Remember Your Creator

Introduction

The fable of “Bell the cat”. … The mice left the cat out their reckoning!

In the same way there are many people who leave God out of their plans. They live their lives as though He weren't there. They forget God in all their theories about life, the universe and everything. They forget that He controls everything through the operation of His divine providence, that He knows everything that is happening because of His divine omniscience, and that He is therefore due our reverence.

And that is precisely what Qoheleth turns to as he concludes his book. Remember your Creator. Remember the One who controls the world you live in. Remember the One who knows everything about you. Remember the One who deserves your worship.

Providence

Remember the One who controls the world you live in. As you live your life which God has given you, remember to take Him into your reckoning in your dealings with others and with your reaction to apparently unpredictable events.

One of the frustrating things of life observed earlier was the fact that time and unpredictable events can overturn our finest plans. The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang oft agley!

The true response to such uncertainty is a redoubling of effort, making the most of the time, urgent in season and out of season. Life is essentially a faith venture. Casting your bread upon the waters is not an option - it is God's command. It is the only lifestyle that has God's promise of His sustaining love and enabling power every step of the way. Joyful enthusiasm should mark the Christian's commitment to his Lord.

Why live life with such joyful enthusiasm? Two reasons are suggested by Qoheleth. Firstly, time and events wait for no one. So, our responsibility is to live by faith in the world, as we find it. We are to trust the Lord to do His work. After all, it is beyond our control anyway! We may not know the future, but God does. And that is where we can have a confidence that reinforces our commitment and uplifts our hearts.

Secondly, you don't need to understand how God works in order to trust Him. We must live our lives by faith.

If the times seem meaningless, you are called by God to bring meaning to them! If you "sow for yourselves righteousness," then you will "reap the fruits of God's unfailing love".

Omniscience

But that positive approach to life must rest on something more solid than cheerfulness or courage, or even sound morality. We must look to God, who made us for Himself. To remember Him is to drop our pretence of being self-sufficient and commit ourselves to Him.

The Christian prepares for the future by living in the present; he lives each day as the unfolding of God's perfect purpose for his life. Faith and confidence go hand in hand. And the Christian owes it to the future to which God is calling him to live now for his Father-God the life of the kingdom of heaven, on this side of eternity!

Qoheleth's statement that Everything to come is meaningless, is his way of saying, "You only have one life to live!" We are to live and enjoy now the life God has given because it is good to do so. And, since it will soon be over, those with good sense will make the most of it. A person who refuses to live for the Lord now is not likely to live with Him in glory. Now is the time to respond in faith to the gifts of God.

Remember the Lord in the days of your youth. Some people regard youth as a time of irresponsibility - for sowing wild oats. The only trouble with this is the crop of failure that follows afterwards! Be happy, young man, while you are young is not an invitation to party into the small hours night after night!

Youth is prime time in God's eyes: a time for responsibility, for learning the things that are really important, for moulding God-honouring patterns of life; a time for sowing in righteousness in the Lord and experiencing the fruit that Jesus spoke of in the parable of the sower. God wants the energy, liveliness, imagination, freshness and eager expectancy of youth to spread the light of the good news of Christ into every nook and cranny of the next generation as it takes its place in the forefront of society's cultural development.

Reverence

Remember the One who deserves your worship. As you live your life which God has given you, remember to take into your reckoning the One who created you to have a relationship with Him. Remember Him as the only One worthy of your worship.

The point is that God is entitled to be remembered by those whom He has made. He has the exclusive rights to our worship, our service and our discipleship! We owe this to our Creator. We have no right to forget Him and go our own way!

Forgetting the Lord is the other side of living for self. It is part of a Christless lifestyle; it is the instinctive preference for darkness rather than light; it is the rejection of God Himself. To forget Him is to be in spiritually dead. To remember Him is to know life and to have it abundantly.

When remembrance means as much as this, there can be no half measures or putting things off. It is in this spirit that we are made to face once more the fact of our mortality.

Remember your Creator when you are young, before the days of trouble come and the years catch up with you.

It describes a scene sombre enough to bring home to us not only the fading of physical and mental powers but the more general desolations of old age. There is much that we lose as we get older, besides our senses and faculties, as, one by one, old friends are taken, familiar customs change, and long-cherished desires have to be abandoned. And all this comes at a stage in life, when we no longer have the resilience of youth or the prospect of recovery to offset it. In our early years, and for much of our life, troubles and illnesses are chiefly setbacks, not disasters. We expect to recover eventually. So, it is hard to adjust to the closing of that long chapter of life: to know that now, in the final stages of life, there will be no improvement: the clouds will always gather again, and time will no longer heal, but kill.

Life is not at our command. It was always God's to give, and is God's to take away. Nothing that we have under the sun is ours to keep. But this passage points us beyond anything under the sun - to our Creator, and it invites a response to Him. It also points us to the present, as the time of opportunity, for we are still alive to respond!

Conclusion

In the final chapter Qoheleth calls for decision and commitment. And the heart of that commitment is the remembering of God for who He is - the Creator-God who has made us and placed us in this world, so that we might be His people in thought, word and deed. We are called to fear God and keep his commands, for this is the whole duty of man. The Lord and His Word are the twin focal points of the entire book: fear God and keep his commands, for this is the whole duty of man.

“What's it all about?” Qoheleth tells us: it's all about giving God His rightful place in our lives, because He made us. God controls the events of life, because He knows all about life; indeed, He is Life. For, Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”