A Time for Everything

Today's Reading

Read Ecclesiastes 3:1-15: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted... 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."

Then read Acts 17:26-28: "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place... 'In him we live and move and have our being.'"

Reflection

The poem of Ecclesiastes 3 is one of the most famous passages in all of literature — and one of the most easily sentimentalized. It is not a pleasant meditation on the changing seasons. It is a confrontation with the limits of human control.

Fourteen pairs of opposites encompass the full range of human experience: birth and death, planting and uprooting, killing and healing, weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing, seeking and losing, keeping and throwing away, silence and speech, love and hate, war and peace. The Teacher's point is that every one of these "times" is real, necessary, and beyond your power to schedule.

You did not choose when to be born. You will not choose when to die. The time of weeping comes whether you want it or not. The time of laughing cannot be manufactured. Life has a rhythm, and you are not the one setting it.

J.I. Packer identifies this as the opposite of fatalism:

"The Teacher's great poem about times and seasons is not fatalism. It is the recognition that life has a rhythm set by God — a rhythm we cannot control but can learn to trust."

Then comes the verse that holds the chapter together: "He has made everything beautiful in its time." Even the painful times — the time to weep, the time to mourn, the time to lose — are, in God's hands, "beautiful in their time." This does not mean suffering is pleasant. It means that the sovereign God weaves every season into a pattern that, when seen from His perspective, has a terrible and wonderful beauty.

But immediately after, the Teacher adds the ache: "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." We have a sense of the eternal — a longing for something that transcends the vapor of daily life — yet we cannot see the full picture. We are caught between knowing too much (that there is more) and knowing too little (what the "more" is).

Spurgeon finds hope in the tension:

"God has made everything beautiful in its time. This is the hope buried within the realism of Ecclesiastes — that even what seems random and purposeless is held within the wisdom of an eternal God."

Going Deeper

Acts 17 completes the picture that Ecclesiastes begins. In God "we live and move and have our being." The God who sets the times and seasons is not distant or indifferent. He is the one in whom we exist. Today, name the season you are in. Can you trust that God has made — or will make — even this season "beautiful in its time"?