Ecc 3.1-13

Ecclesiastes 3:1–13 “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 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. …”

Many Christians today think of God’s eternity as timelessness, as if God were eternal because he is immune to time or alien to time.

But Ecclesiastes presents something different to us. Instead of showing us a God who is immune to time, it shows to us a God who is Lord of Time.

Ecclesiastes 3 tells us our lives are patterned by different times. We never experienced time in the singular. We experience different sorts of time that have different qualities. We experienced a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to sow and a time to reap, a time to live and a time to die, a time to weep, and a time to laugh. Our lives are patterned by these different times and that God calls us to respond to these different times differently.

We may not be able to see the beauty of the different times that we encounter in our lives.

But God has patterned all of it so that all time is a beautiful tapestry. God is Lord of Time, but neither absent from it nor alien to it. And the great demonstration of this reality of god's relationship to time is the incarnation of the Son of God. In the fullness of time. God sent his Son into the world. At the right time Christ died for us, the Son of God entered fully into our time. Time is something we share together with Christ.

As we use this time to enter into worship. Let us remember that The Son doesn't keep his distance, but comes among us to show us the Father within our time.