A Time for Everything | Ecclesiastes
Life Under The Sun - Ecclesiastes : Part 3
Pastor Charles Price
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, Ecclesiastes 3:15
If you have got a Bible with you, I am going to read from the book of Ecclesiastes 3. If you have been with us in the last two or three weeks, we have begun to look into this rather unusual book in the Old Testament.
If you find the book of Psalms, it’s two along from Psalms - the book of Ecclesiastes, written by Solomon. And I am going to read from Ecclesiastes 3, which is probably one of the best-known parts of this book.
You read or hear this read various times, often at funerals, often at other times.
But this is what it says – Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
“a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
“a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
“a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
“a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
“a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
“a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
“a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.”
And then I am going to read Ecclesiastes 3:15:
“Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account.”
I wonder if you came here this morning with questions in your mind and I wonder what gave rise to those questions.
Some of us have come here this morning and we have had a good week this last week. The sun has shone; the sky has been blue for us. Others of us may have come with issues from this past week, which we were not expecting a week ago today. Maybe somebody here lost their job this last week.
Maybe you broke up with a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or maybe you found a boyfriend or a girlfriend this last week. Maybe somebody proposed to you this week. Maybe you proposed to somebody.
Maybe you felt this week that your marriage is on the rocks. You might have celebrated a birth; you might have mourned a death.
These verses I have just read – probably the best known in Ecclesiastes – tell us there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.
If you have been with us in the past weeks, you know that one of the themes of Ecclesiastes is this idea of being under heaven, or under the sun, a phrase which reoccurs (those two phrases together) about 32 times.
In other words, it is looking out at life at the end of your nose, what you can see and hear and smell and touch and taste and reason. And under the sun, there is a time for everything and a season for every activity, writes Solomon.
And he gives 14 pairs of contrasts. Some of these are pretty obvious things. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to keep and a time to throw away. These are things that any one of us in this room could have written. They are not especially profound; they are just simple observations of life.
But then there are some which are a little more difficult for us. A time to kill and a time to heal, a time for love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. These are difficult.
I remind you Solomon is writing about life under the sun, from a humanistic perspective. He comes to some conclusions; the main one is it’s meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless; everything is meaningless. That is a word that occurs 35 times in this book.
And he says it’s like chasing after the wind – 9 times he says that – like running after the wind, trying to catch it in your hand, put it in your pocket and take it home with you, and you can’t do that. And he says life has become like that.
And from that perspective, life under the sun that seems pretty meaningless, he just describes it. And he comes up here with this description of there being these contrasts of good things and bad things that seem to make up human experience.
And there are two ways I want to look at these verses this morning. Both are legitimate ways to view them and I suggest to you that both may have been intended by Solomon.
The first way to look at them is simply as an observation of life, just looking around; what is life like? And it’s an observation of life.
But the second is a little more profound and that is to see these statements as an explanation of life, and I’ll come to that secondly.
But first of all, viewing this as an observation of life. And there is a sort of feeling of helplessness as he goes through this list that these things just happen.
And from the perspective of life under the sun, we feel that we are just participants in some meaningless process over which we have little control and it’s all rolled into this experience we call life that lasts (if you’re lucky) three score years and ten, and then it all comes to an end.
And these fourteen sets of contrasts just happen. And there is a sense in reading Ecclesiastes, the atmosphere here, is a sense of things just happen. There is almost a relentless monotony that characterizes life.
I am going to give you a few of these verses to look at. (I am putting them on the screen because otherwise if I just read them, we might lose the thrust of them). But here are a few verses.
In Ecclesiastes 1:4-7 he says,
“Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
“The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
“The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
“All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they” (that is, the water) “return again.”
And so, he is just describing life here. It’s repetitious, it’s predictable, it’s like a circle that goes round and round and round and round and round and round.
A little later in Ecclesiastes 1:9-10:
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
“Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”
Ecclesiastes 3:15:
“Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before…”
Nothing new.
Ecclesiastes 5:15:
“Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes, so he departs. He takes nothing from his labor that he can carry in his hand.”
And Ecclesiastes 5:16:
“As a man comes, so he departs, and what does he gain, since he toils for the wind?”
And Ecclesiastes 6:10:
“Whatever exists has already been named, and what man is has been known.”
And I won’t give you any other verses because the process of doing so will itself become tedious to you. But there is a kind of tedium to all of this, an unrelenting sense of repetition.
What is will be, what has happened will happen again, what is going on now is not new and there is nothing new under the sun. And there is this sense of helplessness.
Now this raises the important question, and the question is this: why do things happen the way that they do? I mean, why are you alive right now today? Why do you live in Canada? Why are you in the city of Toronto? I mean why are you here this morning? (You may well be asking that question anyway.) Why are you here this morning?
Now people have tried to answer those kinds of questions. There are various philosophical views about why we exist, when we exist, how we exist, what life is all about. And I am going to just give three to you. I give you these three because Solomon in Ecclesiastes or in the book of Proverbs, which he also wrote, seems to be sympathetic to all these three even though a little bit different.
The first is the philosophy of determinism. And determinism believes that the universe is governed by laws of cause and effect, which results in only one possible state at any point in time and this is it.
You are here this morning because ever since the beginning of time things have happened that have a knock-on effect, that have a knock-on effect, that have a knock-on effect that caused you to be born and caused you to be alive and caused you to be here, sitting here this morning at this particular time.
Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? There was a movie with that name, but the butterfly effect is the idea that a butterfly fluttering its wings, let’s say in Beijing in China, could set in motion movements in the air that give rise a week later to a Force 12 hurricane in New York City.
A mathematician and meteorologist in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the early 1960’s (his name was Edward Lorenz) was simulating weather patterns on a computer program that he had devised. And he was typing in a piece of data, which had 6 decimal points to it, and decided to insert only the first three because the last three were relatively insignificant. One would be a thousandth part, the other a ten thousandth part, the other representing a hundred thousandth part of the equation.
And he ran his program and the computer began to plot a weather pattern, which started off in a fairly familiar way and then began to change and eventually it became completely different from the earlier pattern.
And from this he deduced that a tiny atmospheric disturbance in one part of the world that need be no greater than the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, could cause a totally different weather pattern in another part of the world as the movement of those little wings begin to create and escalate other movements.
And this discovery became known as the butterfly effect.
