Living on Borrowed Time

Introduction

Long before The Teacher made his observations about life under the sun, one of God’s choice servants reminded us in a very stark way that life is short. As he penned the words that are recorded in Moses wrote:

Our days may come to seventy years,

or eighty, if our strength endures;

yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,

for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

When you are young and you read that verse, you sort of gloss over it. But as you grow older you begin to realize that time is short. How often have you said; “Where has the time gone?” I think the first time I realized this was when I graduated from High School. As a freshman, 4 years seemed like a long time. I would never get out of that place. And then before I knew it I was walking across the stage on the football field and receiving my diploma.

There is a real sense that when we are honest we are all living on borrowed time.

The events of the past two weeks nationally, from a devestating Lion Air plane crash in Indonesia, to the shootings at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the shootings in Kentucky, and the incident of three school children being run over as they were getting off their school bus near Rochester, Indiana.....we all are starkly aware that we live on borrowed time.

The teacher observed this in and as we walk through his observatoins keep something in mind. While he acknowledges that God exists - he still looks at life from the standpoint that all we can really know is “under the sun.” That limited view point in a sense, takes God out of the larger equation. It is as if the Teacher sees God as there but not really involved. Some of us have felt that at times.

So while we will look at the observations under the sun, because we all do that at times, we will also work to get a glimpse of the greater reality.

Because we all live on borrowed time we experience one similar fate vv 1-3

In his view of life under the sun, it doesn’t really matter how you live. And yet he has some sense and awareness that God is there and he realizes that those righteous and wise people also experience “love and hate.” In other words they cannot control how people respond to them. They cannot in some way make people love them and they cannot control who does not like them.

In that way there is no real difference between the righteous and the wicked. We all die. That is the point of vv 2-3 and that is the obsession with the Teacher. How do we make sense of this life while alive, because ultimately, our “days are numbered” and we ultimately live on borrowed time. That is not a very touchy feely, warm fuzzy reality. We don’t want to think about it.

The Teacher sees this a actually evil. And he is pretty beat up about it.

In his view of life under the sun, it doesn’t really matter how you live. And yet he can’t