Ecclesiastes 6: Time & Eternity
Notes
Transcript
Sermon Tone Analysis
A
D
F
J
S
Emotion
A
C
T
Language
O
C
E
A
E
Social
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Ecc 3:1-11
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Good morning to those of you here in the room and those of you online, and welcome to Family Worship service with Eastern Hills Baptist Church. My name is Bill Connors, and if you’re visiting the family of EHBC for the first time, thanks for being here! It’s great to have you with us today.
You’ll find a connection card in the back of the pew in front of you, it’s this black card with “WELCOME” on the front. If you wouldn’t mind filling that out during the service and either bringing it down to me at the end of the service, or dropping it in the plates as you leave later on, I would appreciate it. We’d love to get to know you better. If you’d rather fill out a form online, you can do that by texting the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004, and you’ll get a link back that takes you to our digital communication card.
I’d like to take just a moment as say thanks to our praise band, Worship 4:24, who are so dedicated to leading our church family in musical praise and worship each week.
Announcements
Announcements
Well, we’re one week away from the launch of Endeavor. I’m really excited about it, and I’m thrilled that we’re going to be on this discipleship journey together, considering the work that God has done in bringing this church together in this place at this time for His purposes, what He wants to do in and through us in the years to come, and how we can be involved in His work through our prayers, generosity, commitment to our church family and our neighbors, and our pursuit of Him. Please plan to be here every Sunday morning if at all possible for the next five Sundays as we start this Endeavor together!
Also, the Endeavor Prayer Team has set aside a special time for worship and prayer as a church family, which we’re calling Endeavor to Worship. It will be held here in the Sanctuary on Thursday night, October 20 (not this Thursday, but next), at 6:30 pm. Please set aside this time to come and worship the Lord and pray as a church body.
Finally, for the last 5 Sundays, we’ve watched videos relating to our Mission New Mexico offering to support the ministries of the Baptist Convention of New Mexico throughout our State. We take up this special offering each Sunday in September and October. Our church goal this year was $10,000. As of last Sunday, we have given $10,491! Thank you church! If you haven’t had the chance to give to this offering and would like to do so, you still can. Just because we’ve exceeded our goal doesn’t mean you can’t give to this important offering. We’ll continue to mention and update each week through October 30.
Opening
Opening
Today, we will finish up our series on Ecclesiastes. Now that we’ve preached through it, it’s kind of funny. I regret that we subtitled it “The Meaningless & the Mundane of Life.” Instead, I think we should have subtitled it “Life Under the Sun.” I can say that before preparing for this series, I’m not sure that I had fully grasped the meaning behind the message of Ecclesiastes. We started with the Vanity of Life back on September 4, and in that opening message from the first chapter, we saw the question that permeates the entire book: “What in the world can bring meaning to life?” And Solomon’s answer is definitive: “NOTHING!” There is nothing under the sun that can bring our lives ultimate, eternal meaning. For that, we’d need something radically different than anything that we’ve seen before. Since then, we’ve looked at what it looks like to trust God even though we struggle, where we find our identity, how we can face doubt, and what it means to have wisdom: to fear the Lord. This morning, we’re going to return to our initial question to close out the book, by considering what is the most well-known passage in the whole book: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11. Let’s stand as we are able to in honor of God’s holy Word and read this passage this morning:
1 There is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven: 2 a time to give birth 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 throw stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to avoid embracing; 6 a time to search and a time to count as lost; a time to keep and a time to throw away; 7 a time to tear and a time to sew; 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. 9 What does the worker gain from his struggles? 10 I have seen the task that God has given the children of Adam to keep them occupied. 11 He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end.
PRAYER (First Baptist Church of Bernalillo, Pastor Al Carroll)
There are lots of people who have never opened a Bible who know what it says (though not in exactly this order), because the song written from it “Turn! Turn! Turn!” as recorded by The Byrds was the number one hit single in late 1965. Some of you are singing it in your heads now, aren’t you? “To everything (turn, turn, turn) there is a season (turn, turn, turn)...” Only seven words of that song don’t come from verses 1-8 of Ecclesiastes 3.
But do we know what this passage means and how to apply it?