Well determinism sort of says there are things that may be seemingly insignificant that happen that cause another thing to happen, that cause another thing to happen and we are locked into this cause and effect process. Life is on a fixed course; it could not turn out any other way simply because we are all effects of previous causes. That’s the philosophy of determinism.
Then there is the sort of development of that which is called pre-determinism. Now if determinism is a natural phenomenon, pre-determinism is a supernatural phenomenon in that it traces the process back, not to the beginning of time, but back to a God who ordained things before the natural process began.
Now theologically the term used for this is usually predestination (though there are other connotations to that word). And many religions of the world teach the idea of predetermination.
Islam in particular has a very strong doctrine of the will of Allah. Everything that happens is the will of Allah, which means that bad things, evil things, all have a good purpose eventually that is worked out because of it. That is part of Islamic doctrine.
Within Christianity there are various versions of this. The Catholic Church has a doctrine of predestination that dates back to Augustine in the 5th Century. And Augustine was a huge influence, not just in Catholicism, though he was Catholic, but in Protestantism as well.
Augustine had a high view of the sovereignty of God in the affairs, the ordinary affairs of life and he learned it from a man called Ambrose, who had been instrumental, not in Augustine becoming a Christian, but in discipling him.
Ambrose was the Bishop of Milan, and every time I go to Milan (which is not often – I have been there three or four times) I have been to the Cathedral of Ambrose and you can visit Mr. Ambrose there because he is lying in a glass coffin in his preserved body in a crypt in the cathedral. You can walk by and say, “Hello” and he has been there for 1500 years – at least his body has, all dressed in his nice hat and his gown, so the bishop.
And Ambrose was the one who taught Augustine that God’s sovereignty works out in the everyday details of life. At the time of the Protestant Reformation, where much of the Catholic Church had been corrupted, many of the leaders of that re-capsulated this idea, this doctrine - Luther and notably John Calvin.
And basically, there are two versions of this within Protestantism. One version says that God plans every event that happens in advance. This necessitates, of course, seeing meaning and purpose in evil as well as in the good things.
The other view says that God sees every event that happens in advance and they interpret predestination in the light of God foreknowing things that are going to happen in advance.
Now we are not going to discuss the virtues of those different views, only to acknowledge that they exist. But the result is it leaves people often with a feeling that we’re just mere mortals (which of course we are) but we are helpless to change anything. We are caught up in a pre-determined pattern.
Now Solomon appears to hold this view a little bit when in Proverbs 16:33 he says,
“The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”
The context there is in discerning the will of God. He says you cast a lot and the way the lot turns out will be the will of God. A bit like tossing a coin; you flick the coin and God will decide which side it’s going to land on. And that’s what he is referring to there in Proverbs 16.
So, in other words, God has determined – it’s a pre-determination of life that causes life to be what it is.
And then there is a third view which takes determinism and pre-determinism into account but attempts to reconcile these with the idea of the free will of human beings.
This is called compatibilism – it’s making compatible this idea of God controlling things and humans having some freedom.
Now there are many complex arguments related to this. It involves defining what is the human will. And the human will is inevitably very limited.
If I decided right now to take off from this platform and fly up to the balcony, I am going to have difficulties doing that because my will is limited to physical laws which don’t allow me to do some things I want to do.
Now the big question arises – what are the spiritual laws, which don’t allow me to do what I want to do? What are the moral laws that don’t allow me to do what I want to do? What are the volitional laws that don’t allow me to do what I want to do?
And so free will has to be understood in the light of all of those things. And our purpose is not to discuss those this morning.
But Solomon seems to hold to this compatibilism view as well when in Proverbs 2 he talks to his son about if you do certain things, other things will happen. If you don’t do them, they won’t happen.
So, he says, “My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands and if you call out for insight and if you look for it as for silver, then you will understand certain things he goes on to talk about.”
So, what he is saying to his son there is this: you have the ability to influence results. If you do this, that will happen; if you do that, this will happen.
So, he seems to be sympathetic to this idea of compatibilism that we can influence and change things.
But the overall view, as you read through Ecclesiastes, the overall sense should I say, the overall emotion of Ecclesiastes is that when he talks about these things, a time be born, a time to die, a time to plant, time to uproot, time to kill, time to heal, time to this, time to that, that there is this sort of sense of standing on the sideline.
And the song that I learned to sing in elementary school, which some of you will know, which starts off by saying,
When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, what should I be
Should I be happy, should I be sad
And this is what she said to me.
Que Será, Será,
Whatever will be, will be
(Oh, you know it!)
The future's not ours, to see
Que Será, Será
(Well done!)
When I was young, I fell in love
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
Will we have rainbows, day after day
Here's what my sweetheart said.
Que Será, Será,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Now I have children of my own
They ask their mother, what will I be
Will I be handsome, will I be rich
I tell them tenderly.
Que Será, Será,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Será, Será
You could write across Ecclesiastes Que Será, Será. That is the sense, that’s the emotion when you read it through. And I have read this book through a number of times in the last few weeks just from beginning to end. That’s the emotion that comes through. There is a helplessness about everything. As far as I am concerned, it’s just Que Será Será, whatever will be, will be.
Well, that’s one way to read this - it’s an observation of life; just it’s going to be what it is, just make the best of it.
The other way to look at these verses is as an explanation of life or an interpretation of life, that when he says there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven, he is not just resigning himself to the fact there is a time for everything and a season for every activity, but he is affirming there is a time for everything, there is a season for every activity.
And then he gives a series of negative and positive things for which he says there is a time.
Let me just read the positives to you. There is a time to be born, a time to plant, a time to heal, a time to build, a time to laugh, a time to dance, a time to gather stones, a time to embrace, a time to search, a time to keep, a time to mend, a time to speak, a time to love, a time for peace.
These are good words, but every one of them is offset with a negative. A time to die, a time to uproot, a time to kill, a time to tear down, a time to weep, a time to mourn, a time to scatter stones, a time to refrain from embracing, a time to give up, a time to throw away, a time to tear, a time to be silent, a time to hate, a time for war.
We like to embrace the positives; we like to reject those negatives. There is a whole lifestyle built around what is known as positive thinking. Positive thinking is getting hold of the good things, thinking about them and affirming them and talking about them.
I’m quoting from a book on positive thinking that says,
“Always use only positive words while thinking and while talking, use such words as ‘I can, I am able, it is possible, it can be done. Try to disregard and ignore negative thoughts. Before starting with any plan or action, visualize clearly in your mind a successful outcome. If you visualize with concentration and faith, you will be amazed at the results. Minimize the time you listen to the news and read the papers.”
