Note: Although not quoted directly, I am sure that this sermon was greatly influenced by Chuck Swindoll’s work Living on the Ragged Edge.
Arriving on Time
Ecclesiastes 3:1-22
Cascades Fellowship CRC, JX MI
April 17, 2005
This morning I want to dispel one of the most widespread myths to ever infect the heart of man. If there was ever a lie that did more damage with more subtlety, I have never heard about it. A person could travel the entire globe and not find a more insidious, yet more innocent looking deception. I have heard it spouted from the mouths of old and young, dark-skinned and light-skinned, those considered wise and those considered fools. This fabrication has no gender gap, no generation gap, no socio-economic gap – it is as pervasive in one social circle as the next.
Anyone have any guesses as to what it might be? Go ahead, someone take a shot at it. It is one of those things that once I say it you’ll think to yourself, “Oh yeah! I should have known that.” Are you curious yet?
This ugly falsehood usually shows up after we, or someone we know has had a sleepless night. After dragging ourselves through the day, weary beyond belief, someone invariably asks, “What are you going to do tonight?” Our bleary-eyed response usually sounds like this, “I’m going to go to bed early and catch up on some sleep.” Or if it happens to be a good friend who is sleep-deprived, we might offer this advice, “Why don’t hit the sack and catch up on your sleep?” Either way, it is wrong-headed. Sleep lost is sleep lost – there is no such thing as catching up on sleep.
Now why do I say that? Because there are two dimensions to sleep that are necessary for the body to feel rested. The first is the quality or depth of the sleep. This dimension we have some measure of influence over. A good mattress, a comfortable, supportive pillow, maybe some music or other “white noise” can impact how well we sleep. We can even use different kinds of equipment – like the masks used to relieve sleep apnea – or medications to help us sleep more soundly.
But the second dimension is one that we cannot impact in any way. We cannot change its nature, nor can we change its measure. It is time. All we can do is use our time wisely to ensure that there is enough left at the end of the day to allow an adequate amount of sleep. Quantity is just as important as quality when it comes to sleep. Every medical advance known to mankind cannot alter this; regardless of how soundly you sleep if you don’t get enough – if you don’t allow enough time – you will be tired.
Time – and so, sleep – cannot be managed by cost analysis. Once you get to zero – you’re at zero. You cannot run a deficit one day and use a surplus the next day that you will just shuffle over to make up for what was lacking the before. We like to think we can, but the reality is that once time is lost – and so once sleep is lost – you cannot get it back. You can use time the next day to compensate for the loss, but you will never regain the same amount of time, or sleep – you had the day before. Allocating time to “make up” for lost time means that the time used for “making up” is lost for any other purpose.
Time is one of the great philosophical questions of all time – if I may make such a circular statement. Humankind has been in conniption fits since the dawn of time trying to discover its nature. What is time? How does it move? We know how to tell time, but we can’t affect it. We can’t speed it up or slow it down. We realize it has this irascible characteristic of seeming to fly by when we are in the arms of our lover, but crawl by when the preacher is speaking. So it seems to vary – but this is an illusion in our perception of reality. Time remains constant for all practical purposes.
Solomon, too, tried his hand at understanding time. We met Solomon last week in our first sermon of this series out of Ecclesiastes called The Trouble with Living. He is the son and heir of King David, Israel’s greatest king. Solomon became wise and wealthy beyond all comprehension. As his influence grew, his heart began to stray from his roots. He worshipped foreign gods, had hundreds of wives and thousands of concubines, and began to despair because he could find no satisfaction. So he set out to find the meaning of life under the sun – that is life on earth without hope beyond this life.
Last week we looked how meaningless our lives can be if we have no hope beyond the grave. Life under the sun without an above the sun perspective can be tiresome, repetitive, even boring – maybe downright tedious. The above the sun perspective is essential to infusing life under the sun with meaning and purpose.
Now, Solomon wants to understand how time fits into this meaningless life under the sun. And as he begins to investigate, he notices something profound. Look with me at vv. 1-8 of our text.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
2 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
6 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
Many of us remember the Byrds 1960’s hit Turn, Turn, Turn. To everything/Turn, turn, turn/ there is a season/Turn, turn, turn/ and a time for every purpose under heaven. The song draws its lyrics – obviously – from Solomon’s wisdom written here. The times when the Byrds released this song were turbulent. Political assassinations, Vietnam, fears of nuclear annihilation, the sexual revolution, the birth of the drug culture, racial violence as the birth pangs of the civil rights movement, the birth of existentialism which would eventually lead to post-modernism – these are just a few of the forces that rocked the world during 60’s. The times seemed to be changing faster than a body could adjust, leading to widespread angst and uncertainty for those coming out of the golden age of the 50’s. Turn, Turn, Turn was a song for its times.
And for the most part, the Byrds were faithful to the biblical message. At the very end, however, they just couldn’t resist adding a twist to address the major political and cultural bugaboo of their time – war. A time for love, a time for hate, a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.
Now, on the surface, this seems to be a nice addition to a rather dreary portion of Scripture. As I discussed last week, Ecclesiastes is not a very cheerful book – in fact just the opposite. Solomon seems determined to depress his readers with the utter uselessness of life. We eat, we drink, we sleep, we have babies, we work and work and work and work and work and work and work and then we die. Nothing we do here on earth lasts long. That which outlasts our life falls into the hands of those who will not appreciate all the sweat equity we have paid to gain it. The Byrds at least end with a note of hope – “a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.”