Let me start by saying this: there are times when I have no choice but to preach a message that I haven’t fully assimilated into my life and thinking. Just because I don’t fully get it doesn’t mean that it’s not true, or that I somehow have no business sharing the truth that the Bible contains.
With that said, I need to share that in very practical ways God helped me to apply our focal passage this week to my own life. I’m not going to go into details, because the details don’t matter, but I had a kind of tumultuous week. And I’m going to be honest with you: I didn’t handle it very well. Even though I knew what I was preaching and had my outline basically done on Monday morning, it would appear that I didn’t really get the message that God was giving me in our focal passage of Scripture, so I was given the opportunity by God to really apply it. And I’m not afraid to admit, because we’re family here, that I didn’t do a particularly good job. It’s true. I even thought through this passage several times while I was in the midst of the turmoil, but still didn’t apply it well.
Want to know why? I’ll say for two reasons: 1) I can be selfish; and 2) I bought into the false idea that somehow, a person who follows God should have it easier, which let back to #1: selfishness in the form of feeling sorry for myself. It’s silly and it’s sinful, and it’s something that I needed to repent of before I could get my head and my heart in the right place for writing my message. God needed to do some work on the heart of your pastor this week, folks. I’m glad that He did. I’m really preaching to my own heart first this morning.
So before we talk about how we might apply this passage, we need to look at it first. What does this well-known passage mean? It’s telling us about all of life.
1) This is life “under the sun.”
1) This is life “under the sun.”
As I said in my opening before reading our focal passage, life “under the sun” is what Ecclesiastes is all about. It’s The Teacher, Qoheleth, King Solomon, looking back on his life and seeing it as a field trip that he took in order to answer that initial question “What in the world can bring meaning to life?” And now we have the opportunity to learn in the classroom of his experience. He opens with a statement that might confuse us:
1 There is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven:
So The Teacher says that there is an “occasion” and a “time” for everything: every activity under heaven, which is another way of saying “under the sun.” So we might think that we’re about to receive advice about how life should look. But what we’re actually reading in verses 1-8 of chapter 3, isn’t advice. We don’t see Solomon telling us anything other than what happens in life “under the sun.” He’s not telling us when these “occasions” and “times” are for everything, or when they ought to occur, as if he’s being prescriptive. He’s being descriptive—he’s just telling us what he’s seen about how life IS.
We’re going to quickly look at verses 2-8, just making a few stops to bring some explanation to them. I have never studied this passage with the depth that I did this week, and I don’t want to bore us with a lot of academia and language stuff. A lot of these are pretty straightforward and clear. But there’s three things that I noticed in my study that I think help us to understand this passage a little better.
First, we need to remember that verse numbers weren’t added to the Hebrew Old Testament until the 15th century. However, when Rabbi Nathan did this, he put two lines per verse in this passage. This retained an important aspect of the poetry of this section, as Hebrew poetry often uses what’s called a chiastic structure, where the parts of stanzas correspond to each other. This is a form of parallelism, where the lines say almost the same thing, just with a couple of words changed. And each pair of lines shares a basic theme between them.
I’ll start with verse 2 as our example:
2 a time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot;
“Give birth” and “plant” correspond to each other, as do “die” and “uproot,” so you can see the chiastic structure. You can also see the parallelism, because they are the same words, with just those terms changed. The third thing I need to mention is that each line is what is called a merism. This is when you say the extremes of something to explain it’s total being. So “give birth” and “die” refer to our entire life cycle. “Plant” and “uproot” refer to the entire life cycle of a crop.
There are other examples of merisms in Scripture as well:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
“Heaven” and “earth” are a merism including everything that God made.
13 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.
There are actually three merisms in this verse alone: “Alpha/Omega” (literally the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet), “first/last,” “beginning/end.” God is all in all. Nothing is beyond Him, and everything owes its existence to Him. He is necessary, everything else is contingent.
So we need to notice those things: chiastic parallelism, merism, and theme as we look at these seven verses in Ecclesiastes. What would the theme of verse 2 be? All of life has limits: a beginning and an end.
3 a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to tear down and a time to build;
The word for “kill” here is not “murder.” In fact, this word is most often used of taking a life in battle, or even for destroying a nation. But again, notice the structure: “Kill” and “tear down” go together, as do “heal” and “build.” The theme here is destroying and repairing.