(Aha…I wonder why – maybe because real life is not quite like that.)
Here’s a good one – it says in this book,
“Always sit and walk with your back straight. This will strengthen your confidence and your inner strength. Think positively and expect only favorable results in situations even if your current circumstances are not as you wish them to be. In time your mental attitude will affect your life and circumstances and change them accordingly.”
Now there’s a bit of wisdom in that. Positive thinking is good. Looking on the good side is valuable.
But you know there is a sort of pseudo-Christian idea that has been attached to this because some of the main promoters of positive thinking have been Christian teachers, pastors, leaders.
And in more recent days, there has developed a movement within Christendom called “The Word of Faith” movement, the belief that the believer will receive what they confess. And so, they encourage only positive confession, you only talk and verbalize the good things. If you verbalize the bad things, you will create it and bring it into being, is the idea in this Word of Faith movement.
When I was in Brazil just recently, I talked to a man and he and his wife had been to a wedding in a church that is very strong on positive confession. And normally in the wedding vows you say things like this: when you stand in front of the church and you make your vows to each other, you say things like, “I take you to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish from this day forward until death do us part.”
That’s what I said, or words similar to that in my wedding – I think those are legal requirements that you make those affirmations.
But he was telling me that in this wedding that he had been to, they took out all the negatives and they said, “I take you to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for richer, in health, to love and to cherish from this day forward.”
Well, that would be wonderful if that was true, wouldn’t it? Pardon me saying this: this is Cloud Cuckoo Land they are living in. (Is that a British expression? I don’t know.)
Marriage is about laughing together and about weeping together. You will have a lot more laughter I hope, but you will weep together from time to time. Sometimes those become some of the closest times you share.
It is about experiencing the highest joys together but also experiencing deep pain together. There are mountains to climb, there are valleys to go through. There is light and there is dark.
And one of the reasons why people quit marriage at such a tragic rate, as is happening today, is because we only want the high times and the good times and the fun times. We want the better, the richer, the health, and we do not tough it through the hard times. And when we do, we become better people, and richer people and deeper people.
You know I am often hearing about people who tell me they are angry with God and it’s because things have gone wrong in their life. And again, I’ll be very honest, they are acting like spoiled children. They create in themselves an expectancy that God has not given them but which they have imposed on God and then they blame Him for not living up to their expectancy of the fantasies they think God should bring about in their lives.
But what Scripture has promised to us is not just the life that is floating 6 inches above the ground and just floating around in this beautiful, wonderful experience, but it is a life that involves pain as well as joy.
We sang a song a few Sundays ago and I felt just a little uncomfortable – we sang these words:
I am trading my sorrows
I am trading my shame
I am laying them down for the joy of the Lord
I am trading my sickness
I am trading my pain
I am laying it down for the joy of the Lord
And we say, Yes Lord, Yes Lord, Yes Lord, Yes
Now I know that this is poetry and poetry is conveying an emotion, and prose doesn’t do that in the same way. But you know, I am trading my sorrows - Jesus was called a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”.
Don’t try to be more Christlike than Jesus was.
“I am trading my sickness.” Paul wrote to the Galatians – Galatians 4:13 and he said to them,
“As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you. Even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn.”
Whatever it was that Paul had, it wasn’t just a cold he had picked up when he came to Galatia. His illness was a trial to the people there and yet, as he says, it’s because of this illness, this sickness that I preached the gospel amongst you, and the church in Galatia exists because of that.
I am glad Paul didn’t trade that in as he approached Galatia.
“I am trading my pain.” I read a book by Paul Brand who was a leprosy doctor in India. Leprosy, as many of you know, destroys the nervous system so you lose feelings in parts of your body. And if you damage part of your body and you cannot feel the pain of it, you don’t attend to it and so infection sets in, maybe gangrene sets in.
And I have seen lepers in India and in Africa who have lost fingers, toes, a foot, a nose; I have seen all these effects of leprosy.
And what Paul Brand says in this book is “If I could give my patients one gift, it would be the gift of pain, the gift of pain, because without pain they no longer know that they are doing damage.”
Now that song that I am quoting, I am only quoting the first part and the chorus but it goes on to quote Paul’s statement in 2 Corinthians 4:7 and puts this to music:
“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”
So, he acknowledges of course, the point is we are pressed hard, we are perplexed, we are persecuted, we are struck down but we are never destroyed.
But sometimes we get the idea that I can get rid of these sufferings and pains very easily and very simply if I just believe God for that. And we are in danger of forgetting who Jesus Christ really is and what the work of Jesus Christ really is. We are in danger of turning Him into a super-physician or turning Him into a super-psychologist or turning Him into a super-pain-reliever. And when He doesn’t come up with the goods, we feel we have the right to be angry with Him.
But what He is, is a saviour, a saviour from sin. Our sins, which are the fruit, and our sin, which is the cause, He cleanses us, He reconciles us to God. He imparts spiritual life, He brings us into that relationship of dependence on Him and obedience to Him, and love for Him. Those are the essential ingredients in the Christian life. And so often our love for Him, our dependence on Him, our obedience to Him, is stimulated and maintained through trouble, not through ease, again and again.
There are many, many examples of this in the Scripture. But you may remember that Paul talked about a thorn in his flesh. And he says, whatever it was, “this thing in me, in my body was a messenger of Satan.” He said, “I’ll tell you where it comes from: it is Satanic in origin.” (You read this in 2 Corinthians 12).
And he pleaded with God three times, “Take it away from me.” And he says in 2 Corinthians 12:9,
“But God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
Let me pause there.
“Paul, you want to know the power of God in your life? My power is not made perfect in a man who is strong and who has it all together; it is made perfect in weakness. I have a vested interest in your weakness, Paul.”
And he goes on to say,
“Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses.”
(He was complaining about them and asking God to take them away at the beginning.)
“Now I will boast about them,
“So that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”
(Not because he is a masochist)
“For” he says, “when I am weak, then I am strong”
(“But in the strength now of Jesus Christ in me.”)
But suppose when you have an idea of the Christian life that says, “I can get rid of my hardships, my insults, my weaknesses, my difficulties, my persecutions” you will have a Christianity which will be all about you and not about Him. The wonderful thing is He works in our weaknesses.
And often what exposes those are the pains that drive us back into dependence. Many of us would probably be able to say that the most important times of spiritual growth have been times of hardship and difficulty, not times of ease.