But the ending the Byrds opted for misses the underlying hope that girds this passage. I have to admit, it is subtle, like time itself but it is there if you keep Solomon’s words in context. And the Byrds hope, well it is rather empty – it’s baseless really. “A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.” It’s like the guy who swears better days are ahead because he’s due. The world has treated him like dirt for too long, eventually the fates have to go in his favor. It’s karma – what goes around comes around, yeng and yang. The universe owes him after all the garbage he has put up with.
While such a mode of thinking may help you get to sleep at night, we all know it is not even close to true. We have all known people – good people – whose lives were put in shambles by some inexplicable accident and from there just spiraled into ruin. People who never recovered from the blows life dealt. We have sat and agonized with them, “Why?” Reality doesn’t allow us to buy into the “What goes around, comes around philosophy” for long. Too often we run into those whose been waiting their turn, suffering in silence, and their break never comes, their ship sinks off the coast, the coffers are empty when their time comes due.
And even more frightening is the realization, “But for the grace of God, there goes I!” As the song by Acapella says, “That could have been me/that could have been me/Pain and the tears, relief unknown/Wondering why I was ever born.” We live day to day, one tragedy away from a life in shambles.
As a pastor, I have seen the pattern way too often. A husband dies and suddenly the stay at home mom finds herself out on the street, her children taken from her by social services and no way out. Despair drives her to drugs, drugs only entrench her deeper in the cycle of ruin. By the time she begins to dig her way out she is so far in the hole, it seems like the stars are aligned against her. Nothing goes right. And folks, we are not that far away from the rut this woman found herself in.
So what is this hope that I said implicitly under girds Solomon’s words – hope so subtle that Solomon himself may not have recognized it was there, at least not in his present state of mind? Well, to begin to glimpse this hope you have to take seriously Solomon’s question in v.9 and ask yourself, “Why is it there?” Look at vv. 9-10.
What does the worker gain from his toil? 10 I have seen the burden God has laid on men.
Remember that in chapter two, Solomon ended by saying that the best a person can hope for is to find satisfaction in his work. If he enjoys the food and drink his labor earns, it is a gift from God. In other words, it is only if you see God’s providential hand at work in your life – that is, gain a perspective from above the sun – can you really appreciate what you have. Otherwise, even the fruit of your labor is tinged with the bitterness of the toil it took to gain it. Once the food and drink are gone, the only reminders of the fruit of your labor is the fruit of your digestion. Not much to be excited about there.
But then Solomon begins by talking about the appointed times in life. Now notice something here. All the appointed times he speaks of - are any of them within the control of mankind? No, not really. All of them enter our life unbidden – some of them are marked by our response; a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, etc. These are our responses to the watershed moments of life, times we cannot predict or bring to pass by our own will.
Solomon lists the times in seven pairs, each time placing one extreme in tension with its opposite. This form of poetry is known as merism, and it represents the whole of something. Just like when we say “from head to toe” we mean the entire person or body. That Solomon uses seven pairs – a number of completeness or perfection in Hebrew culture – indicates that he means that every major moment of life is appointed to us. It has purpose, one beyond our understanding or ability to grasp. And as he reflects on the reality that our life and times are appointed to us he is forced to ask the question, “So of what use is all the work we do?” In other words, if our work cannot change the outcome – if our work cannot add life to us or secure some benefit for us beyond this life, what’s the use?
It is amazing, that even in his deepest despair and attempt to reason his way to meaning in life Solomon still manages to hit upon a rock solid truth of reality. You cannot add a thing to your life – not one second, not one nanosecond. When your day comes, it comes – ready or not. So the question again becomes, what are you working for?
Now, how does this translate into hope? The answer lies in what Solomon says next in vv. 11-14.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. 12 I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. 13 That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God. 14 I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere him.
The natural question to ask is “If times are appointed, there must be an appointer. Who does the appointing?” Solomon’s answer is “God, he is one that appoints these times.” But then he gives us something else – the ray of hope. “He has made everything beautiful in its time.”
That word beautiful – it’s a strange one to use when referring to time, isn’t it? We don’t often think of time as beautiful; more often it seems an enemy. Yet, Solomon says that God makes each appointed time beautiful, in his time. And that is really the key to the hope we find in this passage. You see, what Solomon is telling us is that each moment of life – the good, the bad, and the ugly – God redeems it by infusing with purpose. How? By weaving each one into his eternal purpose, by making each one a thread in the tapestry of redemption.
Have you ever looked at a piece of embroidery? It is one of the most fascinating forms of art. One thread at a time, the person builds a scene by layering colors and complex stitches. It takes extraordinary patience and skill to do well. The best embroidered tapestries seem alive, because of the depth and richness of the picture. But what looks like such an orderly and precise work on the front side when turned over becomes a jumbled mess. The backside is littered with knots and strands of string.
God appoints times in much the same way the embroiderer uses thread. He weaves them together to form an exquisite portrait of grace and redemption. The problem is that from this side of the sun – without an above the sun perspective – all we see are the knots and strands. But if you were to see it from the other side, you’d see how God in Christ has woven the cross through your life and he has used a rich, crimson thread to bind you eternally to his love. And in his time, which is always right, always perfect he reveals to you the work he has been doing in your life. He turns the tapestry over for you see that the times he appoints always arrive on time and make the portrait of his grace most beautiful.
I don’t know what all of you are facing this morning. Maybe some of you are at one of those watershed moments and you are questioning, “Why?” But here’s what I do know. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” I know that God is going to take this time that he has appointed to you and he is going to make it beautiful. The key is to trust his timing, to hold faithfully to God’s promise to make all work for the good of those who love him. Receive each moment with the calm assurance that he is going to weave it into the tapestry of his eternal plan and fill this time with purpose. You may have to wait until you step into eternity to see how this moment is beautiful, but we have this promise – in his time, he will make it beautiful. Even those lost hours of sleep.