4 a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance;
This might be the clearest of the bunch aside from verse 8. The theme here is sadness and rejoicing.
5 a time to throw stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to avoid embracing;
This is the toughest verse of all of them. Each stanza alone is easy enough to understand, but how do they go together? Well, after lots of research on this one passage, I can say this with certainty: I’m not sure. It seems as if there is something here that we’ve lost the understanding of in the sands of time, but which Solomon’s first readers would have understood completely. But I have what I believe to be a good guess. The theme here is hurting and helping, first communally, and then personally.
The best biblical reference to “throwing stones” comes from 2 Kings 3, where the Lord instructed the combined kings of Israel and Judah at the time (Joram and Jehoshaphat) about how to deal with rebellious Moab.
19 Then you will attack every fortified city and every choice city. You will cut down every good tree and stop up every spring. You will ruin every good piece of land with stones.”
25 They would destroy the cities, and each of them would throw a stone to cover every good piece of land. They would stop up every spring and cut down every good tree. This went on until only the buildings of Kir-hareseth were left. Then men with slings surrounded the city and attacked it.
As a community, the army of the people of God would take actions to hurt the nation of Moab as they fought against them. But then also, there is the reference to “gathering stones.” Communally, this is a picture of helping. There’s a reference in Isaiah to gathering stones from a field for a vineyard and using stones to build a watchtower in that field.
2 He broke up the soil, cleared it of stones, and planted it with the finest vines. He built a tower in the middle of it and even dug out a winepress there. He expected it to yield good grapes, but it yielded worthless grapes.
While this is referring to God Himself and His people as the vineyard, in Hebrew culture the preparing of a field for something like this would have been a community endeavor: a man doing so would call his friends and relatives together to help. So I see that this is a picture of hurting and helping from a communal perspective. Likewise, embracing and refraining from embracing are helping and hurting from a personal perspective.
6 a time to search and a time to count as lost; a time to keep and a time to throw away;
This is one that we have trouble with doing, not with understanding. When you lose something, there’s a time where you just have to give up and decide that it’s gone. And not only that, but there’s a time to keep things and a time to get rid of things. These things are just “things,” after all. So the theme here is the fleeting nature of possessions.
7 a time to tear and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak;
This verse is readily understood as far as the words go, but how do the two stanzas relate? The theme for these two would be the cycle of grief and comfort. In ancient Hebrew culture, when you were grieved over something, you would tear the top of your robe, and when you were done grieving, you would mend it. When someone is in grief, sometimes the best thing to say is nothing. But when recovery begins, then is the time to speak words of comfort and healing.
And finally, verse 8:
8 a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.
This is again both personal and communal (or national, in this case): love and hate are personal, war and peace are national. The theme here is the struggle we have to maintain Hebrew shalom (simplest definition: peace), and that sometimes it is necessary to take action to restore shalom.
Notice how all of these take the two extremes of what they are referring to. This passage is thus speaking about the totality of life. There is a time that everything happens under heaven, under the sun, because everything in life happens under the sun. Solomon is telling us what he’s seen about life, and that life has its limits: being born and dying, tearing down and building, loving and hating.
Everything that made my week bumpy was something that happened “under the sun,” as a normal part of life. Things go well, things go awry. Things work, things fail. Things move in the right direction, things come to a sudden and unexpected stop. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s what life is like for all of us “under the sun.” All of us understand that life goes like this. This passage just reflects the reality of life with all of its ups and downs. My response shouldn’t be one of self-pity or excessive frustration, because I can learn from Solomon’s experience that these things are going to happen in their time.
So the common word through these verses is the word “time.” All that happens happens in time, because time is “under the sun.” We’re all stuck on this train called “time,” all heading in the same direction, and all of us have a shared experience of everything that happens “under the sun.” No one can avoid it. Solomon sees this fact, and so returns to his original question in verse 9:
9 What does the worker gain from his struggles?
He sees what I referred to as the “seemingly endless cycle of life” in my first message in this series, and he again asks, “What in the world can bring meaning to life?” The answer that we would assume from the rest of the book is “nothing.” But that isn’t where Solomon takes us in this passage. Instead, he again points to the fact that meaning comes from the One who made the sun and who gives us life.