You see the key is the reverse of what we often are looking for. What we are looking for is for God to get me out of my difficulties. The key is for you and I to bring God into our difficulties that in my weakness His strength may be made present. In my pain, He might be my comfort.
And so, Solomon is making an observation of life, an observation that is perhaps a little cynical and a little depressing – whatever will be, will be.
On the other hand, he is saying, “this explains life, that the richness of life does not mean we live on a level that is above everything else, but we live with this contrast of joy and pain.
Later he sums up what he has written. The pattern of Ecclesiastes is that he is writing about life under the sun. It is pretty depressing. He throws in the occasional shaft of light along the way but then he comes to the end of the book and he says, “because life is so meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless, this is what you need to understand:” and he gives us the positive answers which we will look at another day.
Except for this – I want to jump ahead to Ecclesiastes 12:11 and this is what he says:
“The words of the wise”
(that is, the words that have come prior to this)
“The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings are like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd.”
Now look at those images he is giving us.
“They are like goads.”
Goads are pointed sticks, rods, with which you drive oxen. In primitive societies they are very common tools where you have oxen. And it is interesting back in Samuel’s day – 1 Samuel 13:21 – it says it cost a third of a shekel for re-pointing goads because every once in a while, you need to get these things sharpened. Because if you are going to drive your oxen, you need to use your goads in order to prod them and direct them and teach them.
Now he says, these are like goads that hurt us sometimes, that puncture us sometimes, but they direct us.
And some of the hard times in our lives are goads that put us back on track. And sometimes, because we don’t enjoy these things, we grow bitter because of it and resentful.
Otherwise, on the other hand, we can grow better. Those are the choices: you grow bitter or you grow better. If you grow bitter, it becomes like a poison deep in your heart. And I know people who have allowed bitterness to become deeply embedded. It is deeply rooted in their hearts and they spit poison out all the time because they have not accepted these goads, these tough times. These hard times are my friends not my enemies who direct me and guide me as I respond to God within them.
Or they make us better people, they make us more godly. We learn more from our hard times than we learn from our good times. That’s my experience and I’m sure it’s yours as well.
Remember when Paul, Saul of Tarsus, met Jesus on the Damascus Road and Jesus said to him this:
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Is it hard for you to kick against the goads?”
Some translations: “kick against the pricks”, because that’s what goads are – they are sharp. “And Paul, you are kicking against them, you are kicking against these goads. Why? Because this is God hemming you in, bringing you to this point, Saul.”
Maybe there are proddings that are going on in your life and maybe there are things in your life which are not good. We are not exempt from those but in them you can become bitter or you can say, “Lord, these are goads and You are moulding me through them.”
And the second imagery in that verse is they are like nails, firmly embedded nails. You take a nail and you knock it in and you embed it into the wood and you cause the pieces of wood to stick together. These are like nails, they nail things down, they make things firm and secure in our lives.
It says of Jesus, Hebrews 5:8,
“Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.”
The Father did not give the Son an easy time. This is not about the cross; this is earlier than that. He learned obedience from what He suffered. It wasn’t that Jesus was ever disobedient – He was perfect man – but as a man, He learned from what He suffered.
I have always been struck by that verse in Matthew 4:1 where it says,
“Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.”
The was the object of the exercise, the Spirit leading the Son into the desert, with no food for forty days, you remember, and the devil on His back for forty days. And He was there led by the Spirit.
And in your life and mine God has the right, when we surrender our lives to Him, to lead us and guide us into deserts, into battleground, into territory that will enrich us ultimately. Because through the battle, we learn more and more God Himself.
I notice also in this verse,
“The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd.” (Ecclesiastes 12:11)
And that one Shepherd is a good Shepherd. He cares for His sheep. He is bringing about that which is ultimately better.
It doesn’t mean we become indifferent to trials and troubles. No, we are to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, it says in Galatians 6:2. Our attitude to other people’s burdens is we bear them with them, we come alongside. But it is interesting that three verses later in the same passage he says,
“Each of you should carry his own load.” (Galatians 6:5)
Now here’s the difference: Your attitude to other people is bear each other’s burdens, your attitude to yourself is, I am going to learn to bear this load and to carry this load in dependence upon Christ.
Be grateful for those who come alongside, but we don’t go looking for that; we carry that load in dependence on God. But we look out to other people to help them.
But going back to Ecclesiastes 3:1, if this is an explanation of life, he is saying there is a time for everything, there is a season for every activity. As an observation of life, it is a bit discouraging. As an explanation of life, the hard times as well as the good times, the bright times and the dark times, become the agents of a good Shepherd who is goading us and nailing us into something we would never be if we just lived on the easy plain.
That doesn’t mean that God does not intervene in things in our lives. Of course He does. But His primary concern for you and for me is not our ease and our comfort but our godliness. And godliness often is nurtured best, as Paul says of himself, with his thorn in the flesh, “I will rejoice in my weaknesses because in these areas I learn to discover the strength of God,” and we grow.
Of course, all of this is subject to being a sheep of the one Shepherd. Maybe there are some here this morning, some listening to my voice and you have never recognized there is a good Shepherd who gave His life for His sheep. And in response to confession of our need and our sin, He forgives us of our sin and comes to live within our own hearts. Then, in so doing, He moulds us through times again and again of difficulty and hardship and also through times of good and joy and pleasure. These things work together to be the means of being moulded and made into the people God wants us to be.
And that means that you can go from here this morning and say of every difficulty that you face, “Lord, thank You that in this difficulty You will be making Yourself strong as I look to You and trust You in it.”
Enjoy the good times - there are 14 good times. Don’t resist the bad times - there are 14 bad times in this list. Allow God to use those to mould you - there’s a time for everything – into the person He wants you to be.
Let’s pray together. I don’t know where you are this morning in your personal life. I don’t know where it is and how it is that the Spirit of God may have plied these truths in your own life. But they will apply to everybody here and we have the joy of looking back and seeing often in later times how that those hard times, those valleys we went through, those tunnels we went through, were the means of God moulding us to be better people.
Lord, I pray for every person here this morning, pray that those who don’t know You as their Saviour and Lord will surrender their lives to You and bring their lives under the leadership of that one Shepherd.
And for those of us who know You, help us, we pray, to trust You in whatever set of circumstances You have placed us. Not to just resign ourselves to them, but to look to You to be proactively involved in using them to mould us into better people than we ever were before. Give us the grace to trust You for this, I pray. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
If you have got a Bible with you, I am going to read from the book of Ecclesiastes 3. If you have been with us in the last two or three weeks, we have begun to look into this rather unusual book in the Old Testament.
If you find the book of Psalms, it’s two along from Psalms - the book of Ecclesiastes, written by Solomon. And I am going to read from Ecclesiastes 3, which is probably one of the best-known parts of this book.
You read or hear this read various times, often at funerals, often at other times.
But this is what it says – Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
“a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
“a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
“a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
“a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
“a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
“a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
“a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.”
And then I am going to read Ecclesiastes 3:15:
“Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account.”
I wonder if you came here this morning with questions in your mind and I wonder what gave rise to those questions.
Some of us have come here this morning and we have had a good week this last week. The sun has shone; the sky has been blue for us. Others of us may have come with issues from this past week, which we were not expecting a week ago today. Maybe somebody here lost their job this last week.
Maybe you broke up with a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or maybe you found a boyfriend or a girlfriend this last week. Maybe somebody proposed to you this week. Maybe you proposed to somebody.
Maybe you felt this week that your marriage is on the rocks. You might have celebrated a birth; you might have mourned a death.
These verses I have just read – probably the best known in Ecclesiastes – tell us there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.
If you have been with us in the past weeks, you know that one of the themes of Ecclesiastes is this idea of being under heaven, or under the sun, a phrase which reoccurs (those two phrases together) about 32 times.
In other words, it is looking out at life at the end of your nose, what you can see and hear and smell and touch and taste and reason. And under the sun, there is a time for everything and a season for every activity, writes Solomon.
And he gives 14 pairs of contrasts. Some of these are pretty obvious things. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to keep and a time to throw away. These are things that any one of us in this room could have written. They are not especially profound; they are just simple observations of life.
But then there are some which are a little more difficult for us. A time to kill and a time to heal, a time for love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. These are difficult.
I remind you Solomon is writing about life under the sun, from a humanistic perspective. He comes to some conclusions; the main one is it’s meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless; everything is meaningless. That is a word that occurs 35 times in this book.
And he says it’s like chasing after the wind – 9 times he says that – like running after the wind, trying to catch it in your hand, put it in your pocket and take it home with you, and you can’t do that. And he says life has become like that.
And from that perspective, life under the sun that seems pretty meaningless, he just describes it. And he comes up here with this description of there being these contrasts of good things and bad things that seem to make up human experience.
And there are two ways I want to look at these verses this morning. Both are legitimate ways to view them and I suggest to you that both may have been intended by Solomon.
The first way to look at them is simply as an observation of life, just looking around; what is life like? And it’s an observation of life.
But the second is a little more profound and that is to see these statements as an explanation of life, and I’ll come to that secondly.
But first of all, viewing this as an observation of life. And there is a sort of feeling of helplessness as he goes through this list that these things just happen.
And from the perspective of life under the sun, we feel that we are just participants in some meaningless process over which we have little control and it’s all rolled into this experience we call life that lasts (if you’re lucky) three score years and ten, and then it all comes to an end.
And these fourteen sets of contrasts just happen. And there is a sense in reading Ecclesiastes, the atmosphere here, is a sense of things just happen. There is almost a relentless monotony that characterizes life.
I am going to give you a few of these verses to look at. (I am putting them on the screen because otherwise if I just read them, we might lose the thrust of them). But here are a few verses.
In Ecclesiastes 1:4-7 he says,
“Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
“The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.
“The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.
“All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they” (that is, the water) “return again.”
And so, he is just describing life here. It’s repetitious, it’s predictable, it’s like a circle that goes round and round and round and round and round and round.
A little later in Ecclesiastes 1:9-10:
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
“Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”
Ecclesiastes 3:15:
“Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before…”
Nothing new.
Ecclesiastes 5:15:
“Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes, so he departs. He takes nothing from his labor that he can carry in his hand.”
And Ecclesiastes 5:16:
“As a man comes, so he departs, and what does he gain, since he toils for the wind?”
And Ecclesiastes 6:10:
“Whatever exists has already been named, and what man is has been known.”
And I won’t give you any other verses because the process of doing so will itself become tedious to you. But there is a kind of tedium to all of this, an unrelenting sense of repetition.
What is will be, what has happened will happen again, what is going on now is not new and there is nothing new under the sun. And there is this sense of helplessness.
Now this raises the important question, and the question is this: why do things happen the way that they do? I mean, why are you alive right now today? Why do you live in Canada? Why are you in the city of Toronto? I mean why are you here this morning? (You may well be asking that question anyway.) Why are you here this morning?
Now people have tried to answer those kinds of questions. There are various philosophical views about why we exist, when we exist, how we exist, what life is all about. And I am going to just give three to you. I give you these three because Solomon in Ecclesiastes or in the book of Proverbs, which he also wrote, seems to be sympathetic to all these three even though a little bit different.
The first is the philosophy of determinism. And determinism believes that the universe is governed by laws of cause and effect, which results in only one possible state at any point in time and this is it.
You are here this morning because ever since the beginning of time things have happened that have a knock-on effect, that have a knock-on effect, that have a knock-on effect that caused you to be born and caused you to be alive and caused you to be here, sitting here this morning at this particular time.
Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? There was a movie with that name, but the butterfly effect is the idea that a butterfly fluttering its wings, let’s say in Beijing in China, could set in motion movements in the air that give rise a week later to a Force 12 hurricane in New York City.
A mathematician and meteorologist in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the early 1960’s (his name was Edward Lorenz) was simulating weather patterns on a computer program that he had devised. And he was typing in a piece of data, which had 6 decimal points to it, and decided to insert only the first three because the last three were relatively insignificant. One would be a thousandth part, the other a ten thousandth part, the other representing a hundred thousandth part of the equation.
And he ran his program and the computer began to plot a weather pattern, which started off in a fairly familiar way and then began to change and eventually it became completely different from the earlier pattern.
And from this he deduced that a tiny atmospheric disturbance in one part of the world that need be no greater than the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, could cause a totally different weather pattern in another part of the world as the movement of those little wings begin to create and escalate other movements.
And this discovery became known as the butterfly effect.
Well determinism sort of says there are things that may be seemingly insignificant that happen that cause another thing to happen, that cause another thing to happen and we are locked into this cause and effect process. Life is on a fixed course; it could not turn out any other way simply because we are all effects of previous causes. That’s the philosophy of determinism.
Then there is the sort of development of that which is called pre-determinism. Now if determinism is a natural phenomenon, pre-determinism is a supernatural phenomenon in that it traces the process back, not to the beginning of time, but back to a God who ordained things before the natural process began.
Now theologically the term used for this is usually predestination (though there are other connotations to that word). And many religions of the world teach the idea of predetermination.
Islam in particular has a very strong doctrine of the will of Allah. Everything that happens is the will of Allah, which means that bad things, evil things, all have a good purpose eventually that is worked out because of it. That is part of Islamic doctrine.
Within Christianity there are various versions of this. The Catholic Church has a doctrine of predestination that dates back to Augustine in the 5th Century. And Augustine was a huge influence, not just in Catholicism, though he was Catholic, but in Protestantism as well.
Augustine had a high view of the sovereignty of God in the affairs, the ordinary affairs of life and he learned it from a man called Ambrose, who had been instrumental, not in Augustine becoming a Christian, but in discipling him.
Ambrose was the Bishop of Milan, and every time I go to Milan (which is not often – I have been there three or four times) I have been to the Cathedral of Ambrose and you can visit Mr. Ambrose there because he is lying in a glass coffin in his preserved body in a crypt in the cathedral. You can walk by and say, “Hello” and he has been there for 1500 years – at least his body has, all dressed in his nice hat and his gown, so the bishop.
And Ambrose was the one who taught Augustine that God’s sovereignty works out in the everyday details of life. At the time of the Protestant Reformation, where much of the Catholic Church had been corrupted, many of the leaders of that re-capsulated this idea, this doctrine - Luther and notably John Calvin.
And basically, there are two versions of this within Protestantism. One version says that God plans every event that happens in advance. This necessitates, of course, seeing meaning and purpose in evil as well as in the good things.
The other view says that God sees every event that happens in advance and they interpret predestination in the light of God foreknowing things that are going to happen in advance.
Now we are not going to discuss the virtues of those different views, only to acknowledge that they exist. But the result is it leaves people often with a feeling that we’re just mere mortals (which of course we are) but we are helpless to change anything. We are caught up in a pre-determined pattern.
Now Solomon appears to hold this view a little bit when in Proverbs 16:33 he says,
“The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”
The context there is in discerning the will of God. He says you cast a lot and the way the lot turns out will be the will of God. A bit like tossing a coin; you flick the coin and God will decide which side it’s going to land on. And that’s what he is referring to there in Proverbs 16.
So, in other words, God has determined – it’s a pre-determination of life that causes life to be what it is.
And then there is a third view which takes determinism and pre-determinism into account but attempts to reconcile these with the idea of the free will of human beings.
This is called compatibilism – it’s making compatible this idea of God controlling things and humans having some freedom.
Now there are many complex arguments related to this. It involves defining what is the human will. And the human will is inevitably very limited.
If I decided right now to take off from this platform and fly up to the balcony, I am going to have difficulties doing that because my will is limited to physical laws which don’t allow me to do some things I want to do.
Now the big question arises – what are the spiritual laws, which don’t allow me to do what I want to do? What are the moral laws that don’t allow me to do what I want to do? What are the volitional laws that don’t allow me to do what I want to do?
And so free will has to be understood in the light of all of those things. And our purpose is not to discuss those this morning.
But Solomon seems to hold to this compatibilism view as well when in Proverbs 2 he talks to his son about if you do certain things, other things will happen. If you don’t do them, they won’t happen.
So, he says, “My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands and if you call out for insight and if you look for it as for silver, then you will understand certain things he goes on to talk about.”
So, what he is saying to his son there is this: you have the ability to influence results. If you do this, that will happen; if you do that, this will happen.
So, he seems to be sympathetic to this idea of compatibilism that we can influence and change things.
But the overall view, as you read through Ecclesiastes, the overall sense should I say, the overall emotion of Ecclesiastes is that when he talks about these things, a time be born, a time to die, a time to plant, time to uproot, time to kill, time to heal, time to this, time to that, that there is this sort of sense of standing on the sideline.
And the song that I learned to sing in elementary school, which some of you will know, which starts off by saying,
When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, what should I be
Should I be happy, should I be sad
And this is what she said to me.
Que Será, Será,
Whatever will be, will be
(Oh, you know it!)
The future's not ours, to see
Que Será, Será
(Well done!)
When I was young, I fell in love
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
Will we have rainbows, day after day
Here's what my sweetheart said.
Que Será, Será,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Now I have children of my own
They ask their mother, what will I be
Will I be handsome, will I be rich
I tell them tenderly.
Que Será, Será,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Será, Será
You could write across Ecclesiastes Que Será, Será. That is the sense, that’s the emotion when you read it through. And I have read this book through a number of times in the last few weeks just from beginning to end. That’s the emotion that comes through. There is a helplessness about everything. As far as I am concerned, it’s just Que Será Será, whatever will be, will be.
Well, that’s one way to read this - it’s an observation of life; just it’s going to be what it is, just make the best of it.
The other way to look at these verses is as an explanation of life or an interpretation of life, that when he says there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven, he is not just resigning himself to the fact there is a time for everything and a season for every activity, but he is affirming there is a time for everything, there is a season for every activity.
And then he gives a series of negative and positive things for which he says there is a time.
Let me just read the positives to you. There is a time to be born, a time to plant, a time to heal, a time to build, a time to laugh, a time to dance, a time to gather stones, a time to embrace, a time to search, a time to keep, a time to mend, a time to speak, a time to love, a time for peace.
These are good words, but every one of them is offset with a negative. A time to die, a time to uproot, a time to kill, a time to tear down, a time to weep, a time to mourn, a time to scatter stones, a time to refrain from embracing, a time to give up, a time to throw away, a time to tear, a time to be silent, a time to hate, a time for war.
We like to embrace the positives; we like to reject those negatives. There is a whole lifestyle built around what is known as positive thinking. Positive thinking is getting hold of the good things, thinking about them and affirming them and talking about them.
I’m quoting from a book on positive thinking that says,
“Always use only positive words while thinking and while talking, use such words as ‘I can, I am able, it is possible, it can be done. Try to disregard and ignore negative thoughts. Before starting with any plan or action, visualize clearly in your mind a successful outcome. If you visualize with concentration and faith, you will be amazed at the results. Minimize the time you listen to the news and read the papers.”
(Aha…I wonder why – maybe because real life is not quite like that.)
Here’s a good one – it says in this book,
“Always sit and walk with your back straight. This will strengthen your confidence and your inner strength. Think positively and expect only favorable results in situations even if your current circumstances are not as you wish them to be. In time your mental attitude will affect your life and circumstances and change them accordingly.”
Now there’s a bit of wisdom in that. Positive thinking is good. Looking on the good side is valuable.
But you know there is a sort of pseudo-Christian idea that has been attached to this because some of the main promoters of positive thinking have been Christian teachers, pastors, leaders.
And in more recent days, there has developed a movement within Christendom called “The Word of Faith” movement, the belief that the believer will receive what they confess. And so, they encourage only positive confession, you only talk and verbalize the good things. If you verbalize the bad things, you will create it and bring it into being, is the idea in this Word of Faith movement.
When I was in Brazil just recently, I talked to a man and he and his wife had been to a wedding in a church that is very strong on positive confession. And normally in the wedding vows you say things like this: when you stand in front of the church and you make your vows to each other, you say things like, “I take you to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish from this day forward until death do us part.”
That’s what I said, or words similar to that in my wedding – I think those are legal requirements that you make those affirmations.
But he was telling me that in this wedding that he had been to, they took out all the negatives and they said, “I take you to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for richer, in health, to love and to cherish from this day forward.”
Well, that would be wonderful if that was true, wouldn’t it? Pardon me saying this: this is Cloud Cuckoo Land they are living in. (Is that a British expression? I don’t know.)
Marriage is about laughing together and about weeping together. You will have a lot more laughter I hope, but you will weep together from time to time. Sometimes those become some of the closest times you share.
It is about experiencing the highest joys together but also experiencing deep pain together. There are mountains to climb, there are valleys to go through. There is light and there is dark.
And one of the reasons why people quit marriage at such a tragic rate, as is happening today, is because we only want the high times and the good times and the fun times. We want the better, the richer, the health, and we do not tough it through the hard times. And when we do, we become better people, and richer people and deeper people.
You know I am often hearing about people who tell me they are angry with God and it’s because things have gone wrong in their life. And again, I’ll be very honest, they are acting like spoiled children. They create in themselves an expectancy that God has not given them but which they have imposed on God and then they blame Him for not living up to their expectancy of the fantasies they think God should bring about in their lives.
But what Scripture has promised to us is not just the life that is floating 6 inches above the ground and just floating around in this beautiful, wonderful experience, but it is a life that involves pain as well as joy.
We sang a song a few Sundays ago and I felt just a little uncomfortable – we sang these words:
I am trading my sorrows
I am trading my shame
I am laying them down for the joy of the Lord
I am trading my sickness
I am trading my pain
I am laying it down for the joy of the Lord
And we say, Yes Lord, Yes Lord, Yes Lord, Yes
Now I know that this is poetry and poetry is conveying an emotion, and prose doesn’t do that in the same way. But you know, I am trading my sorrows - Jesus was called a “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”.
Don’t try to be more Christlike than Jesus was.
“I am trading my sickness.” Paul wrote to the Galatians – Galatians 4:13 and he said to them,
“As you know, it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you. Even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn.”
Whatever it was that Paul had, it wasn’t just a cold he had picked up when he came to Galatia. His illness was a trial to the people there and yet, as he says, it’s because of this illness, this sickness that I preached the gospel amongst you, and the church in Galatia exists because of that.
I am glad Paul didn’t trade that in as he approached Galatia.
“I am trading my pain.” I read a book by Paul Brand who was a leprosy doctor in India. Leprosy, as many of you know, destroys the nervous system so you lose feelings in parts of your body. And if you damage part of your body and you cannot feel the pain of it, you don’t attend to it and so infection sets in, maybe gangrene sets in.
And I have seen lepers in India and in Africa who have lost fingers, toes, a foot, a nose; I have seen all these effects of leprosy.
And what Paul Brand says in this book is “If I could give my patients one gift, it would be the gift of pain, the gift of pain, because without pain they no longer know that they are doing damage.”
Now that song that I am quoting, I am only quoting the first part and the chorus but it goes on to quote Paul’s statement in 2 Corinthians 4:7 and puts this to music:
“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”
So, he acknowledges of course, the point is we are pressed hard, we are perplexed, we are persecuted, we are struck down but we are never destroyed.
But sometimes we get the idea that I can get rid of these sufferings and pains very easily and very simply if I just believe God for that. And we are in danger of forgetting who Jesus Christ really is and what the work of Jesus Christ really is. We are in danger of turning Him into a super-physician or turning Him into a super-psychologist or turning Him into a super-pain-reliever. And when He doesn’t come up with the goods, we feel we have the right to be angry with Him.
But what He is, is a saviour, a saviour from sin. Our sins, which are the fruit, and our sin, which is the cause, He cleanses us, He reconciles us to God. He imparts spiritual life, He brings us into that relationship of dependence on Him and obedience to Him, and love for Him. Those are the essential ingredients in the Christian life. And so often our love for Him, our dependence on Him, our obedience to Him, is stimulated and maintained through trouble, not through ease, again and again.
There are many, many examples of this in the Scripture. But you may remember that Paul talked about a thorn in his flesh. And he says, whatever it was, “this thing in me, in my body was a messenger of Satan.” He said, “I’ll tell you where it comes from: it is Satanic in origin.” (You read this in 2 Corinthians 12).
And he pleaded with God three times, “Take it away from me.” And he says in 2 Corinthians 12:9,
“But God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
Let me pause there.
“Paul, you want to know the power of God in your life? My power is not made perfect in a man who is strong and who has it all together; it is made perfect in weakness. I have a vested interest in your weakness, Paul.”
And he goes on to say,
“Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses.”
(He was complaining about them and asking God to take them away at the beginning.)
“Now I will boast about them,
“So that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.”
(Not because he is a masochist)
“For” he says, “when I am weak, then I am strong”
(“But in the strength now of Jesus Christ in me.”)
But suppose when you have an idea of the Christian life that says, “I can get rid of my hardships, my insults, my weaknesses, my difficulties, my persecutions” you will have a Christianity which will be all about you and not about Him. The wonderful thing is He works in our weaknesses.
And often what exposes those are the pains that drive us back into dependence. Many of us would probably be able to say that the most important times of spiritual growth have been times of hardship and difficulty, not times of ease.
You see the key is the reverse of what we often are looking for. What we are looking for is for God to get me out of my difficulties. The key is for you and I to bring God into our difficulties that in my weakness His strength may be made present. In my pain, He might be my comfort.
And so, Solomon is making an observation of life, an observation that is perhaps a little cynical and a little depressing – whatever will be, will be.
On the other hand, he is saying, “this explains life, that the richness of life does not mean we live on a level that is above everything else, but we live with this contrast of joy and pain.
Later he sums up what he has written. The pattern of Ecclesiastes is that he is writing about life under the sun. It is pretty depressing. He throws in the occasional shaft of light along the way but then he comes to the end of the book and he says, “because life is so meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless, this is what you need to understand:” and he gives us the positive answers which we will look at another day.
Except for this – I want to jump ahead to Ecclesiastes 12:11 and this is what he says:
“The words of the wise”
(that is, the words that have come prior to this)
“The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings are like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd.”
Now look at those images he is giving us.
“They are like goads.”
Goads are pointed sticks, rods, with which you drive oxen. In primitive societies they are very common tools where you have oxen. And it is interesting back in Samuel’s day – 1 Samuel 13:21 – it says it cost a third of a shekel for re-pointing goads because every once in a while, you need to get these things sharpened. Because if you are going to drive your oxen, you need to use your goads in order to prod them and direct them and teach them.
Now he says, these are like goads that hurt us sometimes, that puncture us sometimes, but they direct us.
And some of the hard times in our lives are goads that put us back on track. And sometimes, because we don’t enjoy these things, we grow bitter because of it and resentful.
Otherwise, on the other hand, we can grow better. Those are the choices: you grow bitter or you grow better. If you grow bitter, it becomes like a poison deep in your heart. And I know people who have allowed bitterness to become deeply embedded. It is deeply rooted in their hearts and they spit poison out all the time because they have not accepted these goads, these tough times. These hard times are my friends not my enemies who direct me and guide me as I respond to God within them.
Or they make us better people, they make us more godly. We learn more from our hard times than we learn from our good times. That’s my experience and I’m sure it’s yours as well.
Remember when Paul, Saul of Tarsus, met Jesus on the Damascus Road and Jesus said to him this:
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Is it hard for you to kick against the goads?”
Some translations: “kick against the pricks”, because that’s what goads are – they are sharp. “And Paul, you are kicking against them, you are kicking against these goads. Why? Because this is God hemming you in, bringing you to this point, Saul.”
Maybe there are proddings that are going on in your life and maybe there are things in your life which are not good. We are not exempt from those but in them you can become bitter or you can say, “Lord, these are goads and You are moulding me through them.”
And the second imagery in that verse is they are like nails, firmly embedded nails. You take a nail and you knock it in and you embed it into the wood and you cause the pieces of wood to stick together. These are like nails, they nail things down, they make things firm and secure in our lives.
It says of Jesus, Hebrews 5:8,
“Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.”
The Father did not give the Son an easy time. This is not about the cross; this is earlier than that. He learned obedience from what He suffered. It wasn’t that Jesus was ever disobedient – He was perfect man – but as a man, He learned from what He suffered.
I have always been struck by that verse in Matthew 4:1 where it says,
“Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.”
The was the object of the exercise, the Spirit leading the Son into the desert, with no food for forty days, you remember, and the devil on His back for forty days. And He was there led by the Spirit.
And in your life and mine God has the right, when we surrender our lives to Him, to lead us and guide us into deserts, into battleground, into territory that will enrich us ultimately. Because through the battle, we learn more and more God Himself.
I notice also in this verse,
“The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd.” (Ecclesiastes 12:11)
And that one Shepherd is a good Shepherd. He cares for His sheep. He is bringing about that which is ultimately better.
It doesn’t mean we become indifferent to trials and troubles. No, we are to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, it says in Galatians 6:2. Our attitude to other people’s burdens is we bear them with them, we come alongside. But it is interesting that three verses later in the same passage he says,
“Each of you should carry his own load.” (Galatians 6:5)
Now here’s the difference: Your attitude to other people is bear each other’s burdens, your attitude to yourself is, I am going to learn to bear this load and to carry this load in dependence upon Christ.
Be grateful for those who come alongside, but we don’t go looking for that; we carry that load in dependence on God. But we look out to other people to help them.
But going back to Ecclesiastes 3:1, if this is an explanation of life, he is saying there is a time for everything, there is a season for every activity. As an observation of life, it is a bit discouraging. As an explanation of life, the hard times as well as the good times, the bright times and the dark times, become the agents of a good Shepherd who is goading us and nailing us into something we would never be if we just lived on the easy plain.
That doesn’t mean that God does not intervene in things in our lives. Of course He does. But His primary concern for you and for me is not our ease and our comfort but our godliness. And godliness often is nurtured best, as Paul says of himself, with his thorn in the flesh, “I will rejoice in my weaknesses because in these areas I learn to discover the strength of God,” and we grow.
Of course, all of this is subject to being a sheep of the one Shepherd. Maybe there are some here this morning, some listening to my voice and you have never recognized there is a good Shepherd who gave His life for His sheep. And in response to confession of our need and our sin, He forgives us of our sin and comes to live within our own hearts. Then, in so doing, He moulds us through times again and again of difficulty and hardship and also through times of good and joy and pleasure. These things work together to be the means of being moulded and made into the people God wants us to be.
And that means that you can go from here this morning and say of every difficulty that you face, “Lord, thank You that in this difficulty You will be making Yourself strong as I look to You and trust You in it.”
Enjoy the good times - there are 14 good times. Don’t resist the bad times - there are 14 bad times in this list. Allow God to use those to mould you - there’s a time for everything – into the person He wants you to be.
Let’s pray together. I don’t know where you are this morning in your personal life. I don’t know where it is and how it is that the Spirit of God may have plied these truths in your own life. But they will apply to everybody here and we have the joy of looking back and seeing often in later times how that those hard times, those valleys we went through, those tunnels we went through, were the means of God moulding us to be better people.
Lord, I pray for every person here this morning, pray that those who don’t know You as their Saviour and Lord will surrender their lives to You and bring their lives under the leadership of that one Shepherd.
And for those of us who know You, help us, we pray, to trust You in whatever set of circumstances You have placed us. Not to just resign ourselves to them, but to look to You to be proactively involved in using them to mould us into better people than we ever were before. Give us the grace to trust You for this, I pray. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.