is indicative of the eternity God has placed in your heart.
Morality – Virtually every person we meet goes through what I would like to call “moral motions.” When a man on the bus gives up his seat for the elderly, you are seeing moral motions. When you feel moral indignation seeing a car filled with teenagers purposely splashing OSU students walking on high street after a heavy rain, you’re seeing moral motions.
When you ask naturalist how they define morality, they would tell you that morality is a product of natural selection. Morality represents a complex mechanism that promotes cooperation and functions to preserve our species and reproduction.
The diversity of morality that we find within each culture comes from evolutionary processes that took place within multiple isolated sites at the same time.
So, a naturalist would explain that morality comes from cultural conditioning. You can make a moral pronouncement that something is wrong within your own culture, but you can’t go any further than this.
• Naturalism doesn’t furnish us with the ability to make moral pronouncements upon another culture’s horrendous – For instance, how can we say that cultural practices such as cannibalism or bull fighting are wrong? After all, we’re trying to impose our cultural views upon another culture that holds its own.
• If the universe represents a closed system of cause and effect, then what room does it leave for things like right and wrong? There’s nothing moral about chemical reactions and physical laws acting on matter and energy. Without appealing to something outside the physical realm, we’re simply unable to say that something is morally wrong in the ultimate sense. Alvin Plantinga (Christian philosopher at Notre Dame): “Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how…. A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort…and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (…and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful…argument for the reality of God].” According to the naturalistic view, the most we can say would be, “In my culture that would be wrong.” After all, whatever we mean by “wrong” cannot possibly mean anything more than, “My cultural conditioning tells me that’s morally wrong.”
And yet, we long for our words to mean more. When we make a moral pronouncement upon the practice of female genital mutilation, we mean “It’s objectively and universally wrong to force this upon women.”
That’s God's imprint of eternity on our hearts. God is morally perfect and he created us in his image, as Scripture teaches. Therefore, the moral motions and drives we have are not just artifacts of our evolutionary past. God designed us this way.
Death: Irvin D. Yalom (Epicurean psychiatrist): “Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind…
“Only one thing will prevent you from watching every person you know die from murder, accident, or disease, and that will be your own death from murder, accident, or disease.” (p.152)
Some of you might say, “I’m not afraid of death.” Well, that’s probably because you never think of it.
And yet, something within us tells us that there is a life after life. That this life isn’t all that there is. That the things we do have meaning and purpose beyond this life. Scripture tells us that death is an anomaly. Just because we’re used to seeing death, doesn’t mean it’s the way things ought to be. Jesus was deeply moved in anger when his friend Lazarus died.
Human responsibility and freewill. Again, Leonid Perlovsky comments: “Free will, however, has a fundamental position in many cultures. Morality and judicial systems are based on free will. Denying free will threatens to destroy the entire social fabric of the society…” And yet, the logical conclusion of naturalism leads to us absolve people of their moral responsibility because after all, they were not making a free will choice. Our instincts are hardwired in our genes.
One author put it this way: It would be impossible to find a fox which has a kindly and protective disposition towards geese, just as no cat exists which has a friendly disposition towards mice. That is why the struggle between the various species does not arise from a feeling of [hostility] but rather from hunger…In both cases Nature looks on calmly and is even pleased with what happens.
There cannot be a separate law for mankind in a world in which planets and suns follow their orbits, where moons and planets trace their destined paths.” In other words, mankind’s destiny is fixed by nature, not responsibility. Cited from Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 144. Now, I’m not saying that if you hold a naturalistic view of the world, you’re basically a Nazi.
All I’m saying is, the concept of human responsibility makes no sense in the context of a naturalistic worldview because there’s no such things as freewill in system of cause and effect.
Scripture tells us just the opposite. It tells us that God was the one who gave us free choice. In Genesis chapter 2, God gave the first humans a beautiful garden to live in, but told them not to eat from one tree. For in the day that they ate from it, they would surely die. They had a choice to either obey God or rebel against him. Their choice to violate God’s command set off the cascading brokenness we see in the world today. But God in his infinite mercy, decided to provide us a way out. He sent his son Jesus to come and die for us so that we can experience his forgiveness and his love. But he isn’t going to violate our free-will to do this. He tells us in Revelation 3:20, “I stand at the door and knock, and if anyone opens the door, I will come in.”
“yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” – In Hebrew, the word ‘yet’ is an even stronger negation. The New Living Translation puts it this way: “but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end” (NLT).
3:12-13a: The Koheleth acknowledges that there’s joy in being happy and doing good. However, the phrase:
“as long as he lives” casts a shadow over the whole thing. If nothing is permanent, then we are just filling time.
On the other hand, the believer is free to enjoy work and pleasure because she sees that they are “a gift from God” (3:13b). You see, when you place the weight of your entire life on something it has to deliver. And when it fails to deliver, you grow disillusioned. That’s what happened to the Koheleth.
However, if you enter God into the equation, it changes everything. It changes our relationship to work and pleasure. It’s no longer something that has to deliver. It’s a gift from God. It’s something God has given you. Its purpose is known to the giver and is part of his eternal work. As verse 14 points out…
3:14: His plans, unlike ours, needs no corrections or changes. They endure forever. By the way, this word:
“forever” is the same Hebrew word in verse 11. The happiness we get from our relationships, from enjoying pleasurable experiences, from the satisfaction we get from a job well done, that’s the eternity God has placed in our hearts. It’s a constant reminder that there’s more than this life. And he’s done this so that:
“people will fear him” – This word means more than just being afraid. It means to acknowledge, to have reverence for someone. God is the rightful owner of the universe. He created it. He created us. And he made us to be in a relationship with him.
II. Conclusions
Some of you are facing doubts about God’s reality. You may be going through a period where it seems as if God isn’t tangible. You just can’t connect with him like you have in the past. Or maybe you are suffering and wondering if God exists.
If you try to erase God from the equation, you erase all the marks of eternity in your heart. If God isn’t real, then many of the things in your life that give your life meaning and significance disappear with him. Your choice disappears. Your passion for social justice is a chasing after the wind. The fulfillment you get from creating or the feeling you get when a song moves you, is nothing different than a bowl movement. Can you imagine a life without these things? That’s a world without God.
Some of you sense that God is real and may have a plan for your life. But you’ve never started a relationship with him.