2) God is the giver of life “under the sun.”
2) God is the giver of life “under the sun.”
It doesn’t really matter what my week looked like. Whether it was a smooth week or a bumpy one, an easy one or a hard one, a simple one or a busy one. The truth is that every moment that I have is given to me by God. The Teacher has reflected on the totality of the human experience, with its joys and hardships, and saw that the task of living is what God has given to each of us:
10 I have seen the task that God has given the children of Adam to keep them occupied.
It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you live, or what you believe. This is reality. You exist because God graciously decided to give you life. And while that life is in this broken place “under the sun,” with all its contrasts and extremes and limits as we’ve just seen, we all have a life to live and purpose in that life: to honor God because of what He has done. Solomon even saw this just a couple of verses later:
14 I know that everything God does will last forever; there is no adding to it or taking from it. God works so that people will be in awe of him.
I can trust that God knew what my week would bring, and that He allowed my week to be bumpy for an eternal purpose. That purpose may be what we’re doing right now looking at this passage. He sees the things that I don’t see, and since I trust that God is good and has good plans for me, I have no need to accuse Him of any wrongdoing when I experience something difficult “under the sun.” Solomon reflected on this in chapter 5 of Ecclesiastes:
2 Do not be hasty to speak, and do not be impulsive to make a speech before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.
And even further back in my life, God was at work revealing Himself so that I would be in awe of Him.
I came to faith in Christ out of atheism. I didn’t believe that God existed. Any god. And I just assumed things that weren’t true: that the universe could have started from nothing, that all of existence was one big cosmic accident, that my life had no real meaning or purpose. But when I started having to think through those assumptions, I discovered the impossibility of the universe coming into existence on its own, uncreated. I discovered the incredible order and logic behind the design of the universe, the galaxy, the solar system, the planet, and the cell—that all of this was no accident. And I realized that if all of this was true, then God must exist, or nothing else would. And from that flowed the question of the meaning of my existence: if everything was intentional, then I was as well. And if I was intentionally made, then what was my purpose? If God had intentionally made me, then what did I owe to Him? I owed Him my life in worship—to be in true awe of Him.
And I realized that I had failed to live that task the way that He deserved. What could be done? I could never make up for my self-sufficiency, my arrogance, my pride. And that’s when I understood why Jesus had to die. He had taken what I deserve, so that I could be made right with the God who made me. And I surrendered my life to His purposes and His leading, trusting in what Jesus has done to save me, both now and forever.
This is where time and eternity collide, because this life “under the sun” is not all that there is. While we’re given this task of living life, it’s keeping us “occupied.” But doesn’t that phrase “keep them occupied” imply something: that we’re kept occupied with this task until something else. What is that something else?
3) God made us to live for eternity.
3) God made us to live for eternity.
I intentionally worded this point as a little bit of a double entendre, which I will explain in a moment. But first, let’s look at the last verse of our focal passage:
11 He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end.
God has made everything “appropriate” or “beautiful” in its time. Even the tedious parts of life, the meaningless and the mundane, have their time and their beauty because of the task that God has given to us: to live the lives that He has provided. There’s nothing done in life that can’t be sacred for the one who looks to God for their meaning and purpose.
So what is the double meaning of my point: that God made us to live for eternity?
First, God designed us as eternal beings, not temporal. But because of the Fall, all of creation has fallen into futility, brokenness. And so we find ourselves stuck in time, while we were made to live forever. There’s a tension that exists within us. We know we live here, but most of us also believe that this isn’t all that there is. In a Pew Research survey conducted in 2021 on belief in an afterlife, only 17% of the respondents in the U.S. said that they don’t believe in any afterlife at all. The vast majority of us inherently believe that this life is not all that there is—that there is something more.
This is because we were made to live for eternity—God has “put eternity in [our] hearts.” But there’s another way to look at this which is just as valid:
God has designed us with His purposes in mind. So we are called to live for Christ, and not for ourselves. God’s purposes are eternal purposes: we are called to live for eternity, not for the world. This is why Peter would write:
13 Therefore, with your minds ready for action, be sober-minded and set your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. 14 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires of your former ignorance. 15 But as the one who called you is holy, you also are to be holy in all your conduct; 16 for it is written, Be holy, because I am holy. 17 If you appeal to the Father who judges impartially according to each one’s work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence during your time living as strangers. 18 For you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb. 20 He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was revealed in these last times for you. 21 Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.
Again, God has “put eternity in [our] hearts,” meaning that the purpose of our lives is to live with our focus beyond the sun and onto eternal things, forever things, imperishable things. This is what gives true direction and meaning. This is what our lives are meant for, and what the human search for purpose points to. We’re made for something more: we’re made to live with eternity in mind, living out the eternal purpose that God has for us in His plans, following Him into God-sized and God-shaped endeavors that will have meaning not just today, not just tomorrow, but forever. Eternity is in our hearts, and God calls us to follow Him, even though we can’t see the whole picture: that “no one can discovery the work God has done from beginning to end.” But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be a part of that work right now through surrender, submission, faith, and obedience.
Closing
Closing
Do we have eternal things on our hearts? This morning, I’ve confessed that this week there were times that I didn’t. But God is faithful to remind us from His Word by His Spirit that He has set eternity in our hearts, and He calls us back to the walk of faith. For those of you who are in Christ, this is the call: to surrender the life that you live “under the sun” to His purposes and for His glory. Yes, we’re riding on the time train, but that doesn’t mean that this is all that there is for us. What keeps our hearts from thinking about the eternal? What needs to change in order for us to have God’s purposes in mind? We must submit to the working of His Spirit in our hearts and lives, so that we will know and follow His will and His plans.
If you don’t belong to Jesus, I’m glad you’re here. I want you to know that Christians don’t believe that we’ve got it all together. We all struggle. This morning, I’ve shared with you a little bit of my testimony—the story of how God saved me. But just because I’ve been saved doesn’t mean that I’ve arrived. We’re made for eternity, and as long as we live “under the sun,” we’re going to face difficulties. But Jesus died so that we can be what God always designed us to be. We can live forever with Him in Christ, and have a purpose and meaning in life that isn’t trapped “under the sun.” We can live for God. Today, will you listen to God’s call on your life, and surrender to Him in faith, trusting in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus for your forgiveness and salvation?
2 For he says: At an acceptable time I listened to you, and in the day of salvation I helped you. See, now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation!
You can surrender where you are, or you can come and let us know. If you’re online, let us know that as well.
Church membership
Prayer
Offering
PRAYER
Observance of the Lord’s Supper
Observance of the Lord’s Supper
Call down the deacons to serve.
As the deacons come, I want to say that while there is an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven, this morning is not time for taking the Lord’s Supper if you are not a follower of Jesus.
I don’t say this to offend or exclude, but according to Scripture, taking the Lord’s Supper is a declaration of the truth of the Lord Jesus’s death on the cross. If you don’t believe that, know that we love you and are so glad you’re here. We would relish the opportunity to answer any questions you have about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Hopefully our taking the Supper is a testimony to you of the unity and love that we have as believers, and will itself be a testimony of Jesus’s love to you.
Today, through taking these elements together, we are declaring as one family what Jesus has done for us by His blood.
Distribute the bread to the deacons.
Luke 22 records that Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to His disciples.
Have someone give thanks for the bread.
Luke 22:19 then says that Jesus said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.”
Distribute the cup to the deacons.
Luke records that Jesus also treated the cup in the same way after supper.
Have someone give thanks for the cup.
The Scripture records that Jesus said, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”
Send the deacons back.
Pray
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Bible Reading Plan (Psalm 98)
Pastor’s Study tonight at 5:30 in Miller Hall
Prayer Meeting this Wednesday night at 5:45, where we will finish up our look at Paul’s prayer for the church at Philippi in Philippians 1.
Worship 4:24 shirts if you want them, there will be a sign-up on the counter in the office.
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
10 Our lives last seventy years or, if we are strong, eighty years. Even the best of them are struggle and sorrow; indeed, they pass quickly and we fly away. 11 Who understands the power of your anger? Your wrath matches the fear that is due you. 12 Teach us to number our days carefully so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts.